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.