You might think that after four of them, I would be getting sick of startup companies. Every startup I have been with has afforded me the chance to work on really cool technology, but not one of them has yet been a 'hit'. After spending most of my twenties sitting in front of a computer for endless hours every day, I realized one thing: I love it. I've always been really happy working with a small group of intelligent individuals, imagining and implementing new technologies. After seeing some of my friends have successful startups that left them with fistfulls of cash, I've started to understand that even if I had the same luck, I would be back to it before I'd have a chance to spend a dollar.
Since the beginning of January, I've been working with an equally luminous group of people. 4INFO brought me on to help them launch their production application, and start rearchitecting the system for higher performance and high availability. We made a public launch of the product today, and I've decided to stay on as they try to grow a user base and prove the revenue model. The first product is a simple mobile search application. You use it by sending an SMS message (most mobile phones can do this) with a query to 4INFO (44636). Queries can be of many formats, as the application is intelligent enough in most cases to figure out what you are asking for: