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With the growing business viability of SMS, French company MobileWay, is providing a service for the distribution of SMS across all mobile networks.
MobileWay is headquartered in Paris and has offices in the UK, Germany, France and Spain. The company operates by providing connectivity to a number of companies and mobile operators through a single message centre. In this way, content providers can work on a revenue-share basis with mobile operators.
The company serves as a midpoint between content providers and network operators to facilitate revenue sharing SMS operations such as reverse charged messages, according to Ben Taylor, business development manager at MobileWay.
Taylor also pointed out that such a central connectivity service is becoming more useful in an environment where many operators are no longer allowing interconnectivity from country to country as it is no longer cost effective for these operators to do so.
MobileWay works with over 70 mobile operators worldwide, including Esat and Eircell.
Other companies that offer a similar service to MobileWay include British-based M-Blocks and Win, and Swedish company Red Message.
"SMS was initially viewed as a marketing tool where people were initially thinking of ways in which they could use their excess content," Taylor said. "But since then it's moved very much onto being a business model, where companies are thinking of ways in which they can make money from it."
Last year MobileWay and Orbiscom, an Irish credit card security company, announced a partnership to launch a mobile payment solution.
The deal saw MobileWay use its global SMS network, in conjunction with Orbiscom's CPN (controlled payment number)technology to provide secure payment solutions for m-commerce applications.
At the time, Olivier Stoica, Orbiscom's director for sales and marketing Europe said, "The partnership with MobileWay is a significant departure for Orbiscom. It extends the reach of Orbiscom's O-power technology beyond PCs to mobile phones."
In June a Dutch research company TheRazor predicted the market for SMS as a premium business service will grow to over EUR230 million by the year 2003, due to the fact that companies are getting a direct connection to the network of mobile operators.
The company said that in the countries that surround the Netherlands, premium SMS services have already expanded enormously, especially in the UK and in Scandinavian countries, with more than EUR32 million spent on premium services in Norway last year.
MobileWay is at http://www.mobileway.com .
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