mobiK offer free SMS to Australians

Link: Computerworld – New mobile entrant serves up free SMS

“Your mobile phone should be free. You shouldn’t have to pay”. That’s the quote from Damian Thompson, CEO of mobiK, who’ve just launched their service providing free SMS in Australia.

Once you’ve registered, you can either send texts from your PC, or via a downloadable applet that resides on your mobile. And it’s free. So how do they make the cash?

mobiK is currently supported by ad ‘tags’ at the end of each message you send. Although the service seems to work in most of the world, it relies on the recipient of your message being in a region that has sponsors. For instance, it seems you can sign up and send free texts from the UK, but the messages will only get delivered if your recipient is in Australia, India, Malaysia, New Zealand and Singapore.

There’s also an incentive/affilate scheme – called ‘K’ – whereby you can accrue ‘K’ points by getting your friends to join. Not sure how many ‘K’ points it’d take, but you can apparently swap them in for a new mobile handset.

Since their launch in October last year they claim to have 400,000 users at the moment, mainly in Asia. I’ll be watching this one with interest.