Virtual Mobile Numbers - Out of Bundle?

I heard something rather worrying yesterday. It seems that some mobile network operators are taking SMS messages to virtual mobile numbers out of bundle.

This means that when someone sends an SMS to a virtual mobile number instead of being deducted from the SMS allowance that comes with their contract, the message is billed on top.

This is not the same as operators charging SMS messages to virtual mobile numbers that look like UK numbers but are actually hosted off-shore, like Tyn-Tec's Isle of Man number range. This is apparently happening to UK mainland numbers from Vodafone, Orange, etc.

This is crazy and very short-sighted, but unfortunately typical.

Over the years ay Esendex we have time and time again convinced our customers to use Virtual Mobile Numbers when communication with their customers via SMS.

Just broadcast to customers and you might as well be shouting at them. Give customers a reply path and you are interacting.

Where virtual mobile numbers differ from shortcodes is that as far as the recipient is concerned they are just like any other mobile number, and, importantly, SMS to them are billed liked any other mobile number.

This means there is very little resistance from the customers to interact. The messages are essentially free and more interaction occurs.

I don't understand why an operator would stand in the way of this.

Interaction = more engaged subscribers = more messages = plan upgrades = higher ARPU

Isn't that how it works?

I've had some brief interactions with operator interconnect teams and based on these experiences I suspect this is where this 'initiative' originated.

There is very much a sense of 'we're not doing it so we're going to do our damndest to spoil it for everyone else', like a petulant school child.

Am I wrong?

Business Messaging - Your Server's Gone Down

Server monitoring is key to the availability of many business systems so knowing as soon as a server or services is having an issue is critical.

It's also not just the engineers that necessarily need to know. Other stakeholders like support personnel, account managers (who are going to be taking customer calls) and even key customers can all benefit from being kept in the loop about issues.

Most system monitoring solutions can send an email in response to a monitoring event. Just wire that up to an Email SMS service and you can notify anyone, pretty much wherever they are.

However there are times when SMS is not enough. They can be missed. If there are key people that you need to notify and need to know that they've got the message a Voice SMS is a great option.

Using IVR menus you can have the recipient acknowledge receipt of the message. It can keep ringing them until they do or your escalation rules kick in contact someone else.

Business Messaging - Your Taxi's Outside

A local taxi firm, DG Cars, schedules a call back when your taxi is on its way. This is a great way of improving customer service as well operational efficiency for the cab firm.

This can also be achieved simply be sending either an SMS or Voice SMS message direct to the pickup as the taxi is approaching.

• The customer knows when to come outside/get their coat on/say their goodbyes
• The taxi not sitting idle waiting for someone who's not ready when it could be moving onto the next fare sooner.
• Include the drivers mobile number in the message and the customer can all the driver if they're held up.

Dead simple and dead effective.

SMS is the New Black

I caught up with Patrick Smith at the recent Future of Mobile conference. We hadn't bumped into each other for a while and I discovered much had happened, not only had he set up Joshua PR but he'd also started a new blog.

SMS is the New Black is a much needed answer to the fanboy hype surrounding many of today's mobile apps as everyone looks for the next big thing. The key focus is on what mobile apps and services work for Normobs not just technology obsessed geeks.

How refreshing.

Always nice when a client appreciates you

Esendex Taps Into Social Searching With Taptu

At Esendex we pride ourselves on the reliability of our service. Problem is anyone can say that to a prospect, as a differentiator or USP, it's hardly a competition killer.

Thanks Taptu, stories like yours add important credibility to our claims.

US Carriers finally realising how to stop SMS spam?

This cropped up in one of my feeds today. Verizon are increasing wholesale SMS charges by 3cts to around 5.5cts.

http://www.mobilemarketer.com/cms/news/messaging/1879.html

No doubt there will be uproar from the US mobile community but I say, bring it.

Charging spammers is the single most effective way of stopping them. Stop them and you'll drive acceptance and usage of useful and desirable messaging. The kind that has a real value to the recipient.

Great use of SMS Long Number

 

Saw this in Melbourne today. The use of an SMS Long Number makes this service so much more accessible and thus useful.

Most people are on plans these days so the cost of sending one message is negligible and means even if they do end up with a ticket, they won't be liable.

If the parking authority had used a short code not only would there be concern over costs but also as a visitor with a roaming mobile, I wouldn't have been able to use the service.

Micro-blogging needs syndication

Phil posted today “Is twitter a serious business tool or just a complete waste of time?”. I dropped him a comment but in writing it, I came to a realisation that I felt deserved it's own post here.

twitter is the most successful micro-blogging platform in town but it still only serves a niche community of hip, internet things who love whatever is new. Pownce and Jaiku are the closest competition but the problem is critical mass, if I'm using twitter do I want to use pownce to interact with friends you follow there and jaiku for another set? No.

Very few people actually read this blog ( steady, there's more to this sentence ;) ) from the website, most read through an RSS/ATOM reader of some kind. They aggregate the feeds from a number of different sources into one easily consumable window on the blogging world. This is why blogging has become so damn successful, because it gives the reader control of how they consume.

In the micro-blogging world I need to visit multiple websites or download lots of clients to keep up to date with each network, which just isn't practical.

If all networks were to introduce a standard syndication methodology, something more suited to live messaging and the Internet like XMPP then clients could take feeds from all the sites that I like to track in one easily consumed form.

If I particularly liked Pownce's file sharing then I could use that through it's desktop client but it wouldn't preclude me from keeping up to date with all my other networks in an easily digestible form. Further if I liked the russian roulette that is twitter's up-time I could stick with that as my micro-blogging platform.

The problem is all these services want to attract audiences and keep them so they can advertise to them or whatever the business model based on subscriber numbers is, so they think they need a closed shop. However, if they don't grow the micro-blogging market, they won't grow themselves. Good ol' Catch-22.

So I ask you, micro-blogging platforms of the world unite, enable syndication and make micro-blogging as relevant and useful as blogging. Then you can concentrate on providing the best platform for your niche. For if you do there might just be a significant market to aim at.

Are email read receipts rude?

A couple of people I email on a regular basis request a read receipt by default. I don't send them, partially because I hate the dialog that pops up asking me whether I want to every time I receive an email from them and partially because I'm just plain awkward.

I'd much rather have an SMS style delivery receipt, ie I know it's got there, the transport mechanism has done it's job, I'm happy for the recipient to operate according to their own timescales and tell me when they're ready to respond.

The problem with read-receipts is that they're cross that line into the recipient exposing what they are doing to you. If I read an email, I might want consider a response, I might just be scanning to prioritise and get to it later. Indicating to someone that I've read it implies that I'm working on it straight away and they should ready themselves for a response.

So requesting a read receipt from me will certainly not get a response but you might succeed in raising my blood-pressure slightly ;)

SMS Home Routing, let's have a discussion before it's too late

In my interview with Informa yesterday we discussed among many things was SMS Home Routing and that, in my opinion, it represents one of the biggest threats and at the same time biggest opportunities for our industry. What I was concerned about was no one had mentioned this to the journalist before, a specialist in the mobile messaging arena.

A while ago I added a Google Alert for the term to keep me up to date with discussions, nothing. Absolutely nothing has come through. I imagined that in the vast expanse of the Internet, there would be someone who was worried about this or at least might have mentioned it.

Ewan at SMSTextNews has posted a couple of pieces (Verizon’s banning of abortion discussion highlights home routing issues, The arse with SMS home routing) about this (he's not in favour, can you tell? ;-)) but the comments have petered out.

I'm perplexed as to why industry figures like Mike Short, Andrew Bud, et al. are not leading a discussion into this. Why doesn't the MDA have an opinion?

I firmly believe that if SMS Home Routing destroys the validity of a delivery receipts, enterprises are going to walk away from SMS at a time when they're just starting to embrace it. It doesn't have to be this way, we just need some transparency from the operators.

SMS Engagement

I posted on the Esendex Blog about SMS Blogging to Paris. I'd built a web site (www.r4rh.org) for the event and thought it would be a great idea if the riders and support team could send SMS messages in to the web site in order to keep our supporters at home updated. It was a stellar success.

I only gave the virtual mobile number to the team members as I was a little concerned about there being no moderation controls on a web site for a school affiliated event. The genie however was already out of the bottle.

A couple of the riders gave the number to their families and the dam was breached. Messages of support came flooding in as the number spread quite literally around the world. We had people texting in from as far afield as Australia.

The riders were clamouring round my laptop every night to see if anyone they knew had posted a message and/or replied to their posts throughout the day. Two-way conversations were happening between riders and children at the school.

Whether we'd have had the same response if I had provided a form on the web site for people to post comments I don't know but I do believe that using SMS as the transport medium added certain features that made it more successful.

Firstly anyone could do it anywhere, fundamentally important for the riders but I postulate that this also helped the viral spread of texting in. Our friends and families back home would have been bumping into each other, share what they knew about the service and it could have been acted on straight away, rather than having to wait until they were back at a computer.

Secondly, I think the constraints inherent in texting from a mobile handset kept messages short and succinct meaning a lot more messages could be displayed on the web site. Rather than a long message dominating the home page, lots of messages gave a more dynamic feel to the site, encouraging more usage.

The results were astounding, it was a huge motivational boost for the riders but it also engaged our friends, families and supporters in an unforeseen fashion.

Service Level Agreements for SMS Services, pointless?

I attended a presentation about the need for SLAs in the SMS industry by Michael Kowalzik, CEO of Tyn-Tec, at Global Messaging 2008 last week.

I wasn't going to go as I had seen him speak on the same subject last year, but it was on a track I was interested in. Thankfully he spent less time this year trying to promote Tyn-Tec's services and more on what they were and why they were needed.

The 2 main areas for SMS services that differ from standard IT services are

• Message Throughput
• Time to first delivery attempt

Message throughput is fairly easy to measure and report on but time to first delivery attempt is trickier for many of us providers as it relies on the network operators passing the information back.

Tyn-Tec make a great play of running their own SMSC infrastructure, hosted on Manx Telecom's network in the Isle of Man. They have complete control and thus can get the interim delivery receipts required out of their own SMSC.

We don't run our own SMSC but connect into network operators around the world to perform the delivery on our behalf. One of my periodic bang my head against the desk tasks has been to try and get our suppliers to give us the information so we can measure their performance, report that to customers and offer SLAs on the whole delivery process not just until the message leaves our system.

That finally looks like it's bearing fruit, the operators are realising that businesses are using SMS to drive business processes and that SLAs are a minimum requirement.

Great you'd think. Possibly.

I can't help thinking that operators implementing SMS Home Routing (see  SMS Home Routing, should we as an industry be worried?) is going to invalidate the SLA in the eyes of the customer.

Giving an SLA on first attempt is all very well but the customer expects that attempt to be to the handset rather than an interim system on the destination network. The value of the SLA is immediately watered-down when you have to introduce backside covering caveats about the SLA not representing handset delivery to certain destinations.

I concluded in my previous post that SMS Home Routing was an inevitability that we has an industry had to adapt to. I wonder if its corruption of SLAs will end up representing an opportunity lost.

SMS Home Routing, should we as an industry be worried?

SMS Home Routing was a key topic discussed at Global Messaging 2008 this week. It's introduction brings with it the potential to seriously disrupt how we in the mobile messaging business deliver our services, especially cross-border. I made it my mission this week to try and understand what it means from the operator and vendor perspective

Firstly, I should probably explain the problem. SMS Home Routing means that whenever a message is sent to me it always passes through my home network, irrespective of where I am in the world. Normally when roaming, my home network never sees the message as it sent directly from the originating network to the network I'm roaming on.

Great, my operator can give me all sorts of value add services, like O2's Blue Book,SPAM filtering, twinning, out of office replies, SMS forwarding, etc, etc. To do all of these, the operator need to be able to intercept the SMS and apply some rules on it before passing it on to my handset.

It's the implementation of this interception that is the cause for concern. I spoke to, and heard from, senior figures at vendors like Airwide, Telsis and Tekelec who presented opposing views on how they recommend that their customers, the operators, do this. Similarly when I spoke to the operators they were also divided.

In the blue corner we have the transactional advocates. They believe that the transactional nature of SMS should be preserved. When a request is made to send a message to a handset, their systems proxy the request in real time. It handles delivering the message onto the handset and returns the ACK (delivery indication) back if the handset accepts the message. The sending SMSC know's nothing other of what happens behind the proxy but when the home network router reports the messages as delivered, it is.

In the red corner we have the store and forward advocates. Their systems will store the message and return the ACK back to the sending SMSC before it attempts to deliver the message to the destination handset. This unfortunately breaks the transactional nature of SMS and one of the key features that certainly most of our customers buy into, knowing whether the message has got to the handset.

I'll be honest, I arrived at the conference passionately backing the blue corner, a delivery receipt should tell me when the messages has actually arrived at the handset, but one of the vendors I spoke to certainly gave me some use cases that cause me to question this stance.

• Security - send me an SMS and you can find out which country I'm in, what if I don't know you or want you to know where I am.
• Status - a delivery receipt implies something about my status, I'm accepting messages therefore you can accept a response, what if I don't want you to know.
• Twinning - where an SMS is sent to two or more of my handsets simultaneously when is it delivered, when it hits one, two, all?

I guess this comes down to a question of who owns the message, the sender or the recipient? Home routing allows the recipient to delegate the job of message handling to their operator instead of their handset thus allowing the recipient to take advantage of all sorts of value-add services.

The business case for these systems that came up time and time again was SPAM filtering. The network wants to protect their subscribers from nefarious senders of unsolicited messages which generally originate from off the network.

I starting to believe that this is perhaps a bigger threat. The move by the Spanish operators to outlaw the use of alphanumeric originators, except those that have been pre agreed and do not originate off-net appears to be conducted under the banner of SPAM prevention.

The evidence I hear around the industry of legitimate messages being quietly discarded when sent to certain networks because of 'quality' issues is not the fault of home routing but more likely overly simplistic SPAM filters.

The subject of alphanumeric originators, network interconnects and the operators general distrust of A2P (application to person) traffic is a topic I will be returning to as I believe this is a more fundamental issue affecting us that could very quickly get out of hand.

Coming back to SMS home routing, I believe ultimately we have to accept it as an inevitability. As one operator contact told me, "I don't like it, but because xxx have done it we're going to have to as well". And let's be honest there are some really cool things it allows my network to do for me.

Much as we'd like not to, we have to accept that we faced with an oligopoly whose interests are not necessarily aligned with ours. The concept of delivery receipts and the knowledge they give us about the status of a communication is changing and we going to have to swallow that pill and adapt our services accordingly.

The rules have changed, but innovation thrives in times of adversity

Mobile working to Cannes

I decided to take the train to Global Messaging 2008 in Cannes,France. Last year I did it overnight which was sort of fun. This year I'm heading down during the day and seeing whether it's possible to do a days work while I spend the day travelling.

So armed with a my Sony Vaio, Vodafone USB Modem and BlackBerry I attempted to spend the day travelling but so that no one would notice.

3 trains required (if you ignore 2 stop on the RER in Paris):

1. Nottingham to London St Pancras
2. London St Pancras to Paris Gare de Lyon
3. Paris Gare de Lyon to Cannes

Nottingham to London - East Midlands Trains

This first leg is well known to me. I was able to use the power point to keep my laptop battery topped up but no WiFi and mobile coverage is shocking as usual. I've pretty much got used to not being able to do anything connected while on the train to/from London. That said my BlackBerry does an excellent job of exchanging emails when coverage allows.

Same goes for voice calls. Pointless trying to have a conversation.

It's always perplexed me as to why the mobile network operators have not invested in coverage for train lines. Little sardine cans of punters desperate to be communicate or consume content because there's nothing else to do.

conclusion: 3/10 great to have power, connectivity shocking

London to Paris - Eurostar

Aarrgh no power. Luckily I've invested in another battery for my laptop as the spare battery that came with my now 2 year old Vaio couldn't make it to Paris (the original battery gave up long ago). I guess though that a lot people's laptops will survive the 2hr journey so this shouldn't be too much of a hindrance.

I remember when Eurostar first opened and the trains seemed so glamorous, now they just seem tired and sadly lacking in basic facilities. Power points being one.

If they are trying to provide a business service then power is a must and I think WiFi would be a key asset. GNER (now National Express) seem to have done a great job on the East Coast Line, why not a premium route like London - Paris.

However this was when the Vodafone modem came to the fore, especially on the French side. I got 3G coverage almost all the way from Calais to Paris. I actually managed to use some web applications. Properly review some emails, respond completely. It was like being at my desk at home.

Voice calls no problem.

conclusion: 7/10 connectivity pretty good though WiFi would be beter, could really do with power

Paris to Cannes

This was going to be the real test. The first 2 legs are less than or about the 2 hour mark. If all else failed you could probably catch up with things at a coffee shop at one of the stations. 5 hours of whizzing through the French countryside was really going to put this experiment to the test, and it did.

I had high hopes for this train trip. The French being well known for their super fast train service, tearing round the country brimming with socialist pride. I imagined it would be well setup for the travelling business person.

I booked way ahead so travelled first class and was greeted by a nice big seat on the top deck (thought that might be better for mobile coverage) with my own power point.

No WiFi again, but as we left Paris I was hopeful as 3G coverage remained but this soon gave way to 2G, which in turn gave way to very patchy indeed. For large chunks of the journey it was unworkable. Especially as it seemed to stop connecting automatically, maybe that's a roaming setting.

Voice calls were also tricky, especially given they seem to be frowned upon in the carriage. Nothing like a mobile phone etiquette faux-pas in a foreign country to endear yourself with your fellow passengers.

conclusion: 6/10 power and seat great, data coverage varied

So is it workable? Certainly Eurostar, though more on the French side than the British. Given they've shortened that bit recently, I guess it's less of a problem ;-). The key at the moment is to know your route and know how to work round it's foibles.

Having used the WiFi on the East Coast (London to Edinburgh) line it's difficult to understand why other rail operators aren't putting it in across their fleet. You look in any rail carriage these days and the number of laptops as just mushroomed. Couple that with WiFi capable phones and PDAs and there's an army of people that would be quite prepared to pay an additional charge for WiFi while they travel.

I might be getting a little carried away, but I wonder if the government has any view on the national productivity hit of having people stuck on trains, unable to access their work. Could a government subsidy drive adoption as well as our GDP?

Searching for my twitter identity

Ewan of SMS Text News came to see us at Esendex yesterday. One of the subjects we chewed on, over Coke and tomato juice (boy it was a wild afternoon ;-)) was twitter.

I've followed twitter for a while and been intrigued, if not wowed, by the service it provides. "What are you doing?" is a question potentially of interest to a some people I know but in the most part, they're probably not interested in everything.

I decided to try and start using it last week and was soon tweeting about a trip to Legoland with the family, the triathlon I competed in, an 'interesting' thought on mobile I'd had. I've setup twitterfeed so whenever I post a blog entry that appears as well. I dropped the widget on my blog and sat back, proud that I was embracing the latest in social networking, communication, thingies. But then I looked again and realised it was just noise.

It was a stream of consciousness with no theme and questionable relevance to it's audience.

People I know in the industry and with whom I discuss trends, happenings, etc are likely to be interested in my thoughts on my trip to Global Messaging 2008 as I am with their's. If we're to shape an industry this kind of collective knowledge sharing is fantastic. Unfortunately most of those guys don't care about me building part of record breaking Lego tower. In fact, having that on my stream is a positive hinderance when we're all following multiple people and trying to discern what everyone's doing relative to the mobile industry.

Likewise my mates with whom I cycle and race with will want to know of my racing exploits. My Mum want's to know about Legoland and her grandchildren. That is assuming that these groups actually use twitter, given most of them aren't geeks that is unlikely, but that should probably be the subject of another post.

So it comes down to a question of identity. What should my twitter persona be? Do I need multiple twitter personas? What if I want to overlap those personas?

The ideal scenario for me would be to be able to categorise my tweets, set up sub-micro feeds. Your own categories could be presented as a optional set of check boxes on the update page. The main feed would still work, but these categories would be presented as sub feeds.

   http://twitter.com/adambird
   http://twitter.com/adambird/mobile
   http://twitter.com/adambird/family
   http://twitter.com/adambird/tri
   ..etc
  

SMS input could still be preserved by twitter providing multiple text in numbers that can be mapped to your mobile number and category. Meaning, multiple people could use the same numbers with different categories. They'd only need as many numbers as the maximum number of sub-feeds people would need/be allowed. I can't imagine it costing them any more money.

However, for me this would only solve part of the problem. A big question is. "Is the world tweeting about something of relevance to me?". It's all very well if the people you follow know about something but the world is a big place. The new iPhone goes on sale and they're all broken, my customers are complaining about my services, a band I desperately want to see have just released tickets for some surprise gigs, there's an impromptu demonstration about human rights abuses happening NOW. All of things would really require a common syntax, semantic tagging, to be accurate. Something I'm chewing on and will post on later.

So, for the moment http://twitter.com/adambird is going to become an extension of this blog, alongside BlogIt and the good old fashioned web browser. Another means of registering and diseminating my thoughts and views on Esendex and the industry as a whole. Let me know.

Alphanumeric sender restrictions come to Spain

Spanish operators seem to be clamping down on the use of alphanumeric sender aliases. Instead the messages must come with a valid reply-path be it shortcode or MSISDN (standard mobile number).

This is in an attempt to combat SPAM messages being sent to their subscribers. The theory, it would seem, is that if a number is used then the sender can be identified. Allowing the recipient to identify and reply to the sender to unsubscribe from the service.

These kind of restrictions are very broad brush approaches to problems caused by a minority that have a big impact on the majority. I've talked before about these kind of restrictions in Web-sent SMSs now face restrictions. It's puts in an interesting situation.

Many of our customers make heavy use of the facility to brand their messages with their own company or service name. A quick mystery shop round other SMS service providers in Spain reveals that it's business as usual. Alphanumeric senders are fine, they're happy to carry the traffic.

Currently, we have a number of routes into Spain that allow traffic with alphanumeric senders to pass, the messages are received and delivery receipts returned without issue.

That said one of our routes is having issues with alphanumeric senders to one of the Spanish networks. Is this a standard technical issue or this symptomatic of a tightening up of the restrictions?

So do we give the customer what they want while we still can along with everyone or do we self-police our customers and use one of our Spanish virtual mobile numbers for those that don't want the extra cost of having a dedicated number?

The risk if we do the former is that routes get summarily blocked to all traffic rather than just traffic that fall foul of the restrictions because that's pretty much all the operator can do at an interconnect level. This means customers with legitimate messaging have their service disrupted.

However, if we do the latter, we risk losing customers to other service providers who are prepared to carry the traffic.

We're going to put it in the hands of our customers for as long as possible. For those that rely on our service to get the messages through without any potential downtime, we will recommend using our Spanish virtual mobile number service.

We'll just be ready to switch it on for the customers that are happy to risk an alphanumeric alias for the meantime.

Web-sent SMSs now face restrictions

Picked this up from my Google Alerts : Web-sent SMSs now face restrictions

Of particular interest was the following paragraph:

The committee has also decided that the service providers must also ensure that the SMSs received by their network from a website would not have India’s country code +91 as the sender party’s address. The code +91 is strictly reserved for messages sent from a mobile phone.

This is definitely one to watch. Esendex don't do a lot of business in India, but markets have a habit of following each other.

As part of a standard service, we allow our customers to change the sender of messages to be their mobile number or a virtual mobile number we provide. Both providing a legitimate reply path for the recipient. If we were providing Indian national mobile numbers, we would be falling foul of this regulation.

To me this looks disturbingly like their following the US approach of requiring all SMS traffic be sent via shortcodes for A2P (Application to Person) traffic. While this is billed as protecting users against SPAM it also serves to stifle the market for innovative services to smaller organisations.

The issue with shortcodes is that they are short and therefore in scarce supply. Long numbers on the other hand a re long and in plentiful supply. The other benefit of long numbers is that the costs of sending to them are the same as any other mobile number. No need for the dreaded 'standard network charges apply' clause on every bit of communication, no need to educate the end=users to prfix their messages with a keyword in order to communicate.

This makes them both accessible and affordable for SMEs who wish to extend the communication mix and bridge between the Internet and telecoms. They can be used for normal communication appointment reminders, server alerts, customer service applications, etc and not just marketing and promotion of large company's services.

As we extend our interconnects around the world, I hear time and time again that 'this operator doesn't like A2P traffic' and 'that operator has restrictions on this kind of traffic'. It's this kind of ill-considered, blanket approach that brings my blood to boiling point. It's so short-sighted, so protectionist without real thought, and so stifling of innovation.

There are 2 weapons against SPAM that are well within the reach of all network operators.

1. Interconnect fee - the operators can setup AA19 agreements with all networks they wish to receive traffic from specifying commercial terms for doing so. If SPAM costs too much, it stops.
2. SPAM filtering - most SMS hubbing companies I speak to these days have robust SPAM filtering to prevent these messages from passing through their hubs and onto the network. Unfortunately, the networks don't seem to be interested.

IMHO The only real growth in SMS volumes are going to be from the A2P arena. Everyone has phones pretty much and I would bet they're going to reach the limit of what they want to text to each other about. Get them texting with applications and the explosive growth days can reign again.

Virtual mobile number based services represent the Long Tail of innovation that can touch everyone. A company sending just 500 messages a month to key stakeholders is not going to revolutionlise traffic but multiply that by 10,000, 100,000 or a million companies all sending their own messages to their own stakeholders and that starts to get significant. Add onto that the replies from the recipients and surely that should be of interest to the networks.

Disney embraces SMS

I visited Magic Kingdom last week and saw this as we were going into the Monsters Inc. Laugh Floor attraction.

You could text in jokes and the Monsters would read them out. Of course for anyone who's seen a Jack Dee live show this is old hat, but it's great way of getting even more interaction out of the audience.

Being the US, there was of course the slight less friendly terms and conditions.

Just a little more involved than Standard network rates apply.

Is mobile blogging the answer to blog torpor?

As regular readers will know, I had a bit of a blogging hiatus through December. Truth is I just got out of the habit. I got busy and my blog was the balancing item.

I suspect that this is the case for the vast majority of blogs out there. We start with good intentions but soon the next interesting thing comes along and today's brilliant, can't live without, new toy becomes yesterday's forgotten plaything.

Services like Twitter are designed to disseminate transitory information. I have signed up for an account but I really can't imagine anyone would find my random thoughts of interest, and anyway I can't really be bothered. The good thing about Twitter is if I say something that I subsequently wish I hadn't it doesn't hang around. It's forgotten in the sea of titbits about everyone's lives.

Blogs however are a different story. With their archives and syndication, once you've hit publish, that's it. This certainly makes me consider everything I'm posting and perhaps that's constraining the content and timeliness.

One of the problems with timeliness is access to a computer to make posting possible. By the time you get home, there are umpteen other things to catch up on before writing up the blog post you thought about while on the train, in the car, out at lunch.

In the past I've used my BlackBerry for mobile blogging, sending an email to this blog for editing later. When I remember to do it, it works pretty well, though I end up having to reformat and strip off the rather long (thanks to legislation) company email signature. We've recently launched BlogIt here at Esendex so people without email devices can do the same using just SMS.

While these services help to enable the physical act of blogging as and when the mood strikes I also think they require a bit of an attitude shift. I have to remember that every blog post doesn't have to be a long considered essay, it's perfectly legitimate to post something up as when the feeling takes me.

I probably should be championing mobile blogging via SMS as the answer with us running the BlogIt service, but in reality I'll use a mix of both. It'll depend on the situation at the time, what device I have with me, how long the post is, and whether I want to give it a bit of thought before posting.

The key point is that mobile blogging, be it by SMS or mobile email, gives me that choice. For something to become a habit, it needs to be easily assimilated into your everyday life. I spend a lot of time emailing and texting while on the move so now I can blog just as easily.

Expect to hear more from me.

Enhanced Mobile Messaging: What’s Beyond SMS?

Summary of the panel session I mentioned over. First up were T-Mobile giving a carrier's perspective. The crux of their vision was a standards lead, interoperable messaging service that would embrace availability and group sending.

VeriSign must take the tenacity plaudits for continuing to beat the MMS drum. Their view is that what people want to do is Point - Shoot – Share and that is what MMS is all about. Interoperability is here, growth rates are higher than SMS, though this is with far lower numbers.

The representative from OZ talked at great length and clarity about mobile IM blurring boundaries between PC and phone. In his view the phone would become the laptop and the PC would be a research and media station.

Another interesting observation was that social networking sites are really just one-to-many IM. Email use is dropping in preference to networking services like Facebook, Bebo, et al. People will be members of multiple communities and will interact with them based on their context.

Kirusa talked about the success their having in the emerging markets with Voice SMS. You dial * followed by the number and record a voice message. The recipient receives an SMS with instructions to pick it up.

In their opinion, this fills the void in the communication matrix for asynch voice between voice calls and voice mail in the same way SMS sits between IM and Email.

This was a theme extended on by Pinger, a bay area start-up providing voice messaging services. You send someone a voice message, they receive the call and can then reply straight away. That way you get the personality and mood of voice without the hassle of navigating a voice mail system.

So what do I think?

Voice messaging is interesting and the guys at Pinger seem to be making it very simple. I'm not sure it will ever surpass textual messaging. That is definately here to stay, whether we record on the phone using speech recognition (not covered in the session) or type it in it's the most efficient way to send a message as well as to receive one.

For me what is really going to change is context. The context of a message is going to alter how we receive and respond it. I believe that people will want their communications organised around context. This will require a move away from pure messaging clients to tools that are designed for the type of communication we undertake depending on whether we're talking to friends, family or work.

The Facebook for BlackBerry app is a good example of this. This is great for communicating with friends but I wouldn't use it to communicate with family or work colleagues.

This is a step towards the bearer becoming less important ie SMS, Email, MMS, SIP, etc. As one person put it during the session:

We rely on people to be human routers

This is a recurring theme of visions of the the future of messagimg but one thing is standing in the way it becoming a reality, pricing.

While different messaging bearers are priced differently, people are going to have to be able to make a decision. However, ff the carriers decided to make it all the same rate, or even flat rate, this is a very different story. Applications or the networks could then make the decision for us, we don't care we just want the message delivered.

So, as usual, the carriers hold the key. If they decide, messaging utopia could well be within our grasp.