In this review, I will cover two startups that allow you to ask questions from your mobile phone and get answers instantly through SMS or your cell phone browser- AskMeNow and Mosio. You can also voice-enable these services by using Jott to transcribe your questions into text messages without touching the keypad.

AskMeNow is a mobile service that can instantly respond to any questions that you ask immediately through SMS text messaging. You need to send your question as an SMS to ASKME (27563) from your cellphone and you will get a response with the answer. AskMeNow’s AskMeAnything service can answer almost any question for which the answer can be found on the Internet.

Additionally, you can access the following information using AskMeNow:

AskTheOperator - 411 Search
Directions & Maps
Reuters News Feeds
Stock Quotes
Weather
Flight Information
Hotel Availabilities

Their web-based mobile app, which is available at m.askmenow.com, allows you to ask natural language questions about any information found in Wikipedia’s knowledgebase and get answers to it via SMS text message.

In contrast to AskMeNow’s method of pulling information from a variety of sources automatically, Mosio is a more of a community driven question and answer social service. It consists of different SMS to Email addresses for various types of queries. So, for example, if you want to find a business in your vicinity, you need to send a text message to find@mosio.com and someone logged into Mosio will reply with the results through SMS.

To view the complete list of content that you can search, click here.