SMS messaging is still the killer app

SMS messaging is still the undisputed leader in the operators messaging revenue. Apart from the voice revenue, this one is holding the fort and is definitely the cash cow for the operator. Analysts predict SMS revenues of between $60 billion and $80 billion worldwide in 2007. According to a report from portio research, by 2012, SMS messaging shall grow by 3.7 trillion messages per year.

As a follow up to my article on voip acceptance in social networking, I guess SMS has lot of promise when it comes to Social Community interaction. What started as a means of sending short messages to and from mobile phones has become a global sensation used by small kids to old people. The uptake for some of other mobile messaging like MMS,MIM and mobile e-mail is still slow. This could be partly because of the dependency of handsets and interoperability. Mobile e-mail is largely dependent on the advanced handsets like PDA’s and smart phones. So obviously, this serves only the niche crowd and business users who are willing to shell tons of money on handset and the wireless data package.

Many companies understand the huge revenue potential SMS has. Despite the fact that SMS is a saturated technology, there are many startups that are trying to build innovative apps on top of SMS. In addition, SMS is already a successful business, finding something innovative for consumers to adopt is the biggest challenge all these startups are facing.

Some interesting apps worthy of mention are:
• Group SMS ( Check out my Article on list of group SMS companies)
• Voice SMS (Check out my Article on list of voice SMS companies)
• Mobile advertisement (non-intrusive delivery of relevant content and advertising on the SMS window)
• Voting on TV shows( For e.g., American idol )
• SMS based LBS service. (Check out my Article on list of LBS startups)
• SMS based social networking.
• Active streaming from handset ( Micro Blogging-- twitter,jaiku etc)
• SMS 2.0 ( Converged messaging )
• Enhanced messaging features like color SMS, Emoticons etc.
• SMS threading (creating SMS threading that emulates an IM interface )

Folks, here a small list of clients that support SMS threading on handsets:
http://benhirashima.com/software/
http://www.freewarepocketpc.net
http://www.mykesoft.com/textr/
http://www.pocketcm.com/