Its funny how two businesses which may look like competitors to you and me in a growing industry might actually be complementary businesses in the long run. What Im talking about are the businesses of SMS and Data on the mobile front.
Lots of people believe that once data i.e. GPRS, 3G etc is ubiquitous then SMS would be dead. Now when this question was posed to Abhijit Saxena who is the CEO of Netcore at the IAMAI Digital Summit he had an interesting answer. He said “We are looking forward to the growth and usage of GPRS and the introduction of 3G this is because then we can add a link in a message which can make the experience of a consumer even better on the phone!”
He went on the give an example on how during a cricket match when Sehwag gets out prior to making a triple ton a link could be sent along with the match score update to actually view the video how he got out. This would make the sms itself more valuable as well.
Our Take
Well come to think of it Sms could play the role of what social bookmarks did for the internet. And now what twitter does. Think about it bookmarking sites like digg delicious and stumbleupon made internet sites more discoverable thereby making the usage of internet grow. Now if you get a similar service on sms which is useful its not difficult to imagine how both the volumes of smses and mobile internet traffic would increase.
Now I know some of you might think Im being highly optimistic and maybe I am but its not highly improbable that once 3G comes in and mobile internet grows which it will given the number of mobile subscribers sms could play a critical role in driving traffic to mobile internet and making users discover the use of GPRS. Especially when you consider optin sms services. Infact WATBlog itself has some 1000 odd people on mytoday sms alerts and we send a link to watblog.com at the end of every message and our traffic via mobile has increased. Also because so many of our audience have GPRS enabled handsets many purely read us via mobile and I confirmed this fact at the IAMAI Digital Summit.
Would love to know if anyone has any contradicting views as to whether this will happen or this will take too long?
good observation..
agree with you that the humble SMS can open up a world of opportunities once GPRS becomes ubiquitous.
thanks for the post
SMS would play a role only in transition to 3G services. Once transition is done and GPRS is ubitious enough(ie when mails can be pushed to my mobile), SMS will become redundant. In rural India, that may take a long time, but.
it will take time to 3G technology factors are service cost, affordability availability in all cities.
I haven’t seen still broadband is readily available in all cities of india. Too many hurldles