Americans 4 years behind the UK in SMS adoption

While SMS adoption has been increasing rapidly in the US, it is clear that the overall development of the market is still in its infancy compared to Europe. The IntoMobile blog has some interesting statistics about adoption differences. For more details, check out Tomi T Ahonen's article.Verizon Wireless has just reached the '1 SMS sent per day per user' mark, which happened in the UK 4 years ago. Today, we're at 6 SMS per day per user in the UK, 5 in Ireland, 10 in South Korea, and 15 in the Philippines!

New AT&T Branding Guidelines

With immediate effect, AT&T no longer allows the use of its logos and trademarks by off-portal content providers and aggregators. This means that all official branding logos and AT&T registered trademarks MUST BE REMOVED IMMEDIATELY from all consumer facing materials, such as websites, brochures, advertising, etc.

In promoting products and services, content providers should make it clear that they are the sole provider of services. Promotional material should not imply that AT&T provides the service, but only that your service can be purchased by AT&T subscribers.

Any reference to AT&T needs to be made using plain text.

AT&T's auditing partner, Accenture, will start auditing 3rd party websites and advertising for infringement of the above rules within 2 weeks.

Please make sure to remove all infringing AT&T references from your promotional materials asap to avoid possible cancellation of your short codes.

Happy Birthday SMS and SMSC

Today, the mobile phone industry celebrates the 15th birthday of the Short Message Service Centre (SMSC). The SMSC, first brought to market by Acision in 1992, is the principal application behind text messaging. Before 1992, the first ever SMSC was introduced as a product designed primarily for operator use to send trouble alerts and improve reliability of a developing mobile industry.

The SMSC has evolved considerable over the last 15 years, in robustness and scalability. According to Steven van Zanen, VP Marketing for Intuitive Messaging at Acision, "the phenomenal evolution of the SMSC over the past 15 years has been a direct factor to the overall success of SMS.

Despite the rapid evolution of the mobile market, SMS is still the most important value-added service for operators. For operators looking to provide subscribers with robust messaging services, the SMSC platforms available today provide mix and match solutions, which means operators can specify numerous SMS capacities to meet their unique requirements. It is this scalability that makes the SMSC cost effective and adaptable to both growing and mature markets. Even in the most developed markets, such as Western Europe where SMS service penetration has reached 90%, SMSCs are vital to operators seeking to differentiate themselves through high-quality enhanced messaging services.

Verizon limits Premium SMS tariff to $9.99

Verizon Wireless announces an important change to their handling of new premium SMS campaigns. Effective immediately, the maximum price point available for new premium short code based campaigns will be $9.99.

This change only applies to new campaigns that are submitted to Verizon for approval. Campaigns that are currently running on price points higher than $9.99 can continue to do so.

New MMA documents

The MMA has released a new version of its Consumer Best Practices Guidelines, which can be downloaded here. The key changes are:

• Use of 'Free' has been relaxed. It used to be the case that the word FREE could not be associated in any way with a premium billed campaign (e.g. 'sign up now and receive the first 5 alerts FREE'). This is now possible, with certain restrictions.


• Marketing to children (anyone under the age of 13). The MMA requires content providers to adhere to COPPA, and also imposes additional restrictions in how mobile campaigns are being promoted.


• Restrictions on use of single opt-in for Participation TV programs has been made more specific. Restrictions include maximum price ($1.49), transaction-only billing, and use of both verbal and visual pricing instructions during the call-to-action.


• The Best Practices document now also includes guidelines for WAP services and IVR based opt-in mechanisms.


• Further restrictions on running chat programs.

The MMA has also released two interesting documents providing some background information about running off-deck services and creating successful mobile marketing campaigns.

• 'Off Portal - An introduction to the Market Opportunity' introduces the reader to the world of direct-to-consumer mobile services, the market opportunity, and the best practices on how to create an off-portal service.


• 'Understanding Mobile Marketing - Technology and Reach' describes the opportunity of using short codes and mobile technology to create interactive marketing campaigns.

While these documents are certainly useful, it is good to keep in mind that these are 'sales documents', mainly written to promote the use of mobile services, hence not necessarily very objective, and most definitely overly optimistic in describing the overall market potential. One example: the mobile marketing case studies tend to be very long on descriptions, but very short on actual results. Hmmm.... now, why would that be ?

Change in Verizon Binary Message Flow

(Updated: July 18, 2007)

Verizon is implementing a new billing mechanism to improve success billing ratios (SBR) for Surepay customers. Surepay is Verizon's prepaid brand.

The change involves 2 elements:

1. Change in message flow. Premium billing of the subscriber should no longer happen on the WAP Push message, but through a separate 'thank you' SMS message, as is the case with the other carriers. The 'thank you' message should only be sent after the WAP Push message was successfully delivered. the customer has received a handset delivery receipt, indicating that the content was successfully delivered to the subscriber.

2. Change in billing API.

ReminderConnection customers need not worry about the change in the billing API. This change will be handled by ReminderConnection without any customer impact. However, ReminderConnection customers will need to make the proper message flow changes. The deadline for implementing these changes is August 10, 2007. Certification requests entered after July 16, 2007 will also need to adhere to the new message flow. Please contact your account representative in case of questions.

Sprint Payment Re-Capture

Carriers have the right to deduct any non-collectible premium SMS revenue from the outpayment made to content providers. If the outpayment was already made, they have the right to reduce future outpayments to account for past uncollectible amounts. We haven't seen this happen ... until now.

Sprint has informed us of their plans to 're-capture' payments made to content providers for uncollectible revenue as well as refunds, and do so retro-actively starting January 2007. Details on the possible negative impact for content providers are not known at this time, and as soon as we receive further information, we will immediately inform the impacted content providers.