As summer wanes in many parts of the world (and gets underway in others) we have continued to see new and more critical uses of text and other forms of mobile messaging set new benchmarks that have elevated the medium to an entirely new level. Indeed, in the USA, sources say that Barack Obama could have a significant advantage in the election due to text message engagement with voters under the age of 30, and in South Africa text messaging is being used in the fight against AIDS. Some specific points that illustrate the power of mobile messaging: when Barack Obama’s campaign told supporters that he would announce his vice presidential choice via text message, his campaign was able to collect 3 million numbers in the lead up to the announcement; and trials of the system that sends free text messages to encourage recipients to be tested and treated for HIV in South Africa showed that calls to counselors at the National Aids helpline in Johannesburg increased by 200% when messages were broadcast.

On a worldwide basis, if politicians around the globe want to take advantage of text messaging in future popular votes, they may have to overcome some of the controversy surrounding text message voting that has been generated in countries like England where several key TV shows were fined huge amounts due to vote rigging. Globally, if politicians want to follow Obama’s lead and take advantage of text message voting, the industry will need to restore public confidence and show that episodes such as the ones that happened last year are an exception and not a byproduct of the text messaging medium itself.

These international examples clearly illustrate that the power of mobile messaging has only begun to be tapped, and this medium certainly holds valuable worldwide potential well beyond its groundbreaking recent uses in political mobilization and healthcare information provision.

This issue of the newsletter will also highlight a few other issues that have been receiving lots of ‘airtime’ over the last quarter, including whether or not SMS is ready for emergency messaging alerts, and the need for responsible text messaging.

IN THIS ISSUE

Voting with our thumbs?

Source: Mobile Messaging 2.0 Blog - Chris Lennartz

Garrett Graff, an editor at Washingtonian magazine and a former Webmaster for Howard Dean, pointed out in an op-ed in The New York Times this week the growing importance of text messaging in the presidential campaigns, particularly the Obama campaign (where even as I write this the most connected Obamiacs are awaiting news of the VP pick). And of course around the world text messaging is being used in many countries in many ways - to quickly form protests or groups of supporters, to remind people where and when to vote, and even to target the youth demographic to raise interest in voting. But guess what? These examples are just the beginning of the power of text messaging. The potential for even larger scale and more strategic uses is right in front of us.

A few examples: The use of voting reminders could be expanded substantially by using systems that ensure personal SMS message traffic won’t be impacted by the sending of 160 character voting reminders to millions of people. And savvy campaign managers will be using embedded links in SMS messages to their candidate’s mobile internet page with more information about the platform, position on key issues, scheduled appearances, etc.

MMS also carries huge potential for political campaigns. We will undoubtedly see video captures of photogenic political candidates delivering messages directly to their supporters, or audio reminders to ‘rock the vote’ much as the MTV medium was able to do in the past. Operators are now able to tap into demographic information, which means these messages could be tailored to a subscriber’s specific and identified interests or even their location to ensure that the message has a personal impact that only the mobile phone can offer.

I believe the most exciting potential for text messaging, however, takes place on election day itself. Mobile messaging 2.0 holds the promise of becoming the voting booth in a handset, by enabling operators to implement the supporting infrastructure. The potential is there – Ofcom (an independent organization that regulates the UK’s broadcasting, telecommunications and wireless communications sectors) has just reported survey findings that mobile use in the UK has doubled since 2002, and that 44% of adults use text messaging every day.

What better way to tap into the popular vote than to let this vast number of people vote with their thumbs? After all, people are paying bills online, buying goods and services, donating to charities with their mobiles…why not vote for their next president or political representative? With mobile messaging 2.0 it’s all possible.

Regional Spotlight: Eastern Europe

1)  How would you describe the telecoms market in Central/Eastern Europe at the moment?

It is very difficult to describe the telco market in Central/Eastern Europe since as a whole as it is a diverse and varied region.  There are numerous countries of all sizes reaching from the Baltics in the North to Tajikistan in the South, the Czech Republic in the West and Kazakhstan in the East.  Each of these regions and countries have different cultures, mobile handset penetration and ARPU.  As a whole, it is possible to differentiate between Russia/CIS countries like Ukraine Belarus, Georgia, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Central Eastern countries like Poland, Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania, FYR of Macedonia.

In the first category of Russia/CIS, there is consolidation now in western parts like Moscow, St. Petersburg, Kiev and Minsk after years of continuous growth.  However, there continues to be huge growth in the eastern portion of the region including Ural, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Armenia.  The Telecom market in Russia/CIS is dominated by three big players:  MTS, Vimpelcom and Megafon who have numerous licenses in Russia and CIS.  Many decisions and innovations are made centrally in Moscow and solutions are typically implemented there and then ‘copied’ out to other regions.

Looking at the second category of Central Eastern countries, you also see three big players:  Vodafone, T-Mobile and Orange.  Next to that there are smaller ones like O2 Telefonica, Mobilkom and OTE group.  Penetration is above 100% almost everywhere in this region, and the top trends that are emerging now are:  fixed-mobile convergence, the entrance of MVNOs, IPTV and mobile advertising.

2)  What are the key trends affecting this sector in Central/Eastern Europe at present?

The key trends in the region are fixed mobile convergence, IMS, IMS, IPTV, WIMAX and mobile advertising. 

As a whole, data as a percentage of revenue growth is on the rise.  SMS traffic/usage is still generating the most data revenue.  However, additionally, discounted data usage offers and quarterly promotions are encouraging web surfing and data transfer.  There is also rising mobile broadband demand as evidenced by the number of mobile internet subscriptions growing rapidly. 

Bundling is gathering momentum as a marketing practice in Eastern European markets, say researchers at Ovum. During 2006 and 2007, many Eastern European operators introduced and heavily promoted bundled service packages.

At the same time, or perhaps in part because of bundling tactics, the decline in fixed voice markets is slowing, though there still is significant substitution of wireless for wired services.

Broadband also is providing significant growth. Virtually all operators are seeing growth in excess of 15 percent, year-on-year, with an average growth of 24 percent, Ovum says.
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Mobile markets clearly are saturating, though. All mobile markets in the region have penetration levels of over 90 percent and in some, such as the Czech Republic, Estonia and Bulgaria, SIM-card penetration is over 120 percent, similar to Western Europe, where average SIM penetration was 116 percent at the end of 2007.

Growth rates are slowing down as a result, while mobile operators continue to find advanced mobile data services a challenge.

Going forward, we expect mobile operators will continue to focus on IMS. This offers the potential to have interoperability of applications over various networks – a very powerful tool for telcos in their battle to maintain supremacy in the market. Mobile operators need to retain a competitive edge as mobile manufacturers and Internet Media companies (i.e., Google) attempt to move into the mobile data space.

Mobile operators in Eastern Europe are also now focusing on mobile data, particularly in countries where prospects for revenue growth from saturated voice markets are slim and the number of deployed WCDMA/HSDPA networks is on the rise, a tribute to the technology's maturity and its dominance of the 3G technology market.

3)  How is Airwide addressing trends in this region?

In terms of IMS, Airwide has been providing a tiered architectural approach that is Mobile Messaging 2.0 compliant and will support an evolutionary approach to implementing next-generation networks – regardless of what approach wins out in the market.  Not content to offer the same-old, historical approach to managing messaging traffic, Airwide has pioneered a tiered approach to messaging services – a real world solution that’s taking off across Eastern Europe.  By using tiers of functionality, Airwide gives operators the freedom to continue to leverage their existing infrastructure while enabling a modular evolution to next-generation messaging.  In moving away from an antiquated, silo-based messaging, to a tiered modular infrastructure operators have a cheaper and more flexible way to manage their messaging and services. This will allow operators to stay ahead of the influx in traffic, optimize their messaging revenue, and ultimately maintain better subscriber loyalty.  The tiers that should be in place to optimize messaging performance and keep capital and operational expenditures at a minimum are as follows:

• Access and delivery – integrating messaging components to the core network via standard interfaces
• Control – providing network and business logic to route messages to subscribers and/or applications
• Storage – storing traffic that isn’t delivered on first attempt
• Application – high-value combinational messaging services incorporating network enablers (i.e. presence)

Airwide’s tiered architecture enables operators to independently scale any of these four tiers across the infrastructure to support SMS, MMS, and other forms of messaging without incurring the costs of over-buying capacity for any one service or infrastructure tier.   

Also, Airwide has built upon its vast experience working in some of the most demanding operator environments in the world to create solutions that can help mobile operators to tap into hidden sources of revenue that might otherwise be unavailable.  Using solutions for mobile advertising, customer care and others, Airwide unlocks the value of marketing data by orchestrating intelligent, subscriber specific promotions. Individual subscriber profiles and usage history can be combined with disruptive mobile marketing tools and multi-channel ad-insertion capabilities to form an integrated springboard for driving up service value and user loyalty through entirely new business models – personalization, targeted promotion, and advertising.

4)  Are there significant differences between countries in the region in terms of what is driving telecoms growth at present?

Yes, East of the Ural it is still very much ordinary subscriber growth, however, in some areas there is also dual and multi-SIM usage that is driving subscription numbers.  In more mature countries you see a shift from nearly 90 to 100% pre-paid toward more post-paid.  Data as a percentage of ARPU growth is increasing due to higher availability of bandwidth, but as mentioned previously, SMS still counts for most of the data revenue in the region.  Furthermore, operators are looking into new services like IPTV and mobile advertising to drive ARPU up. 

According to recent research from Informa, there is a high degree of variation in ARPU trends in the region which reflects the different stages of market maturity.  Countries with strong competition have ARPU trending down, for example in Bulgaria.  In addition, recent Informa research also shows that developed markets have strong post-paid subscription growth and mobile broadband uptake that is pushing blended ARPU up.  However, across all markets in Central and Eastern Europe, from mature to developing – data is accounting for an increasing proportion of operators’ revenues.

5)  What do you think we will see developing in the future?

In the future, we believe you will see more consolidation of operators and more combinations of mobile-fixed operators.  In addition, we believe that more MVNO’s will move into the mature markets and the shift from pre-paid to post-paid subscribers will continue.  In 2000-2002, new entrants to the market were competing for share by targeting the pre-paid segments.  Smaller, high potential growth countries like Bosnia still have high pre-paid splits.  However, we expect these countries to follow more developed markets and experience strong pre-paid to post-paid migration. 

EMERGENCY SMS

3G Americas recently issued a report contending that the shortcomings of widespread SMS use to alert the general public during emergency situations, make it unsuitable for this purpose.  While we appreciate the organization’s concerns, we believe that SMS has been and continues to be a viable and practical alternative communications channel for emergency alerts.  Although there remain some challenges in using SMS in emergency situations (critics have claimed that not everyone would have access to text messaging at the time of the emergency), in general the same could be argued against other alert methods such as television and radio. The fact remains that ALL methods of communication- media broadcasts, mass telephone alerts and SMS play an extremely crucial role in alerting the general population during critical situations such as evacuations, natural disasters, national security threats, etc.  We believe the benefits of SMS are clear and encourage its use by first responders and coordinators as well as state, local, and federal authorities to provide an invaluable communications tool.

First, SMS is ubiquitous; half the people in the world have SMS and that number is growing every day. Considering numbers alone, text messaging has the ability to reach huge percentages of people in almost any reason.

However, it’s important to consider new infrastructure technology that really allows emergency SMS to become a reality. Recent network developments have removed many of the previous bottlenecks that hindered SMS’ usefulness for mass alerts and real-time communications.  The constraints in pushing a high volume of messages into the network have been largely eliminated. For example, Linux technology can be scaled indefinitely, and access to the network is IP, removing some of the signaling network limitations that had previously existed.

Carrier infrastructure barriers have also been removed over the last few years, and with a realistic architecture, such as the tiered architecture advocated by Airwide, operators can now achieve the scale and performance they need to deploy emergency SMS today.  Additionally, carriers are now equipped with better intelligence into their networks and can more effectively manage campaign functionality, allowing rapid deployment of emergency messages without encountering problems. 

Operators that have deployed tiered architecture that uses FDA and separate layers of functionality are already equipped to do this.  While operators could conceivably carry a high volume of messages with an SMSC, now with intelligence in front of that SMSC, they can trickle messages through to the SMSC steadily or use FDA to ensure that the delivery mechanisms don’t get overloaded.

Focusing only on SMS’ shortcomings for emergency situations and dismissing the technology outright misses a key point:  at the end of the day no single technology is going to be the ideal platform for emergency messaging. It  is going to take a combination of multiple approaches to reach as many people as possible.  SMS already has some advantages that other technologies don’t bring to the table, for example, the ability to hold two-way dialogs would make SMS an ideal way of providing someone with a set of instructions based on their situation. In the future, SIP-based messaging, when presence becomes widely available for SMS,  will bring additional  unique advantages that other approaches cannot currently offer.  And

There has long been resistance to the role of the mobile network in disseminating emergency information.  Just as in any emergency communications plan, there are some challenges yet to be overcome. However it is unfair to dismiss SMS out of hand as a technology that is appropriate for emergency messaging use.  We at Airwide feel that there will be a beneficial co-existence of technologies (from Cell broadcast to SMS, to radio to television) that will provide emergency coordinators with a full range of communications channels to keep people safe in an organized and efficient way. The ubiquitous nature of SMS along with its other many positives must not be left out of any equation that seeks to solve the role of the mobile platform in emergency communications. 

Tips for (Responsible) Texting

Source: Mobile Messaging 2.0 Blog - Jay Seaton

No surprise that we at Mobile Messaging 2.0 are pretty bullish on cool innovations and new developments in the messaging world, so our general position is “the more the merrier” when it comes to increasing messaging usage and applications. However, there CAN be too much of a good thing.

Who among us has not witnessed (or, ahem, even conducted such behavior ourselves) texting while driving, for example? Emergency rooms have seen an increase in patients injured because of distractions from their phones and most recently, Chicago joined the ranks of cities and states that have passed laws to limit phone use while driving. While I’ll be the first one to champion the non-stop connectivity mobile affords us, I also wanted to offer up some tips for responsible texting.

Mobile phone users and the ecosystem of carriers, and application developers who enable them – I urge you to take a moment to consider my “Top 7″ — whether it’s for preserving public safety or your personal relationships, I promise you, your friends, family, and fellow citizens will thank you. hould all be aware of as these platforms proliferate.

• Rule #1: Just say No: to texting while driving….operating machinery, crossing the street without looking, or anything that jeopardizes public safety.
• Rule #2: Listen to Miss Manners: never text during dinner, church, a date, on a job interview. It’s just rude. (And sometimes really stupid.)
• Rule #3: Don’t forget your grandparents: text to their landline.
• Rule #4: They may not “get” your LOL. While we’re talking about grandma and grandpa, remember that “Text Language” is for texting only! Sure when you’re limited to a few characters it makes sense to abbreviate and use acronyms; it’s a part of texting culture. But don’t forget Grandma won’t understand it when you respond to her joke with LOL.
• Rule #5: Can the spam. There is no such thing as an acceptable unsolicited text. If we don’t know you, didn’t ask to receive your message, chances are we’ll interpret your text as spam, especially if we don’t have unlimited data plans. That’s just the way it goes!
• Rule #6: If you must… do it in person. Don’t underestimate the power of “face-to-face”. SMS and MMS can be great ways to get in touch, find out if someone is available, send a picture in real time, but I say no to breakups proposals, firings, or the like via text. Sometimes some messages are best delivered in person.
• Rule #7: Enough already. (Don’t ‘re-text’) If you’ve texted someone and are in need of a response, don’t text the same request again and again. One of the luxuries of text messaging is it affords us time to reply when it suits us, and sometimes that won’t be for a little while (insert any number of scenarios where texting might be inappropriate). Text once and standby.

Let us know if you have other texting rules of the road. Maybe it’s time to introduce the same kind of shared responsibility as with other risky behaviors and appoint “designated digital drivers” — friends who don’t let friends do dumb things with their thumbs.