The amazing success of SMS

SMS... What a strange word in our current language! SMS is the acronym of Short Message Service. It allows you to deliver short messages over the mobile networks. The aim is simple : transmit messages to and from mobiles.
SMS is mainly used for personnal messages. Typically people will use SMS for that kind of messages : "Hi Bob! See you at 9h00 AM for the e-culture english class!"
The service is developping and there are interesting and useful applications such as the following :
- Send e-mail messages from a mobile phone to any e-mail address via SMS.
- If you want to have information about the weather or the latest news, you can receive it while sending this sort of message "WEATHER" at a surcharge phone number such as 83120.
- Find your love with mobile chatting!
- Internet email alerts
- Downloading ring tones
- Play for money with a TV show. You have to send a message and wait to be selected by the TV show.

Look at this short video, it shows how to get games on your mobile while sendind an sms.



Before advertising on the mobile phone was limited to the phone companies. But these last few years we've seen that many advertising campagnes have been developped by other companies too. For example : during the rugby world cup 2007 in France, M6 (a french television) proposed a game to all of Bouygues Telecom's users which phone number ended with "66".
You could win either a car or 100 000 euros. Playing was easy : first you got a SMS from M6 telling you of your chance to win. You only had to send a SMS with the word "play". Then, you got another SMS saying "oh sorry! you lost the car, but try to win the 100 000 euros! It's simple : send an SMS with these words "..." to this phone number "..."! "
It was a good operation for M6, showing their partnership for the rugby world cup, but it was certainly not a good operation for the user! And for sure! I lost 5 euros with this game!

I think that SMS advertising can be great if you have an event to promote. For example, you want to promote a gig in Paris.You organise this gig with SFR. You could send SMS to all the SFRs users living in Paris to invite them to come to this gig!

I think SMS will develop and offer more than a simple text message. I think we will able to send messages with sound, images, little videos or animations. We can already see these applications with the Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS) that allows a combination of text, sounds, images and video.

What will appear on our mobile phone in the future? I don't know but I am sure it will be surprising!