Webnames.ca StaffI own an LG pay-as- you-go “dumbphone”. It has a qwerty keyboard that I love with a passion that should only be reserved for animate objects.
I can’t get my pictures off my phone nor can I get on the web as it is pay-as-you-go.
One thing I can do, is text the bus stop number to Translink (Vancouver transit) and they send me back the list of when the next buses are scheduled to arrive. This I like. A lot.
I read a Mashable article about the “dumbphone” and its market is expanding. My friend Laura was in Africa recently (Uganda and Kenya) and SMS is massive there.
So last night I was thinking: huge dumbphone market + sms + .tel = opportunity.
The beauty of .tel is the information is held in the DNS. There is no HTML or Flash to render. You don’t need an app to be able to view the information. Very dumbphone friendly.
Here’s my big idea: There is an SMS section in your dot tel. You populate it with 140 characters of whatever info you want – phone number, email, opening times etc. Telnic has replicating .tel dns servers with every cellular provider.
You text richmondplumbing.tel to 800-555-1212. You get a reply back of: Phone 6042750455 Address 140-4631 Shell Rd. Richmond Hours M-Sa 7-6 Ashton Service Group is on your side for all your plumbing needs.
For those businesses who are in areas that are underserved by high bandwidth cellular services, this would be an amazing solution to parsing essential web based data down to the consumer via SMS.
And for those of you who do pay-as-you-go like me, well your dumbphone just became a whole lot smarter.