Kwiry, an SMS reminder service is officially launching today. The team has been working on the product for the last year after taking $1 million in funding from Hummer Winblad Venture Partners.
The product is pretty straight forward. It lets you SMS reminders to yourself while you’re on the go. Hear about a new band, product, or restaurant, but don’t have anywhere to save it? Just message the reminder (i.e. Alicia Keyes) to K-W-I-R-Y (59479) and the service will email you a list of search results related to the message. The “Kwiry’s” are also saved to your online account, where you can organize and review your previous messages or those of your friends.
The product’s dependence on SMS is designed to make it work with the large number of “dumb” phones out there. However, my sense is that a product designed for collecting reminders on the go has a rather narrow use case. When I hear about something I’m interested in, I have several more options before SMSing a new service. I can simply remember it until I get to my computer, write it down, or search for it immediately. Google has an SMS product that works even on my “not-so-smart” Katana.
The service does make sense as an application on top of Twitter’s growing platform. In fact, Kwiry has integrated with Twitter. After registering your Twitter user name with Kwiry you can add Kwirys by Twittering direct messages to username Kwiry.
I have a “dumb” phone, really only because I lose them constantly and don’t trust myself enough to get a “smart” one, but that is beside the point. Typically,if I am without pen and paper and need to write something down or remember something I will text it to myself. I will definitely use this service. I know many others who text themselves reminders and I think we are the exact target for this service.
This might make sense as an application on Twitter’s platform, but it also bumps up into the host of todo tracking and reminder services also there (Remember the Milk, Sandy come to mind, there are tons more).
Hi Nick,
Thanks for your post about our launch! I’m Ron, the company’s CEO and co-founder.
It looks like people have a lot of different opinions about the service; even MobileCrunch itself , with you and John having different takes: http://mobilecrunch.com/2007/12/13/new-company-kwiry-helps-you-remember/)
I realize that there are people out there like yourself who remember everything or always carry a pen/paper or smartphone with them, and kwiry might not be right for them. However what we’ve found is that a lot of people do forget things…. things like songs or restaurants your friends recommend at dinner, books you want to read, or stuff from your favorite magazine that you want to learn more about or buy online.
kwiry uses the one device we always have on us to create reminders as soon as we find something we want to remember (smart phone users can email reminders to save@kwiry.com). When you get back to a computer (where you can surf in a full browser) you can access search results for your kwirys with one click from our website or your e-mail.
We encourage everyone to try kwiry out before they form an opinion.
I’m happy to answer any specific questions that aren’t covered in our FAQ by email at ronf@kwiry.com.
Thanks.
i mostly just twitter out “note to self” messages and use my friends as my reminders – sometimes they do tasks for me – or the project manager who’s on my project and on my twitter adds it to a work todo list.
if something is worth doing, it’s worth having someone else do.
my friend john reminds me that he’d like a reminder to drop off his library books while he’s walking past the library on his way to work. He generally remembers that task only after he’s stopped at the credit union a half a block away.
The question is how many mobile phones without a built in application for talking notes will still been used for years