LATAM Telecom

A little more than a year ago, Telefonica Moviles Spain and Colibria announced the launch of SMS 2.0 (source Colibira Press release , Nov 2006). Earlier this year, both parties announced interconnectivity with Vodafone’s Messenger (source Colibria Press release , Feb 2007). Telefonica has been working hard this year to bring the same service to Latin America. This should be an interesting move, given the difficulties IM/Presence vendors like Colibria and Oz have had introducing a Portal IM gateway service in Latin America. SMS 2.0 is much more than an upgrade to an SMS platform/service, it is actually a repackaging of what we know as Operator IM. The new 'feature' of this service allows seamless communication with subscribers that do not have the service (SMS 2.0 is a presence application), and they can exchange SMS messages that will be received by the other subscribers through the SMS 2.0 application. While SMS 2.0 can be expected initially to have a limited scope (it require...

Following my post from yesterday regarding the opportunity that Mobile Instant Messaging represents in Latin America, I found out that two major players, OZ and Neustar recently issued interesting press releases: NeuStar has announced that it has reached a milestone in the development of mobile instant messaging (IM) globally, having delivered 3 billion mobile IM messages across its servers ( source ). OZ announced that its mobile IM and mobile Email gateways have handled over 10 billion transactions to date. Adding to this milestone, OZ also announced that it has shipped its 100 millionth preloaded client on mobile phones ( source ). Both companies quoted additional statistics showing the success of both Mobile Instant Messaging and Mobile Email in the North American and European markets. According to Allen Scott, general manager of NeuStar, "This is an important moment for mobile IM because it marks a significant step toward this service becoming a mainstream mobile application...