SMS? Not quite dead and buried

Jeremy Wagstaff   |  Mon, 02/25/2008 12:02 PM  |  Sci-Tech

I remember an instructive conversation I had recently with a guy who developed services for the mobile phone. I, with my usual flair for grandstanding, was suggesting some fancy mobile service or other that I had dreamed up over some Drambuie.

The only thing, I said, is that the user would have to install some little program on his phone. "Wouldn't happen," my cellular friend said. "No downloads, no registration, no links. Customer wouldn't do it."

He's probably right. And maybe that's why SMS, which has been with us for nearly a decade and was always supposed to be a stopgap measure, is so popular, so powerful and why, still, it's the method of choice for services for people like my friend. (His service sends the recipient SMS updates of where his car/driver/spouse/children/boat/truck is, based on a little GPS box stuffed in their glove box/trunk/bag/purse. It's called Tramigo.)

After all, two billion people send SMS messages. That's twice the number of people who use the Internet.

Singaporeans sent 10 messages per day last year; the average Filipino sent 12. (Americans sent one.) And the cellular operators are making a pretty penny from it: about US$80 billion last year. (That, according to Tomi T. Ahonen, a Finnish analyst who covers this sort of thing, is a bit less than the earnings of Hollywood, the music industry and video gaming combined.)

So no wonder SMS is still inspiring lots of ideas. Here are a few, some of them collected from the excellent textually.org website.

A device that allows you to start your car engine by SMS. The Webasto Thermo Top E Parking Heater allows users to send a text message to a car where it is installed, which then kicks it into action, ensuring your car is warm to the touch when you get in. If you can't actually find your now toasty car, check out a service running at the Mall of America in Minneapolis, where users can find their car by SMS. (It doesn't explain how, exactly, this works, but it makes a lot of sense. Apparently about 50 shoppers each day forget where they parked at the mall. It's a big mall, apparently.)

Tackling a more urgent problem, you'll be pleased to know about something I'll have to call SMS Toileting, where text messages help you relieve yourself.

In London, Shanghai and, via MizPee, anywhere in the U.S., those caught short can SMS for the address of the nearest loo. To guarantee your experience won't be diminished by vandals, some toilets in Finland are locked. But, this being Finland, you can open the door by sending an SMS to a special Toilet Door Opening Service.

Finland, Timo is quick to point out, has had all this kind of stuff for years. More than half of Finnish households have abandoned a fixed landline altogether. SMS usage is rampant, helped by costs that are among the lowest in the Western world. (This, sadly, is not saying much: An informal study by a web designer called Sam Garfield concluded that a megabyte of data, if transferred by SMS, would cost about $1,500 at U.S. rates.)

Libraries in Finland, Timo says on his blog, will send book alerts by SMS, dentists will reschedule appointments by SMS.

Cell phone parking, he says, has been around in Finland since 2001. Same with mobile check-in. More than half of Helsinki's tickets to the subway are paid by cell phone. More than half the revenues of commercial TV in Finland come not from advertising or subscriptions anymore but from SMS interactivity like voting. And so on.

OK, so Finland is some ways ahead. But there's still room for innovation elsewhere.

The Philippines has been a pioneer in cheap SMS, says Textra Extra blogger Rolandeither, allowing users to send free SMS messages from their computer, or by subsidizing a pre-paid reply.

This is part of what I'd call the growth of Conditional Messaging: You'll only get your SMS depending on certain factors.

For example, an SMS service that delivers text messages based on the recipient's location. JotYou lets you specify a location so your friends get your message only when they arrive at school or the mall. Yeah, I can't quite figure out the use for this yet either, but I'm sure there are some.

Or a service, yet to be launched, that will ensure the sender knows when his message has been read. Can't say more about this for now, but the idea is to ensure that recipient is forced to acknowledge receipt before they read the message. Neat if you're dealing with recalcitrant tenants or ex-spouses.

Which brings me onto another useful service just launched in the UK. The SMS part of it is relatively simple, but it's a great illustration of what is possible if you marry it to another device, in this case a motion detector.

When the bicycle owner locks up their bicycle they send a text to a security office to trigger the system to guard it. If someone then moves, or tries to move the bicycle, a sensor in the lock emits a silent alarm which triggers a CCTV camera to zoom in and take a picture. Result: bike theft down in Portsmouth by 90 percent.

Bottom line? SMS still has a lot of leg left to it. Why? Because it's simple. Because every phone can do it. Because it's cheap. Because it's tied to the most versatile device we've yet come up with: the mobile phone. Expect to see a lot more of this kind of thing before we're finally done with the old text message.

Jeremy Wagstaff writes for The Wall Street Journal Asia and the BBC World Service. His guide to technology, Loose Wire, is available in bookshops or on Amazon. He can be found online at jeremywagstaff.com or via email at jeremy@loose-wire.com.

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