4INFO Adds TV Guide
We wrote a bit about using text messages to find information over cell phones this week. 4INFO, a company we mentioned in passing, announced a deal with TV Guide to provide local TV listings via SMS and WAP today. The company’s CEO Zaw Thet said in a chat with us that the company is concentrating on signing up more media content deals and currently makes 80% of revenues through contextual advertising and 20% through premium services. So far, since it was founded in July 2004, the startup has raised more than $8.5 million in funding by investors Gannett Company and Draper Fisher Jurvetson among others.
M:Metrics also provided us some interesting data on using SMS to get information, which isn’t too promising for SMS-only news and info startups. Only 13.5% of U.S. cell phone users had accessed information or news over a cell phone, M:Metrics says, with far more users saying they had accessed news and info via a web browser than using SMS. We guess that’s smart planning then that 4INFO is not just betting the farm on SMS, and also delivers its service via WAP.
Looks like 4info is struggling!
TVGuide also offers its own mobile web version at: http://wireless.tvguide.com/
Listings, TV “Insider”, etc. NOTE: The site appears to be down today. Trying to find out.
Also, Handmark also a mobile tool (really great) with TV Guide listings. Available for Palm, Windows Mobile, PocketPC http://tvguide.handmark.com/
TV Guide also offers its own mobile listings service (mobile web).
Handmark offers a fee-based TV Guide tool. Really cool. Works on Blackberry, Pocket PC, Windows Mobile, Palm.
Finally, Gist is beta testing a mobile tv listings product called UGuide. If you’re running Windows Media Player 2005 you can even use it to program your PVR.
This post on ResourceShelf has links to all of these tools. http://digbig.com/4mnet