The Day SMS Will Die

When was the last you sent a text message (SMS), question asked to smartphone users. Maybe some are still using SMS when connecting with people who are not into sophisticated phones, the smart ones.

So basically the industry of SMS will come to an end or at least see itself shrinking, except for companies who still believe that this is a cheap marketing tool and keep in feeding your phone with crap messages about shoes sales, valentine flowers, and so on… and most of the messages end up being deleted and most of the time, before even reading them.

But it seems that eventually the SMS market still have some potential. It has been estimated by the International Telecommunications Union that 6.1 trillion SMS messages were sent in 2010. That’s over 16.7 billion messages per day. 696 million messages per hour. 1.16 million messages per minute. And 193,429 texts in a second.

So who is replacing this niche business? It is called Mobile Instant Messaging.

The smartphone users are invaded by mobile instant messaging apps and they are built for almost all mobile platform, but not unified till now and not everyone uses the same IM client, so still this needs to be fixed by app builders.

I am not quite sure if mobile IM will be as profitable as SMS, but it will take the mobile service providers many years to work this out until data access becomes as cheap as sending an SMS and until all users are playing with smartphones.

For business travelers, still email is the #1 tool to send one to many messages, to avoid high roaming costs, plus almost all mobile IM requires to sign-in (except BBM and that is why it’s still the No.1 threat) and users tend to forget signing in every time they turn on their mobile phones.

Until SMS comes to an end, let us wait and see new mobile IM apps emerging and the latest news in this sector was the Facebook acquisition of Beluga for an undisclosed amount.

To know more about what is happening in the mobile platforms and applications, consider visiting the ArabNet 2011 Shift Digital Summit, from March 22-25, in Beirut-Lebanon, which will draw over 1,000 attendees and 80 speakers from around the world. It will include a Developer Day (March 22), Two Forum Days (March 23 & 24), and a Community Day (March 25).