I'm way behind in catching up on reviews of new and cool phone-based startups. Here's one that I'm playing around with. Snapvine and another competitor, SayNow, both allow you to publish a widget like the one below so that visitors to your website can call with any phone and leave you a message. That in itself isn't unique, but the ability to publish the voicemails back to the website via widget is neat. I'd post both widgets, but the SayNow widget isn't working as of now. With Snapvine, the visitor has to call out to a long distance number. SayNow actually calls the visitor back at their number, saving them the cost of a long distance call. Both companies are marketing to the MySpace crowd, as well as to bands and celebrities to keep in touch with their fans.
Kwiry is an interesting company that allows you to text reminder notes to yourself that get saved to your web account, with additional search results appended. With the partnership with advertisers (see above) they are on the right track to offering another valuable service for consumers. Text codes are nothing new, but combining it with free-text response and del.icio.us-like bookmarking is a new twist which could make Kwiry succeed where others have failed.
