Disrupt finalist TalkTo is today bringing its powerful communication platform for local businesses and consumers to the web.
In its most basic form, the result is a Google-type search experience combined with text messaging.
TalkTo launched a little over a year ago on our Disrupt stage, bringing to market a mobile app that let users contact any business via SMS. The promise was that, if a company wasn’t already signed up on the TalkTo platform with an SMS number, TalkTo would have a phone representative call the business and relay the answer back to the user.
This not only allows TalkTo to grow its vendor base in an organic way, but it ensures that TalkTo always works for consumers.
“When we built this, I never wanted the consumer to wonder what businesses were on the platform before using it,” said co-founder Stuart Levinson. “That’s not their job, it’s ours.”
People research businesses just as much on the fly as they do at their desktop, which is why a web-based TalkTo makes sense. The only difficulty is asking people to search somewhere other than Google.
However, the first time you get a text response after typing a question into a search result, you’ll understand the power of the platform. The idea is that we all have a number of things we have to figure out or complete in a given day.
TalkTo lets you cross off those tasks by sending a simple text, and now you don’t even have to switch between computer and phone. You can do this anywhere.