Vakow is a online community centered on SMS. It is trying to leverage on India’s mobile boom and that one thing in mobiles (sans MMS, GPRS, 3G, Edge and all such fancy acronyms) that is a proven mass market winner- SMS. Vakow allows you to build up an online SMS collection (or repository), which can then be adorned with the typical Web 2.0 goodies- sharing, rating, tagging, commenting, forwarding, subscribing et al. Posting of the SMSes can be done through the web interface or from your mobile. Vakow is the effort of Rahul & Amit, who were amongst the earliest employees (No 4 & 5) at Webaroo. They have since moved on and are pursuing this venture full-time.

So what is the need that the webapp serves? The founders think that Vakow’s basic appeal is based on not just its fun element, but also the fact that when millions of SMS are being sent everyday, people would want to search for interesting ones- they can do so on their site now. The future monetization strategy will revolve around advertising (online, mobile, permission marketing) and content syndication via close partnership with relevant companies.

Check out some of the SMSs featured on Vakow’s homepage and you can’t help laughing. This proves the fun part of Vakow’s appeal; what the team will need to prove, is its utilitarian value.