Saturday

SMS based Microblogging service SMS GupShup secures $10million financing

Community oriented online services are still growing up in India market. Cellphone penetration is order of magnitude higher than PC based internet access.  For new applications, it’s natural to address mobile market before addressing still emerging PC based web services. Riding on that assumption, Mumbai based Webaroo launched SMSGupshup - a sms based community site.

Very few online platforms  are able to successfully marry mobile and PC based social community experience. Twitter has shown the way, it has strong community support but it’s suffering from scaling issues. SMSGupshup can really grow to have global userbase if they can expand their core offering. To go after bigger opportunity, they recently secured new round of venture financing, as reported by Pluggin.

$10 million expansion round was led by Helion Ventures and Charles River Ventures.

Industry vendors are betting on global mobile messaging revenue to reach US$165bn by 2011. Social networking experience is supposed to play critical role in increasing sms message volume.

For marketers this offers near real time engagement with target customer base. Younger demographics and precision targeting also puts this market at higher valuation compared to regular social network such as Orkut.