How Innoz Is Connecting The Offline World To The Internet Via SMS

Innoz is a Bangalore based company that has pioneered web access for millions of people without actual web access. Their technology works on SMS, which is ubiquitous in a country like India. While mobile Internet usage is rising fast, there are large swaths of the Indian user base that cannot get consistent access to the Internet. Using SMS to interface with the Internet is a functional idea, which many people do not consider as revolutionary. This maybe because they have never really suffered internet outages or poor speeds. So much today in our daily lives depends on accessing information and poor internet connections and speeds can be crippling.

Innoz’s SMSGyan is a search engine which receives queries from SMSs and returns the particular text from the Internet back to the phone. This is arguably a long winded way to access information, but you have to understand that it is a great option when you do not have access to the Internet at all. SMSGyan is seeing quite a bit traction already. According to the Limca Book of World Records, it is the largest offline search engine in the world serving a billion SMS queries by the end of 2012. Innoz doesn’t just operate in India alone but has also expanded to seven other countries which face similar information access challenges.

The interesting part is what the company has in mind for the future. It is planning its own operating system for feature phones. They are calling it Project Brownie and when installed on such a phone, it will give instant access to Internet services via SMS. Currently, the user facing part of Project Brownie is the Android app that I downloaded recently. Brownie for Android is a lightweight Internet browser which focuses only on text. It attempts to bring the concept of apps to ‘dumb phones’. When you fire up the app, you get a minimal interface which is only optimized for text.

You can then select the various apps such as Travel, Sports, Maps, Facebook, Twitter and so on and send queries via SMS. You can do a whole lot of searches about anything that you want. These SMS apps are written by developers all over India and other countries, similar to the TxtWeb platform. The apps bring a lot of services back to the humble dumbphone, which can then be enabled to access the Internet. Here are some images of the sample searches that we did with the app.

The great part is that while Brownie uses SMS as an query medium, you can also use it with the Internet if you want to. You can change this in the settings. In the last couple of weeks, we have noticed especially bad Internet service from Vodafone. 3G speeds are really pathetic and other people we know have assured us that they are facing similar issues. Apps like these are super helpful when such situations arise. We are going to keep the app for this specifically and also when we are travelling in a remote area with no Internet coverage. We think you will like this too. Give it a try and let us know what you think of it in the comments.

App | Brownie For Android

Website | Innoz

Hat Tip | The Next Web

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