THERE ARE TWO TYPES OF PEOPLE IN THE WORLD.THOSE WHO MAKE HISTORY AND DOES WHO WRITE ABOUT IT.

We have a similar service for businesses at http://www.mobilemarketing.net. SMS based mobile marketing is on the RISE here in the U.S. SMS is fast, simple, and makes any advertising medium interactive.

The real world application is the interaction with the company or brand, and the follow-up marketing.

Content delivery via PSMS is already a big market and anyone coming into it now needs to offer something unque. I had a look at Mozes (and even txtms) and can’t for the life of me think of a single real world application.

PSMS is going to explode this year, but it will be for services rather than content.

2) The concept is definately valid and I do not think their current model is 100% their future vision. We (Skycore) are also launching a similar product using PMMS. Hopefully if we get profiled on techcrunch when we launch you will be able to critique our service also. It is interesting to hear guys like Juha talk about these concepts launching in europe 5 years ago. Juha please contact me – bizdev at skycore.com I have a few questions for you.

I am actually looking for beta testers in Europe(FR,DE,UK,NL,SZ,BG,NO,SV) so if you read this send me and email (include your operator) at bizdev at skycore.com for beta login.

For example, I’ve reserved the keyword “hotchicks”. Try it!

The amount of SMS traffic is huge. The Philippines averaging 15 text messages and Singapore averaging 12 text messages sent daily. The heavy users – generation C – are another enormously large market. 10% of the under 20 year olds in the UK average 100 text messages per day. In South Korea that number is 30%.

Almost every user of SMS text messaging has access to internet based e-mail. Yet survey after survey proves that young people prefer SMS over email.

Mobile subscribers using SMS are billed over 70 Billion dollars annually which is larger than Hollywood box office, global music sales, and video gaming software revenues- combined.

Examples of rich content are wallpaper, mobile blog feeds, stock alerts, weather updates, news flashes, pod casts, mobile voting and ring tones. The best known ring tone is probably Crazy Frog11 which generated in excess of $200 million for its parent company Jamba22 .

The best North American example of rich content and Premium SMS is the American Idol voting phenomena. Over the last 5 years the Idol series world-wide generated 1.9 billion Premium SMS votes with the finale of the last American series generating 41 million votes in the US alone. Total Premium SMS revenues were approximately $720 million which were split between Fremantle Media (Idol producer), the TV broadcaster and the mobile carrier.

Bottom line is that there is a huge market potential in the US with over 220 M mobile phone subs.

I wanted to make all of you aware of a similar, but better service that is quickly getting a lot of notice, http://www.TXTMS.com. This company offers multiple user IDs with a single email address, only one person needs to have an account for an exchange to occur, and best of all it is compatible worldwide.

CHECK OUT http://www.TXTMS.COM

As such, Moses will be trying desparately to grow a user base and build a high volume service in hopes of monetizing it. The path to monetization is not an easy one though, even with traffic. As many people have mentioned, SMS gateways charge for clients to put SMS traffic onto the carrier network, on the order of 2-10 cents per message. Which translates into a loss for each message sent. The goal is to achieve a volume threshold that gets the carriers attention, enough attention that they are willing to pay per message sent instead of the reverse. However this volume threshold is historically very high, close to 1MM monthly SMS message per carrier! Which means Moses will have to serve 1MM messages per month on Sprint, 1MM messages per month on Verizon, etc before they ever get paid on a per message basis. Not easy.

In order for services providers likes Moses to be successful, there needs to be an aggregator out there that pays out on a per message basis for low volume clients. Wait, that sounds like a business model worth investing in………

my biggest gripe with this co. is it’s name – what’s up with the co. name of mozes?

moses, mozes, god, religion, bibles, jews etc etc – they all flow in the same direction, you see

why name a co., a cell texting co. at that, with a religion connection? someone who knows why, plz enlighten me

http://celltzer.com

Brand recognition for the short codes was something that was thought to be valuable as well in Europe back in 2000. As the SMS services that work came to be such that you always have the number and instructions in front of you (on TV, on paper on on the web) that lost all importance. It is easier to remember a short code like 11111 than 73594 but it really doesn’t matter in the end as very few people will ever use premium SMS services without a proper context like participating in a voting in a TV show. There is thus ample opportunity to show the short code and directions related to the service to guarantee maximum participation by the audience.

SMS is really effective for the type of mobile connection services we offer to fans, bands and publishers. There are also other technologies that we will be introducing in the coming months that make these mobile connections more dynamic and rich.

If anyone has any additional comments feel free to send me an email – we’re always looking to improve things.

irv at mozes.com

In general carriers around the world have always allowed keywords a) because it allows services to be launched quickly, without all the network programming and b) because it shifts the burden of service configuration and establishment to the aggregators/service providers, which is a good model.

So overall, if we are now seeing US carriers support them (and I doubt this, I am thinking Mozes submitted a detailed application form and will get whacked when an “unsuitable” content partner wants a keyword) this is a good thing.

However, these are just keywords run off a short code – anyone can set this up in an hour, assuming they have a short code ready to go. The value would be in the consumer brand recognition of the 66937 number – which frankly doesn’t strike me as likely, especially not in the US with $5 million to spend.

I remember at least a dozen companies started in 2000 in Finland alone that were offering a platform to create and deliver SMS services for content creators (like Mozes). These companies of course were offering SMS connectivity to countries across the world, as connectivity with domestic operators was trivial. You just filled in a one paged form and applied for a short code and you were up and running within a couple of days. I’m definitely amazed if the keywords will be auctioned or anything like that as that hasn’t happened anywhere else in the world either and the US is the last developed country to embrace SMS services.

I really don’t get why US VCs are now investing to SMS startups, as there are plenty of competition from companies that have been around since 2000 and have created sales of hundreds of millions of dollars per year on premium SMS services. SMS is a pretty “been there done that” space, at least on a global level. It’s hard to see why a US based startup with little experience in SMS services would do well against a competitor with 100 MUSD in sales and years of experience in creating SMS services that sell.

If I’m totally wrong here and there is a huge business opportunity in SMS in the US at the moment and all kinds of crazy SMS companies are getting funded, I’m happy to move over there and start an SMS business again. Don’t hesitate to be in touch.

I certainly see the value in SMS, but I think it lies much more in apps like Dodgeball that help you find things that are changing constantly, i.e. the location of friends. Using it to simply get information and updates when you request them doesn’t seem to have wide appeal to me.