The Hindu Business Line : A ‘browser’ for SMS

A mobile widget platform to let you enjoy ‘seamless access to branded content and services such as Facebook and Google without the need for a data plan’ should sound cool. And that’s what Raj Oswal, Product Manager/Business Development of Shorthand Mobile, Inc, ( www.shorthandmobile.com), talks about. His card speaks of ‘browser’ for SMS (short message service). And, on the site, the California, US -based company’s promoters speak of how they were “dissatisfied with the way information and services were accessed on mobile phones and envisioned a better, simpler, and less expensive way to connect users in the mass market to mobile content and services.”

The SMS content partners have provided us with a great variety of content to leverage, says Raj, during a recent lunch-hour interaction with eWorld. “It is our goal to provide an intuitive and highly capable interface to allow for the same Web-like experience to everyone, today, on their mobile phones.”

Excerpts from the interview.

First, why a ‘browser’ for SMS?

Why not?

I like using the classic ‘DOS vs Windows’ comparison as an analogy. I think everyone could agree that SMS uses a clunky user interface (UI) which makes it very difficult to use for more than just person-to-person communication, just as DOS (disk operating system) was in the past. We have drastically improved the experience to remove this layer of complication. No more cryptic commands, no more memorisation.

By creating a browser-like scroll-and-click experience, we have enabled millions of basic handset users to access and discover a world of valuable content, from updating their status on a social networking site, to checking their bank account balance, to checking their train or flight status, to searching for restaurants, to much, much more…all through SMS.

What makes SMS so sticky a phenomenon as to be highly popular? Do you think SMS, as a medium, is here to stay?

People are on the go, everywhere. The ability to be able to communicate when you are mobile is becoming essential around the world. In India, the mobile subscriber base has exceeded 400 million as of June 2009 and continues to grow at a healthy clip.

A good portion of these users are active text users. From 2007 to 2008, the volume of SMS messages sent and received increased from 90 billion messages to 150 billion. While a large portion of these messages were sent between people communicating with each other, businesses are starting to provide value-added content and informational services over the SMS channel as well, and that will add to the already rapid growth of SMS.

Although GPRS (general packet radio service) and data access are rising, we believe it will take years to penetrate the millions and millions of users who either cannot afford GPRS access, or have phones with little to no GPRS capability.

I don’t see SMS as a competitor to the Web. It is more of a complement to the Web. They both have different utility values. SMS users are not necessarily looking to browse like one would on a PC (personal computer). These folks want access to specific information, fast. They want to know their account balance, or know their flight status, or look at the train schedule, or make a payment, or find a local restaurant, etc, as quickly as possible. A clean, menu-based interface that allows these users to get what they want, as quickly as they want is what is needed.

Because, SMS is not going anywhere; it is definitely here to stay.

Does SMS pose challenges that can be overcome?

Yes, it does. And yes, they can be overcome! In the very first place, there can only be 160 characters per message and that too, only Western European characters. Colours, movement, images, sounds cannot be transmitted. However, these very limitations can be used to create tight and inexpensive communication.

We have got around the various limitations inherent to SMS:

The character limit, which we circumvent through a concatenation mechanism.

Our pattern-matching algorithm identifies Web hyperlinks, keywords and telephone numbers in an incoming SMS message and turns them into links that the user can then click, for example, to make a phone call or to go to a wireless Web site or to access more information over SMS itself, so that the entire transaction is a seamless experience.

As another example, our unique UI incorporates sounds within SMS chats, for example, so that the user gets more than a silent textbox to type into.

The overall user experience is more through the clicks and navigation and less through the keypad.

Areas where you see potential for mobile application development, and the ecosystem that can nurture the same.

Everywhere! I think there is a lot of room for growth at the enterprise level. Suppose I am waiting to be seated in a restaurant and want to know the specials of the day without having to wait for the waiter. Suppose I am in line at a post office to send out some mail, and want to find out the postal rates. The point being there are many areas ranging from law enforcement, to hospitality, to financial services, to food services, to real estate, etc, that could utilise mobile applications for more efficiencies for both end-users and organisations.

Companies such as Sun, Apple, and Microsoft are creating mobile application stores. This will foster innovation into many new areas of development.

One of the biggest areas of potential is the area of mobile commerce. In rural India, most folks do not have bank accounts. The local shopkeepers in any village could use SMS to enable money transactions. There is a lot of development occurring in this area and could lead to paradigm shifts in the way we use money.

Are traditional enterprises alive to the need for adding mobility platform to their products/services? Who do you see as emerging bigger winners, in the process: the bigger enterprises or the smaller entrepreneurial ones?

First, we do not recognise the ‘traditional’ vs ‘new economy’ divide, or the large corporation vs SME (small and medium enterprise) divide. We only view two kinds of organisations — those who are capable and willing to seek out and build mobility and mobile solutions into their organisational DNA and those who are not. How they do adopt mobility varies — to reach out to customers, provide customer self-service, make their own operations more efficient or seek new revenue streams.

We have partners from the ‘brick-and-mortar’ oriented hospitality industry to the social networking sites that adopt mobility as a part of the business.

Mobility solutions, especially the simple and inexpensive ones, effectively level the playing field for organisations to compete and reduce the barriers to co-operation. The winners would be the most innovative enterprises, large or small.

That said, we do not preclude the possibility of large, cash-rich enterprises buying out smaller, nimbler competitors that make better use of mobile technology.

Any other points of interest….

I’d like to speak about a current challenge with regard to mobile software development. Because of the heterogeneity of the mass-market mobile handsets, ranging from different keypads, to different screen sizes, to different operating systems, etc, most companies shy away from this sort of mobile development because, simply put, it’s just not easy for these companies to develop applications for all the different phone models.

We realise that the value of a platform is to get the application on as many of these types of phones as possible, and we are working towards that goal. Each time we add our application on the phone, we have taken away the hard work that our content partners have to do in order to mobilise their services on that phone. We have come a long way, and continue to make our application available on more and more phones.

While it is important for some of the large handset manufacturers and software vendors to come together to create common standards, I don’t think anybody will disagree that this will take a long time! This is why we believe in the relevance of an SMS platform that bridges the gap between those that have less capable handsets and those that have the latest and greatest.

dmurali@thehindu.co.in

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A ‘browser’ for SMS