Bharti Softbank, a 50-50 partnership between India’s Bharti telecom and Japan’s Softbank telecom provider, has announced the launch of their first ever product for the Indian market, called Hike.
Hike is a Messaging service like the Whatspp but is better in the sense that it also allows users to communicate over SMS, which is a boon for users who do not have access to mobile internet or data.
With Hike, a user can message contacts regardless of whether they have the App installed or not as the service is entirely dependent on the SMS medium. Sending messages to Hike user is free globally and the company is giving 100 free SMSes every month to message those users who aren’t on Hike as of now. Users who are not on Hike can reply back using standard SMS on standard SMS rates.
While the users who are using Hike will get the message right in their Hike app. Along with that the company will also be awarding each user with 50 free SMS per month for each friend they have invited to Hike.
The company is presently in talks with major telecom service providers in India to provide a viable solution for the service and to make the service monetary beneficial so that this can be adopted for a longer duration as well.
While the application might not sound like to high tech but it surely makes a lot of sense to use a simple medium such as SMS in order to be the carrier of messages across devices and channels.