Express SMS

The Short Message Service (SMS) really started to be taken seriously amongst the developer and provider community during 2000 as a myriad of platforms and services were developed. SMS services had reached a critical mass in terms of having a large addressable audience that were aware of and able to use the service. Whilst the proportion of value added services rather than simple text messages has remained about the same, the overall volumes of those messages have increased and there are signs that certain value added services based on SMS such as ringtones are reaching a critical mass- fuelling enhanced revenues.

The mobile industry has finally delivered real-time charging for prepay SMS and application development toolkit platforms so that third parties do not have to reinvent the wheel to offer their services but can piggyback on aggregators and middleware vendors. This is enabling great new revenue-generating SMS services such as ringtones, logos and pictures, voting, flirting, SMS TV and the like.

It is clear however that plain SMS is a rudimentary text service and that the messaging roadmap from SMS to EMS (Enhanced Messaging Service) to MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service) is as important for mobile phones and akin to the DOS to Windows revolution in the PC world.

Ultimately, the Short Message Service (SMS) is the Lowest Common Denominator, in other words it is the only technology that is deployed in every SMS phone, every WAP phone, every GPRS phone and so on. It will therefore always have a valuable future as a notification technology and service utility.