In Going by the promise in the Hotmail co-founder's press announcement, he well could.
After all, it's been a long time since Sabeer's last successful venture, the ubiquitous free email service Hotmail, was bought by Microsoft (1998). And this time, the new venture could just click on the simplicity and power of the idea - unlike others such as Arzoo and Live Documents (the latter, unfortunately, couldn't do to Office what Hotmail did to email).
Called Jaxtr Inc., the new venture is founded by Sabeer Bhatia and Yogesh Patel. The firm has launched JaxtrSMS, a cross-platform, open texting application to send an SMS to anyone in the world for free. (What would happen to the fat SMS revenues of telcos? one wonders.)
JaxtrSMS is claimed to be unique in that a mobile user can send a text SMS to any mobile phone in the world without requiring the receiver to have the JaxtrSMS application installed on their phone. This open facet of JaxtrSMS, claims the release, distinguishes it from other free mobile messaging applications where messages can only be sent within a closed network to people who also have the same app installed (WhatsApp, for instance).
JaxtrSMS retains the number of the user and no new number is required while signing up for the JaxtrSMS service.
In his press statement, Bhatia said, Fifteen years ago, we [he and Jack Smith] gave you Hotmail.com, the worlds first webmail service that freed up e-mail from the confines of the desktop and aided the creation of a global communications network which was completely open and free for users. Today, we present JaxtrSMS which does to SMS what Hotmail did for e-mail."
It further said that mobile users can leverage the company's free and open application to send messages to their contacts anywhere across the world without having to pay anything. The JaxtrSMS app is said to have been downloaded by users across 197 countries in just a few weeks since its soft launch.
JaxtrSMS was completely developed in India, claims the release. It can be downloaded from www.jaxtrsms.com or from the app store on the handset for free and is compatible with all mobile operating systems, including the iPhone, Blackberry, Android and J2ME.
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