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Text-messaging and the mobile Web will become core components of advertising within five years, according to one expert from a Reading, England-based messaging company that provides communication solutions for more than 300 network operators and service providers worldwide.

 

TMCnet reported here on the use of text messaging as mainstream communications among mobile phone users – about 42 percent of consumers use their mobile phones to text as much or more than they do to make calls, one survey finds. Some have called for global text messaging revenues to double to $165 billion by 2011.

 

Now, as Oswin Eleonora, senior vice president at Acision, LLC, told TMCnet in an interview (below), text messaging is poised to evolve as a technology in its own right and become a fundamental piece of all advertising.

 

If there’s one group that’s been looking at the potential of text messaging, it’s Acision (News - Alert). The company serves more than 1.5 billion consumers in 135 nations, while delivering more than half of the world’s text and multimedia messages and serving three-quarters of all video-mail users.

 

TMCnet recently got an opportunity to put some questions to Eleonora. We talked about how this slower economy is affecting innovation in the field, what we should want to see in President-elect Barack Obama’s top technology appointees, and the future of telecommunications.

 

Our exchange follows.

 

 

Oswin Eleonora (pictured left): Mobile messaging use and growth have yet to see any negative impact. What we are seeing is that capacity expansion plans are being prioritized by service providers as a result of usage growth rates holding steady. This will likely affect the speed of introduction of certain unproven new technologies as budgets are tightened in anticipation of a challenging economic year ahead. Innovation will not be completely shut down, but in a climate where the consumer is expected to be more frugal than ever before, it is expected that all-you-can-eat plans for existing services will be pushed to their limit.

 

 

OE: Text messaging will continue its evolution into the realm of enabling technologies. What is meant by that is that text messaging itself will be seen more as a technology than as a service. We have already witnessed a proliferation of services that exploit text messaging as a bearer. This trend is expected to kick into a new phase of explosive growth as progressive developers focus their energies on the introduction of creative services rather than continuing to focus on coming up with new technology. We will see many more examples along the lines of Twitter and ChaCha.

 

 

OE: The most important quality the appointees should possess is a balanced perspective of the forces that shape the communications market. Contrary to popular belief, infrastructure is not getting cheaper or simpler. The technology is getting more powerful, more intelligent, more flexible and thus “easier” in some ways. But on the other hand, technology consumption is accelerating at such a torrid pace that network infrastructure remains a costly and complex endeavor. Careful thought is required when evaluating spectrum policies and competitive forces.

 

“Open” is great, as long as it is balanced with “standards” – otherwise we will once again create a technological tower of Babel that will take decades to unravel. Cup of iDen-TDMA-CDMA-GSM anyone? Similarly, “open” cannot be synonymous with “free,” otherwise in five years the next TARP we will need will be for the billions of dollars in required communications infrastructure that no one will want to invest in.

 

 

OE: We expect text and mobile Web to become core to the advertising market in five years. That means that they will be fundamental to all advertising, rather than the “additional” or “new” channel that they represent today. Behavioral analysis is essential to that evolution. While the proper balance of its application is yet to be determined, there is no question behavioral analysis will exist and will play a critical role.

 

 

OE: Video is coming, there’s no denying that. At the same time, we need to be cognizant of the requirements for effective use of video as a communication channel on top of its role as a consumption channel. As mentioned earlier, technology consumption is outpacing all expectations. Who would have thought even in 2000 that a 2Mbps ADSL line into your home would be considered embarrassingly slow? More important, who would have thought that it would actually also be insufficient for a wide range of applications, services and games that consumer want to use? Mr. Chambers is much smarter than I am and certainly exposed to much more information. But based on what I’ve seen from a network technology perspective so far, talking about video-based communication standards sometimes seems like talking about a super-advanced spaceship that uses a catapult to get into orbit.