(To subscribe to the MediaNama channel, use this subscription form or SMS ON MEDIANAMA to +919870807070) Google is making a habit of entering market segments in India that others have spent time and effort and money evangelizing: they did that to local language search and local business listings search, and now are trying to grab a piece of the Push SMS subscription pie. Via an email from a kind reader, we were informed about the launch of Google SMS Channels. Digital Inspiration had also written about it. At the time of posting this, there are already 242 channels live on the site, many of them user created. As a publisher, or a sender, it's a fairly simple process for creating an alert - just choose an available keyword, verify your mobile number, add an RSS feed as a content source, and you're good to go. The numbers, the numbers, the numbers As we've mentioned earlier, the Push SMS business suffers from a problem of plenty - the more the number of users, the higher the cost. We've heard that bulk SMS rates have been coming down, and though none of the publishers or bulk SMS providers have confirmed this, we're told that they're now lower than Rs. 0.05 per SMS, or around $0.00108 (at Rs. 46.31 to the dollar). If Google were to send as many as 10 million SMS per day, it amounts to a cost of Rs. 18.25 crores per year, which at the current conversaion rate is…
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