Part of my job requires looking at the signals in the mobile messaging market from all angles. Some of which includes; analyzing emerging business models, understanding the consumer usability aspect of our business, keeping an ear to the ground on the differing regional telecommunications policies that may have an impact on our customers, and learning from the findings of our Advanced Development Group. I am privileged in my position that I can ask the question: Why? Why does that business model work or not work? Why does text messaging take off in one region vs. another? Why does the industry develop closed systems?

All of these signals at some point in time collide to create a phenomenon not equal to the big-bang but enough to alter the current market conditions and affect the status-quo of what we do. Companies that are able to decipher these signals and define the appropriate solution are the ones that will be successful in evolving market conditions.

Mobile Messaging 2.0 is just such a collision:

• Operators struggle with the duplication of service infrastructure;
• Consumers struggle with a poor user experience for anything other than text messaging;
• Content providers want web-like capabilities from their interactions with operators;
• And governments start to mandate that operators provide more forms of control and subscriber protection.

From recent forums that I have attended and operators that I’ve spoken to, I’ve heard complaints of value-added services stage fright. In other words, many services have been greatly anticipated for their potential to replicate the $60B SMS market phenomenon, but as yet all have failed to deliver. MMS is one such service, and we have lived through its growing pains, starting with the first deployments back in 2001. From some of the more recent market data we see that strongest market for MMS is the last market that deployed the service - North America.. Did the early adopters jump before we could swim? My expectation is that the early adopters with lackluster growth will relaunch MMS for mobile advertising or another application ensuring the problems of yesterday are addressed. The penetration of capable devices, inter-working between networks and devices, and usability improvements have all helped to allow MMS to succeed in the North American market place.

Mobile Instant Messaging (MIM), another much-hyped service 4 years ago is also at a serious crossroad. Operators raced to install Personal IM solutions to only reposition their offering as direct connect services to the big IM providers. Fear of subscriber retention and ownership played a major role in the decision to blaze down a Personal IM solution. Even with the direct IM connections subscriber penetration for MIM barely reaches 1% for operators that have deployed it. To add to the problem, consumers face a daunting usability problem because MIM and other forms of messaging do not inter-operate.

It is unfortunate that the requirements for Mobile Messaging 2.0 did not exist prior to the efforts of 3GPP to define standards for MMS. It’s also equally unfortunate MM2.0 did not exist prior to the wireless village standardization of Mobile Instant Messaging. In fact it was the frustrations with vendor-driven new technologies that led to the emergence of Mobile Messaging 2.0 as a practical ‘cookbook’ for deploying next generation mobile networks.

However it is fortunate that:

• SMS still continues its strong traffic and revenue growth, providing new methods for the operator to grow their capacity.
• MMS continues its growth requiring the 2nd generation MMS architectures to augment or replace current networks
• MIM for all that I like from a usability perspective, it is fortunate that we have learned that direct connect MIM as a starter pack is the best service offering.

The above signals provide the operator with an opportunity to start the deployment of a Mobile Messaging 2.0 framework from either one of the mobile messaging silo architectures.

As I said earlier this is not a Big-Bang, but is far more than a gradual evolution. All of the above factors mentioned previously are producing dramatic changes in the Mobile Messaging status quo.