Thanks to all the users of Fun Text for their great comments. We get many sent in each day and we read them all. Some of the best ones we put on our blog http://funtextfeedback.blogspot.com Very motivating when your customers love your service!

Mobispine @MWC in Barcelona

Dear customers & partners!

As always Mobispine will be in Barcelona to meet up with people from the industry. We'd love to schedule meetings with all kinds of players in the mobile eco system where you think we can do some good business together.

Feel free to join us at a cocktail on monday afternoon or simply send an email to sales AT mobispine.com for scheduling a meeting with the team.


We hope to see you there!

Thanks for a good 2009 and what to expect from 2010

I always feel I want more to be developed, delivered, sold etc but at the end of the year I always try to stop for a few seconds to think about the year that just passed and the coming year.

Looking back at 2009
This year Mobispine turned 5 years old and considering we were consolidating some acquisitions we have made at the same time as we were closing deals in new markets and reducing our overall cost structure 2009 was an OK year. Looking at some key metrics - that I can share - this is the progress:

- Going from being a company dealing only with RSS-technology (the RSS reader) into being a mobile messaging player with 25+ mobile operator customers in EMEA and APAC.
- Winning deals with new customers (mobile operators) in Russia, Ukraine, Uzbekistan and India.
- From loosing lots of money to almost breaking even
- Having established a solid delivery organization which makes it straightforward for us to deliver most kinds of projects to our customers
- Having established a strong product management function which will be even stronger next year

What to expect from 2010
Next year we will continue our investments into product development & sales. We will for example:
- Execute our product roadmap going from delivering only desktop messaging solutions to also delivering multimedia and volume messaging solutions.
- Hire experienced sales people with great experience from software sales
- Expand sales into a handful key mobile operator groups where we already have a presence.

I want with this short blog post say thank you to all fantastic people who are involved in this journey such as
- our employees
- our shareholders
- our customers

Happy New Year!
Joakim Hilj
CEO, Mobispine AB

How shall operators package, price and offer desktop messaging to their customers in order to be successful?

Operators often ask as the above question.

The answer is clear to us. Thanks to the knowledge gained from all current deployments world wide we can see a clear pattern for achieving high usage, penetration and profitability as well as the usual mistakes when operators miss out on this.


1. Target the product to both business and consumer users
Desktop messaging is equally important for both business and consumers but need to be positioned a bit different for each segment. Business users use the product as a mass communication-, information- and marketing tool while consumers see it as a natural extension to their person-to-person communication.

A business user could therefore be a storeowner wanting to inform a large number of customers that the sale is on from tomorrow, or the company manager wanting to communicate an important message to the entire staff. More and more professionals offering services where you have to book an appointment also use desktop messaging to remind their customer about the scheduled appointment. Dentists are a good example of professionals that have managed to reduce the number missed appointment with such a feature.

To simplify for business users Mobispine provides bulk features and import of contact list to enable smooth sending’s to many.

2. Include the product in existing messaging price plans with no additional monthly fee.
Desktop messaging is by users considered a natural extension of the traditional person-to-person SMS on the mobile. A monthly fee reduces the usage dramatically and should be avoided. The users have a hard time understanding why they should pay more to send more SMS, which is fully understandable. The more messages you send as a user the better price you should get right, instead of being “punished” with a monthly fee?

3. Charge the same price for SMS as when sent from the mobile.
To charge the same price for desktop SMS as for regular SMS have two major advantages and operators that do not pursue this will suffer considerably on both usage and revenue compared with operator that embrace the same pricing.

How come?

Customers have a hard time understanding why they should be punished for sending more SMS, regardless if it’s from the PC. We all know that usage creates more usage and that users who on top of the normal SMS behaviour also send more and longer SMS when sitting in front on the PC will most likely also get more replies (replies are mainly delivered to the mobile device) and the wheel of sending and receiving is on.
Why should customers pay a higher price for SMS for sending even more SMS? This is a very valid question and the main reason to avoid a higher price.

Another reason is simplicity; It’s simply easier for the user to remember the price if it’s equal to the existing price plan for SMS. If the pricing differs the customers may hesitate to use the service due to of lack of knowledge of the new price that they might fear could be expensive.

So, be fair to you customers about pricing and they will be fair to you.

Pandelis Eliopoulos
Vice President Marketing
Mobispine AB

Feedback from my trip to UK

Hi all,

I just came back from a business trip where I met some customers and some of our distribution partners in the infrastructure area. I asked these folks,
- why do you like Mobispine?
- What is exciting with what we do for you?

The feedback I got was interesting and relating to the fact we are in the middle of Telco & Internet businesses which is quite unique.

There is a Telco world out there with huge mobile operators we work with. Telco Groups such as Vodafone Group, Telenor, TeliaSonera, T-Mobile, MTS, Telefonica, Orange all have subscriber bases between 100-600 Million subscribers each and of course huge revenue streams thanks to voice, messaging and other services.

On the other hand side there is the Internet world with all the Internet players, very fast-moving, disruptive, sometimes lower requirements on quality than Telcos (compare the term carrier grade systems).

What is really exciting and interesting with Mobispine is that we deliver Internet services to Telcos in a way that not many players are capable of doing on a global basis. Already today our backend systems are integrated in some 30 mobile operator environments talking to their billing, provisioning and messaging platforms. We are also experts in user interfaces, front-end systems and in our DNA we breathe Internet every day.

If you have any ideas of how Mobispine can further improve the way we do business - let us know here!

/ Joakim Hilj
CEO Mobispine

Sending SMS from Windows 7

As we know, today Microsoft has possibly the biggest product launch of its history with the roll out of Windows 7. Corporations are expected to adopt the new Operating System far more than the previous Vista OS. Windows 7 is also targeting Mobile Broadband users.

Mobispine is here to help ensure that your mobile subscribers and customers can send SMS from Windows 7 and that you can place your operator brand on the Desktop of Windows 7 users.

Mobispine is providing Desktop applications for Windows 7 and Microsoft Outlook plug-ins. We can also help you notify all the existing registered users of our PC-to-SMS services about the new client.

Contact Mobispine today about SMS for Windows 7.

Will desktop messaging cannibalise on my existing SMS traffic?

We sometimes get the question whether the introduction of desktop messaging service (which enables users to send messages from their PC) will cannibalise on the existing SMS mobile to mobile traffic, when introduced to the customer base.

Actually our experience and insights show the opposite. The overall SMS traffic will actually increase.

Here are some reasons to why the traffic does not cannibalise but actually increase according to our experience:

1) We know by history that services that further improve an established behaviour increase the overall usage. Compare voice with voice mail, voice with SMS or SMS with MMS.

The fear of cannibalisation is always present when introducing services but glancing in the rear mirror we should know that when you are improving an existing behaviour the fear is false.

2) The users that can access Desktop Messaging, will more easily be able to send SMS and MMS when sitting in front of the computer. This will generate more replies that will generate even more messages. Since the replies will be received on the mobile, and obviously, users do not sit in front of the computer 24/7 the mobile-to-mobile SMS and MMS traffic will actually increase. On top, desktop messaging enables users to easily send pictures stored on the PC and other content provided by the application in a user friendly way.

3) More than 30 % of all messages sent with the desktop messaging application tend to be longer than 160 characters, which is equivalent to one (1) SMS. This means that 30 % of all the messages being sent will actually generate two (2) or more messages. 

How come? When users are being exposed to the simplicity of the Mobispine Desktop service combined with access to the PC keyboard and the bigger PC screen they tend to write SMS as they write their emails, with more words, compared to the minimal character communication typically for mobile-to mobile messaging.

4) SMS is sticky. Once the users are introduced to the simplicity of sending SMS from their PC the snowball effect has started. How many of us can honestly resist getting an SMS without reading it or replying to it.

5) Last but not least, the Mobispine Desktop service enables users to easily import, manage and send messages to many at the same time. More and more are discovering the advantages using SMS as a mass communication, reminder and marketing tool.

This is a key advantage especially for business users.
Imagine the storeowner communicating to 10 000 VIP customers that the sale is on.
Now imagine doing the same from your mobile phone.

We see this happen every day and as a result some users reach up to 6 digit numbers of sent messages per month.

So, don’t be afraid of cannibalisation on SMS when introducing desktop messaging. Let your customers embrace the service and you will most likely end up with more loyal customers than you had before.

Thanks for reading!

Pandelis Eliopoulos
VP Marketing, Mobispine

Happy birthday Per!

Happy birthday today to Per Lundberg, one of our lead developers in Mobispine. Per has now been with us for 3,5 years which is a long time in such a dynamic environment as Mobispine.

We have all followed his development of key pieces both in old and new Mobispine doing stuff around iPhone, Android and RSS. As I understand from our CTO he will now more and more focus on content and Fun Text to make that content platform work on all our platforms together w the Fun Text team.

Our demos in Prague next week

Next week Mobispine will be exhibiting in Prague at the Future of Mobile messaging conference. We will be demonstrating some exciting messaging services and products that we believe make a lot of sense for mobile operators.
- Desktop messaging from different kinds of clients (Outlook, leading browsers, standalone client, Gadgets..)
- Web based Messaging solutions where also Fun Text is integrated into the website. This makes it possible sending cool content from web to mobile phones with MMS
- Mediabox, photo & video storage and sharing

See you there!

The Future of Mobile Messaging

Mobispine will be attending and exhibiting at The Future of Mobile Messaging event 23rd-24th September in Prague. We will be talking about and demonstrating all of our products - SMS and MMS, web and desktop, Fun Text and MediaBox. Some great speakers and topics covering converged messaging, social networking, IM, RCS, new SMS and MMS VAS services and mobile advertising. If you are going or if members of your organisation are going email me (james.pycock - at - mobispine.com) and lets fix a meeting!