TxtmeQuick seeing adoption from Fortune 500 companies
WASHINGTON – Virginia-based TxtmeQuick said it’s using digital technology to capitalize on legacy tech that has become largely ignored.
Ray Bolouri founded the company in 2010 when he realized there was a way to facilitate better communication between enterprises and their customers.
“What we do is open up a new medium of communication between organizations and individuals and facilitate a two-way dialogue through the text message medium,” Bolouri said. “What’s unique about us is text messaging in the business world has been around for a number of years but it’s primarily referred to as SMS marketing, which is one way business figured out they could reach a large number of people.”
Text-message marketing, however, is a one-way street while TxtmeQuick is a two-way dialogue. The technological focus of TxtmeQuick is on the integration of two existing technologies – one wireless and one landline based – into a new one that it recently patented.
Landlines, though somewhat antiquated for efficient person-to-person communication, are still more economical to small- and medium-sized businesses that need a landline number as a means of central communication, and to large companies with call centers.
Text messaging provides a more concise and precise method of communicating complex issues simply, Bolouri said, and using an operating system built for that purpose, TxtmeQuick has integrated the two technologies, allowing landlines to receive and respond to text messages.
“We become the messaging center for the organization, and what we do once we have the messages, we reroute them to wherever the organization would like us to send them,” Bolouri said. “Or we have our own application, a Web app where we can send the message and they can see and respond to the message in real-time from a regular computer.”
TextmeQuick said it was the first U.S. entity to seek to acquire the rights to text messaging for all non-wireless numbers, which were previously unclaimed, while their wireless counterparts were held by wireless trade group CTIA.
By breaking into a previously neglected channel of communication, TxtmeQuick has focused on expanding its operating system. As a result, the OS now has 30 different functionalities and is said to be able to fulfill as many individual roles as its customers need.
Currently TxtmeQuick is in talks with the Montgomery County Police Department to implement a program where the TxtmeQuick OS, which can perform audio translation in 27 different languages, can be used as an investigative aid.
The idea is that officers can use their mobile phones to gather statements from witnesses and residents who don’t speak English or have a difficult time being understood. The auto translator can be used to determine if it is worth bringing a witness in to give a statement to a trained human translator, allowing limited police resources to be deployed more effectively.
