Lesson plan

TxtWeb

txtWeb was a SMS text-based application platform for non-smartphone users residing primarily in rural India. It was founded by Scott Cook, Manish Shah, Manish Maheshwari and Clinton Nielsen. The founders jointly hold the US patent on “Method and system for providing a stateful experience while accessing content using a global textsite platform” , which forms the core of the txtWeb platform. It brought the benefit of the World Wide Web through text-based apps (hence, txtWeb), which were crowd-sourced from local businesses, publishers, and developers supported by the payment solution, txtPay. This platform was launched in 2011 and it grew to 12 million users and 1 billion transactions by 2014. It became the subject of GSMA's global case study on empowerment through information and won the NASSCOM and mBillionth 2012 Award for Innovation. One of the interns in the txtWeb team was Evan Spiegel, who went on to create Snapchat (later rebranded as Snap).

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Article summary

txtWeb was a SMS text-based application platform for non-smartphone users residing primarily in rural India. It was founded by Scott Cook, Manish Shah, Manish Maheshwari and Clinton Nielsen. The founders jointly hold the US patent on “Method and system for providing a stateful experience while accessing content using a global textsite platform” , which forms the core of the txtWeb platform. It brought the benefit of the World Wide Web through text-based apps (hence, txtWeb), which were crowd-sourced from local businesses, publishers, and developers supported by the payment solution, txtPay. This platform was launched in 2011 and it grew to 12 million users and 1 billion transactions by 2014. It became the subject of GSMA's global case study on empowerment through information and won the NASSCOM and mBillionth 2012 Award for Innovation. One of the interns in the txtWeb team was Evan Spiegel, who went on to create Snapchat (later rebranded as Snap).

Key claims

  1. date of foundation: 2011 — source: Wikipedia · confidence 0.95

Discussion questions

  1. Summarise the article in your own words. Which single claim would you verify first, and why?
  2. The record states that the date of foundation is "2011". What evidence would count against this claim?
  3. Which claim in this article is most likely to be revised as the sources update? How would you check its current status?
  4. If two sources disagreed about one of these facts, what would you need in order to trust one over the other?

Bibliography

  1. Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=1365663184

Key claims and bibliography are generated from the same tracked claims and sources as the article page.