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.
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. 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.