BBC Reports - The Death Of SMS - well not quite ;-)

Interesting story in the BBC (Other news services are available) today that Chat app messaging has finally taken over SMS in terms of volume of messages sent. There are a myriad of group messaging apps which seem to have finally broken the SMS camel's back? Hmmm unlikely!

I am glad the BBC story also covers the following discussion: 

"most of the chat apps were used by consumers who own smartphones. However, ... there are a large number of consumers, especially in emerging and lesser developed economies, who use normal mobile phones and rely on SMS as the preferred messaging tool."

SMS as an effective means of communication, across EVERY SINGLE mobile phone often escapes the press coverage of its demise. What also is often missed is discussion about how SMS could (and should) evolve through use within the machine to machine (M2M) world.

There are worlds of growth available to SMS that would be greatly aided by one thing. Mobile carriers that whine and moan about the death of SMS and it's dwindling revenue need to ask themselves one thing - what are they doing to support it's growth. Largely from an outsiders perspective very little. As an entrepreneur trying to engage with Customers through SMS it is a difficult process should you want to do this through a mobile carrier. Sure it's pretty easy through an OTT player like say Twilio, or Nexmo, but what are the carriers doing to support innovation?

Other than allow their Customers to send SMS between mobile networks the mobile carriers have done almost nothing to innovate with SMS since the very first SMS was sent on the 3rd of December in 1992. To be honest carriers have been lucky to be able to milk the SMS cash cow for this long, without continually providing innovation with respect to SMS. Now that revenues have peaked and are starting to reduce, if carriers want to rely on SMS as a growth revenue stream they need to act.

SMS is largely a closed market though. The only way to access SMS was to own a handset and manually type the text into your phone and send it. OK there has always been access to aggregators to provide access for developers to SMS. This access is continually becoming cheaper and easier allowing any developer to engage with it. However developer access to SMS is driven not be carriers, but rather by aggregators and OTT players.

If carriers wish to embrace innovation on what is rapidly becoming a stale product then they need to open up to the possibility of innovation by others. Innovation is most likely to not come from an internal source but rather from an external party. The only way to play in the game and potentially share in the spoils is to open up developer access to core assets, in a sensible way. Why for instance, as a developer, can I not buy a SIM (or virtual SIM) with the same tariff that a regular mobile phone customer has access to - so access to a bundle of SMS that I can use within my application. This is just one very simple option (one of many!) that a carrier could entertain. As it stands at the moment any engagement surrounding SMS or Voice (two core assets of the mobile carrier) through a carrier is simply too hard to do. This is why developers are queuing up at OTT players to get access.

Cheers

m

BlueVia Voice API launched

We finally launched the BlueVia Voice API alpha on April 10th 2013. I have been campaigning that SMS is not dead for several years now, and although the Voice API doesn't provide access to SMS just yet, the plan was at some stage to add support for SMS as well. SMS isn't dead, carriers just need to understand that they are not currently using their Voice and SMS assets in an innovative fashion. Carriers need to provide open access to their Voice and SMS assets to developers, such that anyone can play and be innovative. Innovation isn't the remit of a team within an organisation. Anyone should have the tools to demonstrate and build innovation. Herein lies the beauty of BlueVia - it now provides trivial access to voice functionality for developers - and I hope also SMS soon.

To access the BlueVia Voice Alpha go to the BlueVia Portal and request access to the alpha. The following diagram shows the landing page for the BlueVia Voice API alpha from which you can request an invitation. This, links off to a Google+ community, which you can join and request access to the service. This is a little clunky to be sure, but we wanted a simple community solution in order to gather feedback from early adopters of the service. Feel free to join - we will give you $50 USD of credit to play with the service. Then feel free to leave feedback. Be brutal if you want to - all feedback is incredibly valuable to us.



Once you have been given access to the service you can then manage the numbers that we will give you. For the alpha period we will give you numbers in the USA, the UK and Germany to play with. 2 numbers in each country. These are completely free during the alpha period, however there is a limitation in that you cannot purchase further numbers during the alpha period. The following diagram shows a summary of the numbers associated with your developer account, once they have been assigned to you.



Simply click on a number to configure it to point to your application. The URL you associate with your number provides the commands that BlueVia will execute when your number is called. For an overview of what you can do, please have a look at the BlueVia Voice API alpha documentation. To see how trivial it is to use the APIs maybe look directly at the BlueVia Voice API quick start guides.

Let me know what you think. Don't hold back ;-)


On a personal note, I have been working in carriers now for 6 years. In that time I have been campaigning, unsuccessfully it seems(!), to provide access to developers to carrier assets. In DT I was desperate to provide developer access to shortcodes and extensions to provide access to enablers such as group messaging through SMS. Never got anywhere with it, while all the while OTT players were exploding the group messaging market. Now rumours are that Google tried to acquire WhatsApp for a billion.

Then came the emergence of the OTT voice and SMS players - the media darling Twilio, and the rest - Nexmo, Voxeo, Hoiio, Plivo, etc... (please forgive me if I have left you off - there are just so many of you now!). These companies provide trivial access to voice and SMS for developers and have become successful as carriers DO NOT provide trivial access to SMS and Voice.

This is why BlueVia, and the chance to provide Voice and SMS access so appealed to me. It provided a chance for a carrier to actually do something innovative and allow developers to use us for their innovation - in a way that no carrier has ever been able to do before. Sure AT&T and DT have launched voice services through their developer portals, but they have only done so in partnership with the OTT voice players mentioned previously. BlueVia on the other hand, is the first carrier to expose voice services, warts and all, through using their own assets. The first carrier to do so. We might be now playing catch up with the OTT players who have jumped the gun and not only demonstrated the value of doing this, but have also demonstrated how to do this, but at least we are in the game with our own technology.

There is a load of work to do to take the BlueVia Voice API alpha to be a truly commercial success, but if you cannot see where and how that success will be possible, then I suggest opening your eyes. We are a carrier. We have two assets that we control, Voice and SMS that are providing access to a decreasing revenue stream. We are not innovative enough to define an ever increasing revenue stream from these assets. That might sound a little harsh, but dig deep - you know it's true. The only way we can fuel growth, through innovation, is to let other people play and experiment with our assets. This was the beauty of BlueVia - Come Play With Our Network

A Four Month Winter Is Not Acceptable!

March 2013 was the second coldest March on record. It was bone chillingly cold for the entire month, and in fact, although the first month of Spring March was actually colder than December, January and February. Arctic easterly winds, from Siberia, were the norm for the entire month. Taking wind chill into account I don't believe there was a single day where the temperatures made it over 0 degrees Celsius. The average daytime temperature for March is around 8 degrees Celsius.

Consequently, most of the plant life in the garden is still in hibernation. The above photo shows a cherry blossom tree on the 31st of March with no blossom at all. Looking at at the same tree from the 29th of March 2011:



Just a little different! What the picture above doesn't show is the insane buzz of bees that are in the cherry blossom  There must have been hundreds of them. This year, so far I have seen one single solitary bee, which I saw on the past weekend. We finally had temperatures of almost 10 degrees, this past weekend (6th and 7th of April) and I was lucky enough to see the first bumble bee in our garden. I am just happy that somehow there are some bees left after the insane extended winter we have had.

Looking at the long term forecast it seems as though we are now through the winter and that hopefully the garden should now explode into growth. Here's hoping anyway as there has been a lot of damage caused by the builders over the past year! Think the garden might take a year to recover yet!

Saturday the 6th of April 2013 was a joyous day for me, as it was the first day I went outside in 2013 and didn't feel as though I would shiver to death! It felt so warm - I think we hit the majestic level of 9 degrees Celsius! Relatively speaking that felt remarkably warm! I am a creature of warmth and the London Winters, especially when they last 5 weeks longer than they should, drive me crazy.

Cheers

M