SMS4PC grow the business in Europe

Today officially launched the new service SMS4PC in the international market. The service makes it possible to send SMS from your PC to many recipients at once, making it easier for companies in various industries to communicate with their staff and their customers via their mobile phones.

Sales of SMS4PC is already underway and is growing by about 30% per month, and has customers all over Europe. The business concept is simple: By highlighting the benefits of communicating via text messages over e-mails and phone calls will increase sales. The service is used in email clients like Microsoft Outlook, which is part of the interface or in a standalone "app" from the computer.

The first SMS service in the Google Chrome App Store

During the first quarter of 2011, SMS4PC, which is now app-based (Ie. you download and install an application locally on your computer) to develop an intelligent cloud service. Integration with Google Chrome and Google App Markets are also planned, and the service is expected a bright future.

It is the Swedish mobile company Mobispine that develops and sells the service SMS4PC. CEO Joakim Hilj already has a number of successful projects behind him - including the co-founder of the largest consultant broker for IT professionals, eWork Scandinavia AB, and Mobispine AB together with serial entrepreneur Joacim Boivie.

"The type of service that SMS4PC represents is not unique to the market", says Joakim Hilj, CEO of Mobispine. "But our offering and market strategy is unique. Our target customers are industries where the safe and rapid transfer of information is paramount. SMS is still the single most widely used mobile application and we have taken advantage of that when we developed the service, " he continues.

Now also company bundles

Operators previously integrated Mobispine SMS platforms are Vodafone, Telenor, TeliaSonera and Tele2. With the launch today SMS4PC further developed from being merely a product of the major operators' package deals to become a full-scale stand-alone services that are sold directly to users via the website www.sms4pc.com.

Customers who already use SMS4PC are primarily companies in the IT, financial, staffing and transportation industries.

Mobispine software integrated to Connection Manager from Birdstep

Enhanced mobile messaging on mobile broadband dongles (Mobispine)

View more presentations from Mobispine.

The last two days I have been presenting the future versions of Desktop Messaging together with a mobile broadband connection manager from Birdstep, The prospects have been two leading OpCos in Northern Europe.

There is definiteley an interest in the space, interest in making more money, ARPU from the existing customer base by starting to offer them some simple to use mobile messaging services. This stuff woud be pre-loaded onto dongles and extremely simple to use for the users. This is the only way to reach mass market adoption of messaging from the desktop I think.

Cheers

Desktop messaging in the cloud

We now offer our world leading desktop messaging software as a service in the cloud directly to enterprises as well as through our distribution partners. Our brand is called SMS4PC and was just launched a few months ago. Growth and numbers look very promising and so much more for us to enhance the experience for all the customers.

We work on a new layout of the webpage (see below)

What do you think? Simple to understand the offering? Would you feel tempted to take the "free trial"? Would you buy from us?

Looks like next week is the launch date for this new "baby". We'll keep you posted!

Joakim @ the Mobispine team

Current usage pattern of Desktop Messaging

We just got some interesting data from some European mobile operators about the usage pattern they currently expore with our services. Their findings is quite interesting regards customers and user patterns

0,4% of the users account for 36% of the SMS traffic through the systems
4% of the users account for 71% of the SMS traffic through the system

43% of user accounts are from business/enterprise customers and remaining 57% are residential customers
BUT 84% of the SMS traffic comes from business/enterprise segment while residential market accounts only for 16%

Popular customer groups are within these sectors: transportation, public, IT-services and financials.

What does this tell us?
First of all Desktop Messaging as of today is first of all a business service.
Secondly, it tells us we need to focus even more on the top users (see above 4% accounts for 71% of traffic) and try to satisfy their needs even better in the future.

Cheers
/ Joakim Hilj

Closing down Fun Text operations

The Mobispine board of directors has today announced the decision of closing down the Fun Text service and the Image Semantics Limited subsidiary in UK.

After over a year of offering the Fun Text solution to our customers, the Mobispine team has decided to close down its Fun Text operations. The decision to do so has been tremendously difficult, but we’ve come to realize that now is the best time for this to happen.

First, we’ve struggled with making our Fun Text business financially viable.

Secondly, without the revenue to keep a great team full-time, we’ve not had the chance to lately develop the solution as we originally wanted. In addition, the nature of the market is changing rapidly moving from mobile web to apps for iPhone and Android phones and we believe you need to invest in these areas to stay as a leading player in the mobile content space.

Thirdly, we have seen that the sales cycle is still kind of long (quarters) and the mobile operator customers we have approached are expecting to get Fun Text on a revenue share basis, i.e. not much up-front money to us.
At the end of the day the cost was too high too keep the product alive and we did not see any profitable future in the foreseeable future.

It was a tough decision but now we look forward and we will stay even more focused in providing our leading messaging solutions to mobile operators. We have very exciting offerings in the areas of:
- Desktop messaging
- Enterprise messaging
- Enhanced mobile broadband messaging
- Management of SMS services

If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to ask them in the comments or contact us privately.

Joakim Hilj

CEO, Mobispine AB
Firstname.lastname AT mobispine.com

Mobispine summary from our Annual General Meeting

Hi all who have some interest in Mobispine!

We had quite some people coming to our Annual Shareholders Meeting some ten days ago and we therefore want to share with the rest of you what we talked about and how the company was presented on that meeting. Below you see the slides and as always feel free to comment below.

All the best from Mobispine
/ Joakim H, CEO

Mobispine strengthens board

Mobispine shareholders at the AGM unanimously elected a new board. Stefan Lennhammer becomes Chairman of the Board. Stefan Olsson and Lars Lindgren were elected as members along with the two founders, Joakim Hilj and Joakim Boivie, who were re-elected.

“It is an exciting challenge to lead Mobispine's continued development. The customer base includes many leading Operators and great services and products. I have great faith in Mobispine and I am confident that the company will continue to grow with both existing and new customers" says Stefan Lennhammer about his new role as Chairman of the Board.

Stefan Lennhammer has previous experience as Chairman of the American Stock Exchange company, Crown North Corp Inc and True Software Scandinavia AB. Stefan has also previously been Group Chief Executive of Catella Property Group and President of Stronghold Invest AB. In his role as Chairman and owner of almost 5% of Mobispine he will lead the long-term strategic direction of the company.

Stefan Olsson was elected as a board member. Previously he ran sales, purchasing and business development for GEAB, The Phone House and 20:20 Mobile in Nordic countries (Europe's largest distributor of mobile phones). He has built many distribution networks and has established contacts with mobile phone distributors. Through his contacts and knowledge he brings to Mobispine significant strategic and operational skills in marketing and sales.

Lars Lindgren has previously been a member of the Board and is an active business angel and venture capitalist. He will use his experience as a Board member and investor in high growth IT companies to assist Mobispine with future challenges as the company grows rapidly.

Market research on SMS for business users

Thought you might find this market research on SMS for business users
interesting:

"Early statistics from the MDA (Mobile Data Association) reported that the majority of UK based executives used SMS for work, receiving as many as 40 work related SMS messages daily and that British executives considered SMS their most valuable time-management tool. Think about it, the only resource a manager cannot replicate, is his own time. And if 'conservative' British executives felt SMS was their most valuable time-management tool, perhaps you should consider if this might be true.

Why SMS, why not email? Think about it. How urgently do you respond to emails? 160 Characters measured in 2007 that we respond to email in 24 hours, but we respond to SMS in 5 minutes. How much faster is SMS? It is 288 times faster in response time than email! That is like comparing air travel speeds of a hot air balloon to a jet plane. SMS is the jet age of interpersonal communications. We have similar findings from 2008 that SMS is read and responded to within 15 minutes (Experian 2008)".

We at Mobispine of course believe in this data and we see similar findings from customers all over the world.

Comments?

Americans send 5 B SMS per day!

I just ran into this very interesting article from Chicago Breaking Business News.
Some of the numbers are very impressive:
- 5 billion text messages per day sent in US
- Text messaging pricing increased from 10 to 20 cents
- Number of multimedia messages (MMS) more than doubled last year
- reveneues from data services now represent 28 percent of total revenues for US carriers

The full article can be found here!

Mobispine @ CTIA in Las vegas

Hi all!
Some of our key people from Mobispine is in Las Vegas this week for the huge CTIA tradeshow. We have lots of meetings planned with key players from both North and South America. If you wannna hook up with our head of products (James) and/or head of Americas (Carlos) just send us a short email at sales AT mobispine.com.

We do have a very exciting demo of our Desktop Communicator suite together with one of our key partners, Acision. This one is demonstrated in the Acision booth. The Communicator product is about utilizing two screens (mobile phone and PC) with one SIM card, i.e. basically having some of the phone's capabilities on your desktop/laptop as well. These functions are things like messaging (SMS/MMS), voice mail etc.



See you in Las Vegas!