Last September, when the Indian Telecom regulator TRAI released the first version of its SMS Spam guidelines, Dayson Pais wrote for us about how the guidelines effectively made TextMe, his startup, redundant. Since then, the guidelines have been modified significantly, to enable opt-in users on the do-not-disturb directory to receive text messages, and TextMe has now been launched: the service allows users to share text and links on the web via SMS, whether through a javascript based button or a publisher integrated sharing button, similar to those for sharing on Facebook, Twitter, Stumbleupon, Reddit, Digg and others. We spoke with Pais on how the service works, how they plan to monetize it, how they've addressed the TRAI SMS Spam guidelines, integration with sharing services like AddThis, and more: How TextMe Enables Sharing TextMe initially only allowed publishers to integrate a button for sharing. Users click on the button, enter the mobile number they want to send the content to, and for registration, verify their own number. Pais said that they realized that people still wanted to share pages that weren't Indian or didn't have publisher integration, so in order to enable usage, they also added a browser extension service. The site is doing roughly around 15-20,000 times a day, according to Pais, and has integrated with around 150 publishers, including SantaBanta.com and Mumbaivotes.com. Pais claims that the service has been used over 4.5 million times by over 40,000 users. How does TextMe plan to make money? Pais said that their…
