Thursday, April 2. 2009

Location-based SMS

"The death of SMS has been forecasted but it continues to prove the pundits wrong," says Mark Titus of TeleCommunications Systems (TSYS). And his company should know as it is the leading provider of short messaging service (SMS) for mobile carriers. This week at CTIA, TSYS issued several press releases around new products and platforms. In speaking with Titus before the announcement, he mentioned that there are now opportunities for location-based messaging with smsExpressTM Mobile Value-added-service Platform (MVP) product. The product, as envisioned, was to deliver enhanced services to both employees and consumers at the enterprise level. "We want to take this gateway and platform for mobility and allowing content that is plain or enhanced text messages for consumers and then add value with location." One of the emerging technologies that blend location is cell broadcast as it is the delivery technology of choice mandated by FCC for e911.

Part the commercial mobile alerts that would be offered comes as a result of a small component of the WARN Act, legislation signed in 2006 that mandated location-based alerts in the event of a national emergency (see our report). The use of cell broadcast accommodates SMS to a specific location.  That‘s the public safety aspect but on the consumer side, it hits the mobile advertising market.

What TSYS would do is to take advantage of the SMS payload and part of that message may be a URL so it would be a triggering service and the SMS would have a URL embedded in the message and then a mobile web browser service would be instantiated. What TSYS is seeing is that carriers are warming up to “location” in general and privacy issues were a concern.

TSYS also benefits from having a diverse set of business units. A report issued by a investments company that follows TCS notes that the company is engaged in many revenue-generating solutions such as a service bureau that processes e911 calls, a government services group that supports special ops in the Middle East, as well as SMS. And a study by Nielsen suggests more people are keeping their SMS plans but reducing voice plans.

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