A startup called Uppidy has unveiled a service that backs up SMS services to the cloud, making it easier for individuals, parents, or even your employer to read your text messages.

Uppidy was founded by entrepreneur Joshua Konowe, who came up with the idea after dropping his cell phone in the toilet and going through a difficult process to retrieve his text messages from AT&T. The small startup in Washington, DC launched almost a year ago with a free service for consumers. In the past few weeks, the company started selling to the corporate world.

So far, a few unnamed businesses are testing Uppidy on corporate phones, Konowe told Ars. One customer is backing up and monitoring text messages from 500 phones, and another is doing so on 200. Konowe said he was initially just going to sell to consumers (including parents who want to monitor their kids’ messaging), but interest from corporations led him to develop a business-focused service as well.

“We don't have a gazillion users,” he said. But “we have a lot of inquiries from Fortune 100-sized companies who are very interested in this.”

Before you scream "privacy violation!" we'll point out that this is likely confined to devices that are owned and paid for by employers. Uppidy can be installed on employee-owned phones, but it does require some user-initiated actions. With Android and BlackBerry, users must download an app to their phone from the Android and BlackBerry application stores, respectively. Using Uppidy with an iPhone requires a desktop application and a wired connection to iTunes.

Konowe said he couldn’t get an app onto the iPhone App Store because of Apple’s restrictions on building tools on top of the phone's SMS service. That means iPhone users’ messages aren’t uploaded to Uppidy automatically, but syncing with iTunes on your desktop updates the Uppidy database, which is stored (in encrypted form) in the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud.

Konowe said potential customers in regulated industries have told him they shut off text messaging on company phones because they can't track and store messages the way they can with e-mail. Keeping records is important for e-discovery purposes, as companies are often required to turn over electronic communications as part of legal proceedings.

Uppidy's public-facing site is very consumer-oriented at the moment, complete with the option to sign in using your Facebook account. The business-focused service isn't fully baked yet, but Konowe said his team is creating a way to separate personal texts from business texts so companies can just track the business-focused ones, although this requires manual effort on the part of users to separate contacts into personal and work buckets. Uppidy is also working with mobile device management vendors to get its text tracking service integrated into the types of IT management tools that handle provisioning of mobile services to employees and enforcement of policies.

Uppidy is building its services with venture capital funding, and will try to make revenue by upselling consumers to premium services, running ads, and charging business customers fees around $5,000 or up to $1 per device per month. Eventually, Konowe says he wants Uppidy to archive messages from IM services, Gchat, Skype, Facebook, Twitter, and so forth.

For people who want an easy way to archive personal communications, Uppidy is worth looking into. For employees who are (rightfully) worried that employers might use something like this to keep tabs on them, remember that it's best to keep all personal communications on personal devices. As Konowe says, when you're using company property, you have to act like it. In fact, Uppidy isn't even the first to offer text message archiving to businesses—companies like Smarsh and Sonian are already in the market.

"I would argue that if it's a corporate-sponsored device, and the user doesn't expect the company to be looking at everything on the device, they're crazy," Konowe said.