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The survey of over 1,200 teenage girls by American company FunMail and teen site Mykindaplace.com found that 96 percent of respondents wanted FunMail's SMS messaging service for their phones with 72 percent saying that they would send such messages three to five times per week. Those surveyed said they would be prepared to pay around STG0.37 for each message.
Around a third of respondents said they would switch mobile operators in order to take advantage of animated SMS messages. However, while 80 percent said they were aware of the visual features in their handsets, only 45 percent said they "hardly ever" or "never" used them.
FunMail's text-to-animation messaging system works on a number of formats including SMS, I-mode and GPRS. It allows users to send short animated sequences featuring a number of well-known cartoon characters such as Garfield along with a relevant text message.
The company launched its service in Japan in May and expects to carry out trials in other parts of Asia and across Europe in Q4 2001, with launches starting in Q1 2002. The company has secured the rights to various cartoon characters and has announced relationships with Logica and CMG for the integration of FunMail into their messaging systems.
This kind of Enhanced Messaging Service (EMS) is expected to eventually become more popular that SMS and be a major revenue generator for mobile operators. Enhanced messaging allows users to "add life" to text message in the form of colour images, melodies and animations.
Currently, SMS traffic exceeds 20 billion messages per month worldwide with an average fee of USD0.10 per message, but a recent report by UK research company, Mobile Streams, said that EMS will be a USD6 billion business within the next 18 months. Ericsson, Motorola, Philips and Alcatel all plan to have EMS-enabled phones available by Q4 2001.
The report also said that middleware vendors such as FunMail and Swapcom, which have the technology to handle different EMS formats, will be in heavy demand from such operators.
According to FunMail, it intends to offer both subscription and per-message billing methods to mobile operators depending on the platform and the region. For instance, NTT DoCoMo's I-mode service in Japan is subscription based with users selecting from a menu of services, which are then added to their monthly bill, while in Europe users pay for every message they send.
FunMail can be found at http://www.funmail.com.
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