SMS Industry Perspective with mBlox

Today I attended a webinar hosted by our North American SMS partner mBlox.  They had some interesting stats from last year and some bold predictions for the coming year.  They reported that SMS traffic between SMS aggregators and their clients grew by a factor of four in the USA last year.  The reasons they gave for this growth were increased adoption of SMS by American users, mobile marketers, and social networks.  Some interesting stats they gave for 2008:

1. *4x growth between SMS aggregators and their clients over 2007
2. *70 million unique SMS users per month in the USA
3. *Carriers conducted 20000 audits of SMS services (us 20 times)
4. *Most new SMS business models are ad based
5. *Typically only 60 characters of SMS messages were used before ad based business models
6. *More Marketers and Social Networks adopted SMS in 2008

I think we all know that 2009 is going to be a tumultuous year, but that didn’t stop mBlox from making some bold predictions about where the SMS industry is going.  On the lighter side, they predict that Obama wil be bossing Hilary around via SMS.  Sadly, they also predict that the carriers are going to start charging users for standard rate messaging.  Some of their predictions for 2009:

1. *Acceleration of the SMS ad market
2. *Location Based Services coming from developers, not carriers
3. *More audits by carriers of SMS service like ours (I hope not, we get them every two weeks!)
4. *More launches of free to end user services across all the carriers simultaneously
5. *Carrier enabled micropayments in the USA (buy stuff with SMS)
6. *Doubling of enterprise SMS traffic (banks, government, education)
7. *SMS service growth to outpace the stock market!
8. *Carriers will charge for standard rate messages (booo!)

In any case, it will most surely be an interesting year for SMS and for all.

Happy Holidays,

Chris Richardson
tagga.com developer

Text to save a life, surgery via sms

Text SURGERY to 82442 for daily surgery instructions via SMS.  First up tomorrow, appendix removal!  Next, get that circumcision you’ve always wanted!

Obviously I am just kidding, but it has really happened, a doctor actually performed a successful surgery from sms instructions.  Engadget posted about it today, a British surgeon volunteering in the Democratic Republic of Congo performed a surgery he had never performed before from SMS instructions sent by a colleague in the UK.  This is truly an amazing story and proof of the power of SMS, who knew it could save lives?

Chris Richardson
tagga.com developer

OC using tagga for SMS fire alerts

Save you hermits out there, most of us have heard of the wildfires raging through Orange County this past week.  Not Snoop Dog’s house! In all seriousness, these fires have been horrible, burning down homes and ruining lives.  The wildfires move very fast, giving people little time to evacuate, which is why the Orange County Register took action.  They set up an SMS alert using tagga, where their readers could text FIRE to 82442 to receive the latest fire updates.  This is by far the coolest and most practical application of tagga we’ve seen yet.  It also made this natural disaster more real to us and our hearts go out to those affected by the wildfires in Orange County.

Also, we’ve received reports from some OC residents who have had trouble unsubscribing from our alerts.  Please text STOP or FIRE UNSUB to 82442 to unsubscribe.  This unsubscribe problem arose because users were replying to the messages they received, which would not normally be a problem.  However, turns out that our SMS service provider had a bug whereby they were mistakenly sending out our messages on shortcode 83960, not 82442, meaning we were never receiving the unsubscribe messages.  We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience.  If anyone else is having problems unsubscribing,  please email us (support[at]tagga.com) for help.

Chris Richardson
tagga.com developer

Tagga sponsors Blogworld Las Vegas Bash

Tagga will be sponsoring a Las Vegas bash in conjunction with Blog World Expo.  Details of the bash are here. This PR effort is to support a secret contest being held at Blog World Expo (Sat and Sun) as well as a launch of new features soon to be posted on tagga.com. Stay tuned for exciting news…

Create SMS Campaigns - Standard Carrier Rates Apply

Last week we advertised on our front page that users could “Create FREE SMS Campaigns” using tagga.  It turns out we were mistaken and we would like to thank AT&T for pointing this out.  Even though tagga is completely free to the creator of an SMS campaign, we wouldn’t want users to think “they will receive something of value without a requirement of compensation”.  That being said, if you were to create an SMS Campaign using tagga, you wouldn’t have to pay for it.  We just can’t say that doing so would be “free”, “no charge”, “complimentary”, “without charge”, or “zero cost”.

We really should warn you that even though tagga does not charge for sending or receiving tagga SMS (some would call that free), all text messages are subject to standard carrier rates (definitely not free).  This means that one text message to/from tagga counts as one text message through your carrier and will be billed as per your contract with your wireless service provider.  It also means that your carrier doesn’t want to take flack for billing you whatever potentially extortionate per message rate they are currently getting away with.  Me personally, I am charged $0.15 per SMS I send over and above my one hundred free text messages, on a plan that already costs me $60 a month.  Weird, I pay $40 a month to Shaw for broadband internet and they don’t charge me per instant message sent with Adium.  Maybe Rogers should talk to them?

Chris Richardson
tagga.com developer

Tagga on Techvibes

A couple of months ago Amielle presented tagga at the Techvibes.com career fair that went before Launch Party.  She gave the crowd her elevator pitch and got quite a good reaction.  Vancouver’s very own Techvibes wrote a little blurb about tagga and I think they nailed the essence of what we’re about.

Chris Richardson
tagga developer

Tagga on SMS Text News

Amielle recently showed SMS Text News what’s under the tagga hood and it sounds like they were impressed.  They’ll at least have their on eye on us; they’ve even indicated that we could be one of the very few successes there have been in the Canadian mobile industry.  We are hoping to pass RIM by the end of 2008:)

Chris Richardson
tagga developer