How would you like to reduce your mobile phone bill by two-thirds? That's what a new UK start-up is offering - and it's only a matter of time before it hits Ireland.
This week Doug Richard, the American IT entrepreneur best known from the Dragons' Den television programme on BBC2, launched Hotxt, a mobile phone application that will excite teenagers.
Just as Skype launched voice calls over the internet and shook up traditional phone carriers, Richard hopes that Hotxt will have a similar effect on the mobile phone operators. Skype, by the way, was bought by eBay for $2.6 billion (€2.1 billion) last autumn.
Right now, texting is controlled by the mobile network. When you send a text message, the phone connects to a short message service (SMS) gateway run by the mobile operator.
Although the bandwidth "over the air" required to do this is small, operators have turned a good living by charging way over what it costs to send.
Hotxt works much more like e-mail and uses the mobile's in-built connection to the internet, thus avoiding the mobile network operator altogether.
All you have to do is sign up from the Hotxt.co.uk website or text "join" to the firm's 80468 short code. This action downloads a small programme to the handset. However, it only works on Java-enabled phones such as Nokia and Sony Ericsson.
With Hotxt, instead of sending a message to a phone number, you send it to the person's Hotxt user name. Yes, the other person has to have Hotxt installed - creating a clever marketing incentive for your regular contacts to sign up.
And sending to a name is likely to appeal to Hotxt's main target audience of young people who are well known for their SMS addiction.
At least they'll be able to say more. A Hotxt message can be four times the length of normal texts - 640 characters instead of 160 - and users can also block any sender if they feel harassed.
Every new user gets two free weeks of messaging, plus another week for every friend they sign up.
And what's all this going to cost? In Britain, it will be £1 (€1.40) a week, which is quite a saving if you are a teenager who sends an average seven texts a day.
There are extra charges, however. Connecting to the internet to send the text does cost. Richard estimates it will come in at less that a penny a message in the UK alone, where the average is 12p a text. Similar savings should be had when it launches in Ireland, which is highly likely.
Speaking to The Irish Times, Richard was obviously buoyant about the firm's prospects: "It's texting over the internet. Traditional costs don't apply, so there's no marginal cost to provide the service."
Richard is initially aiming Hotxt primarily at 16 to 24 year olds. "If you look at the 'texting generation' of young people, they have a group of friends they send a lot of texts to and a little to some. Hotxt works if they like unlimited communications between each other.
"The text appears very fast, so you enter into more of a conversation."
Whether Hotxt does turn out to be the phone company killer that Skype is being touted as, remains to be seen. But it's clear the mobile phone companies face new challenges as this won't be the only firm to come out with such an application over the next year.
