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hpE BDay Texting: Bginin of www of fings

According to SlashGear, there were half a trillion of them sent last year, but in 2010, there were 6.1 trillion – 193,000 per second. They are the reason many people have thumb injuries, and now there are warm-up exercises to help prevent those injuries. They’re banned while driving, but they’ve spawned an entirely new communicative vocabulary. But now -- just another year older -- some say they are on their way to extinction. Not so fast, say other experts. The Internet of Things may give SMS another chapter.

2012-12-11

By Michael Goul, Chairman, Department of Information Systems According to SlashGear, there were half a trillion of them sent last year, but in 2010, there were 6.1 trillion — 193,000 per second. They are the reason many people have thumb injuries, and now there are warm-up exercises to help prevent those injuries. They’re banned while driving, but they’ve spawned an entirely new communicative vocabulary. But now — just another year older — some say they are on their way to extinction. Text messaging (Short Messaging Service) turned 20 years old on December 3, and many are writing that SMS is about to be retired or pink-slipped and will go the way of the dinosaur. But some say not so fast. Wikipedia has a good summary of the value of texting to business: “Businesses can use SMS for time-critical alerts, updates and reminders, mobile campaigns, content and entertainment applications.” Unless you are part of the generation that grew up with SMS, it takes a translator to understand all the acronyms used in the 160 words or less messages – and the texting generation is not likely to give up the communication style anytime soon. In case you were stumped, our headline, translated, means Happy Birthday Texting: Beginning of the Internet of Things) Those who claim SMS will remain viable cite among its advantages that it is ubiquitous — available through almost any cell phone. And according to ZDNet, because it is billable it enables marketers, political party causes, etc. to capture identity through a cell number. Even though the number of messages sent might be declining, people are actually texting more using social networking sites, instant messaging and proprietary messaging services such as iMessage. It is clear to most that the main contribution of SMS to date has been to prove that mobile marketing works. But there could be new life on the horizon. While SMS might not be the final choice for the “Internet of Things,” it is a logical starting point. MQTT (MQ Telemetry Transport) is a current favorite protocol for the long term. In late November, the New York Times reported that GE is hiring 400 software developers and investing $1 billion on a new “Industrial Internet that will bring digital intelligence to the physical world of industry as never before.” Sensors are being built-into everything industrial these days, and things will need to connect and communicate with other things and people. Simple messaging in some form will have a new life. Alcatel-Lucent predicts there will be 15 billion devices connected to this new Internet by 2015. How will it all play out? Well, while text messaging’s value to business has been at customer touch points; the Internet of Things bodes well for other areas of the value chain. This is consistent with Clayton Christiansen’s law of conservation of attractive profits: “When attractive profits disappear at one stage in the value chain because a product becomes commoditized, the opportunity to earn attractive profits with proprietary products usually emerges at an adjacent stage.”

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