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Apr. 20, 2008

According to M:Metrics, which surveys mobile media consumers on a monthly basis, SMS continues to be a very popular data feature, with almost 110 million mobile phone users sending various text messages in January of this year.

Damian Sazama, vice president of marketing for Interop Technologies said “overall, 2007 was a banner year for SMS, with 1.9 trillion text messages sent.”

Interop provides wireless messaging, device management and personalized solutions.

“Industry analysts are predicting a 20 percent increase for this year. SMS is evolving from a ‘nice to have’ service to more of a necessity,” added Sazama.

On the other hand, MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service) hasn't taken off as quickly. In fact, by contrast, only 48 million users or less than 22 percent sent a message with a photo or video in January 2008, up from 29.4 million in January of last year, according to M: Metrics.

Interop recently introduced its SMSC 4.0 solution that “provides wireless carriers with an extremely robust infrastructure to support text messaging.” This scalable solution enables carriers to replace legacy platforms without having to rip out their existing infrastructure, Sazama says.

One of the key reasons MMS hasn"t experienced the same kind of growth as SMS is because operators and vendors marketed different messaging technologies, such as SMS, MMS and Mobile Instant Messaging, said John Sims, CEO of Santa Barbara, Calif.-based 724 Solutions.

724 delivers intelligent any-to-any service message and traffic handling solutions.

For example, when MMS was first introduced in Europe, users had to sign up for a different service and the pricing was quite different – causing it to get off to a very slow start. Now the pricing is more reasonable and more of the devices are available, Sims says.

Sims says he believes that MMS will continue to grow along with an increase in application content versus person-to-person (P2P) messaging. One current example is “Footie on the Phone,” offered by Vodafone in the U.K., which launched the service through 724’s messaging platforms for Application to Person (A2P) bulk MMS.

“Users don’t think that way – to them, a message is a message,” Sims says. “What distinguishes a message is time frame and content. Instead, we as an industry extended those silos to the user, and those terms in themselves tend to be inhibitors to adapters of anything new.”

In another example, 724 is working with China Mobile to offer newspaper content to mobile phone users, with the goal of implementing it before the 2008 Olympics in Beijing this summer.

Mobile phone users also want to send instant messages from their mobile phones to people on their desktops. Rather than having to download an application to their phones in order to do so, 724’s Seamless Messaging enables users to send a text message that is translated into an instant message and sent to someone’s desktop.

That person can then reply, and his or her IM is translated into a text message for the mobile phone user.

“Footie” uses MMS messaging to send alerts to U.K. soccer fans about team news or happenings in specific games. Users can receive photos and text or, for an extra fee, view video of an entire game or a goal being scored.

“It’s using two discrete technologies, but it doesn’t require anyone to get a new technology,” Sims says.

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    This article was featured on Business 5.0.

Source: M:Metrics.