Most mobile phones can send and receive brief text messages as well as voice calls, yet so far text has mostly been limited to personal messages, sports results and news feeds.
However, companies are starting to use the text facility, called Short Message Service (SMS), for other purposes, say industry watchers. Many firms see advantages in the speed and ease with which SMS can distribute information. "The key is the ability to react to information received Ã, for example, you might react to a stock alert by [dumping] your stock," said Mike Franklin, the UK managing director of Finnish software firm Wireless Commerce (WCL), an example of a vendor that offers two-way interactive applications over SMS.
"[But] a lot of people are getting fed up with just getting alerts," Franklin added. "It's all very well having information sent through, but if you have to phone back you could be on hold for ages."
Having originally planned to build a wireless auction platform, WCL's founders soon realised that they had developed something rather more generic. The company now markets a wireless commerce engine, including features to support permission-based marketing, charity donations and voting. "All our applications are generic and run on WAP or SMS," said Franklin. "It is the content logic that differs. The query goes through the gateway, interrogates the application and returns the response. With WAP you can get much further into the system, but SMS is what people are using today."
The advantage of SMS over WAP is its simplicity and ubiquity, said Carsten Schmidt of analyst firm Forrester Research. "Consumers like simple services. I think SMS is quite a useful way to move forward."
Speed can be a problem, however. Most messages are received quickly but some can be delayed for hours or even days. "[The operators are] trying to upgrade their SMS networks, but until they do, there will be slow service at peak times," admitted Franklin. Peaks include Saturday afternoon, when the sports results go out, and early morning, when news feeds are being delivered.
Schmidt noted that SMS suits some applications better than others Ã, chiefly those where very simple transactions are needed, perhaps just a yes or no reply. People would not use SMS to book flights, for example, but might use it to confirm seats or to check for delays, said Schmidt.
"Where we're seeing most interest is in the high-volume consumer market," said Franklin. "It's still very new on the business-to-business front. There's a lot that can be done, but I don't think it will be done before the release of WAP 1.3 and GPRS."
An SMS application can be funded in one of two ways. Delivery can be paid for by the sending company. An example of this would be a marketing service, where an SMS number on an advert permits readers to retrieve product information. The alternative is a reverse billing agreement, with the network operator adding charges to a subscriber's mobile phone bill. With this approach, messages can be charged for at premium rates. For instance, Vodafone users now have premium-rate access to Teletext pages via SMS.
WAP may be the future, but SMS is here today and it works, said Franklin. "For our clients, it's a very low-cost way to get their business into the mobile environment."
