Instant SMS

Last week I discovered a new technology being introduced by Comverse. They are calling it Instant SMS and they introduced it at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in February. The basic idea is to implement the instant messaging experience using the existing SMS technology. You can see the press release at

http://www.comverse.com/press_releases.aspx?newsId=742.

Instant SMS provides capabilities such as presence, multi-media, and other features we are used to using in instant messaging on the PC, on the mobile device without requiring the provider to move to advanced network architectures such as IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem). From what I understand the presence functionality is quite limited, but I think this is a service that will catch on very quickly.

Apple's iPhone has a nice interface for SMS/MMS messages that groups them into a dialog-type view. This makes it much easier to see and manage the message based interactions you have had with specific people, much as you can with email on your desktop. However, Comverse is taking this one step further and making it more robust combining multi-media, presence, emotion icons, and other such functionality.

For those of you not familiar with them, Comverse provides systems to Telecommunication Providers. They have two separate product lines - billing and value added services such as voice mail and messaging.