How Will The Next Mobile Messaging Revolution Be Delivered?
by Ewan Spence
I talked last week about what form the next big Mobile messaging would come from (see here), and today I want to go a little bit further and talk about how it will get to you. What’s surprising, looking at all the possible forms of future messaging (or new media, or Brian-ism’s, or whatever you call them), is that the transport mechanism is already there.
Either you’re going to be working with some form of real-time interaction, in which case you’ll be looking at 3G and defaulting back to a Wi-Fi connection if it is available (although I expect seamless switching to whichever option is cheaper for you to be part of the de facto setup in the next year or so), or you’ll have some sort of delayed ‘send something – wait – receive something – reply’ loop. And it’s in the latter where I think we’ll see messaging 2.0. Because all the building blocks are there.
The key is the transport mechanism. How do you get one chunk of data from one handset to another? And manage that with the least amount of fuss, with cross-network compatibility, and a high probability that the receiving handset will be able to understand what’s coming in. The form of the message can’t be fully predicted, but I’ll put money that it could easily be digitized, and sent as a discrete packet of data of up to around 500K (with that value rising alongside Moore’s law).
So what does the mobile industry have that provides cross network capacity, can handle discrete packages of data, is understood by the majority of handsets and (most importantly) already integrated into the billing systems of every carrier? MMS – The Multimedia Messaging Service.
Not only is it available, but it is still under-used. It can handle different formats of data, from still images, to video and audio, depending on the handset. And certainly in the UK if you receive an MMS that your handset can’t cope with, you can look at it online and get it there. But as handsets improve and functionality ramps up, I’d expect more and more handsets to be able to handle MMS as easily as email handles attachments.
The only thing stopping the next generation of mobile messaging is imagination. The form factors are there, the transport mechanism is there, the question is, are the entrepreneurs and VC’s there? And if not, why not?
