Free SMS: the next big play for Hotmail founder

Jaxtr Inc, founded by Sabeer Bhatia and Yogesh Patel, on Tuesday announced the launch of JaxtrSMS, a cross-platform, open texting application to send SMSs to anyone in the world for free. By the end of this year, the company expects to have 100 million subscribers and 600 million users by the end of next year.

A mobile user with JaxtrSMS application can send a text SMS to any mobile phone in the world, and the receiver need not have the JaxtrSMS application installed on his phone. JaxtrSMS is a downloaded mobile application that allows users to send free unlimited SMSs to other mobile phones. The company says this feature alone differentiates it from other applications like WhatsApp and Blackberry Messenger.

Bhatia, who has developed the application is also back as an entrepreneur after successfully selling Hotmail in 1997 for an estimated $400 million. Jaxtr, a subsidiary of Sabse Technologies, was founded in 2005 and acquired by Sabse in 2009.

BHATIA’S JOURNEY

1997 Sabeer Bhatia hits jackpot after selling Hotmail for around $400 million to Microsoft

1998 launches Arzoo, his second entrepreneurial bet, providing cloud-based solution. Went bust in 2001

2005 starts mentoring Instacoll, provides Live Documents, a web-enabled Office productivity suite

2006 re-launches Arzoo, as one-stop shop online travel mart

2008 Sabse Technologies launched. Offers cloud-based voice conferencing solutions 

2009 Sabse acquires Jaxtr Incconferencing solutions 

“Fifteen years ago, we gave you Hotmail.com, the world’s first webmail service, which freed up e-mail from the confines of the desktop and aided the creation of a global communications network, completely open and free for users. Today, we present JaxtrSMS, which does to SMS what Hotmail did for e-mail. Now, mobile users can leverage our free and open application to send messages to their contacts anywhere across the world without having to pay anything. The fact that our application has been downloaded by users across 197 countries in just a few weeks since our soft launch amply reflects our belief that JaxtrSMS would prove to immensely useful to mobile users across the world," said Sabeer Bhatia, chief executive and co-founder, Jaxtr Inc, and co-founder, Hotmail.

While the company did not give the exact number of subscribers, Bhatia said that about hundred of thousands of subscribers have downloaded the application. “In terms of ranking India leads the download numbers followed by US, Kuwait, Italy, UK, Venezuela and other countries like Lebanon, Philippines and others," said Bhatia.

The application can be downloaded from http://www.jaxtrsms.com and is also available on app stores of handsets for free. According to the company, the application is compatible with all mobile operating systems, including iPhone, BlackBerry, Andriod and J2ME. The application's size is about 150 Kb. Once downloaded, the application uses a data connection for sending messages.

On regulatory hurdles in India around bulk messaging, Bhatia says they the company has taken care of these. "We are in compliance with the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India regulations," he said. Patel said while the company was not against retail subscribers, it would not want them to send bulk messages. The company has also generated a system to check which messages were being mass forwarded.