Mobile messaging company Quartez has come up with a way of making a bit of money from text messaging - competitions and orgasm tips. We know, it sounds horrendous but then it's gonna work because people are horrendous.

Who the hell would want to pay anything up to a £1 to text Quartez with the word "gamble" in the hopeless attempt to win a holiday to Las Vegas? Readers of Esquire that's who. The mag, run by National Magazines, will be offering precisely that next week.

Anyway, Quartez basically acts as a middleman for this, provides numbers and word-trigger technology for competitions and the like, takes a cut on the traffic and away you go. Bloody good business model if you think about it.

The VC company Media Ventures obviously liked it because it's just pumped a seven-figure sum (between £1 million and £10 million) into the company. ®