.Dust

I was sit­ting on my deskchair read­ing a news­pa­per when I came across this news:

“Davide e la riv­o­luzione degli sms da 1 cent”

that may be trans­lated in “Davide, and the 1 cent SMS revolution”.

The writer talks about the Skebby appli­ca­tion and the impact it may have on the oper­a­tor SMS market.

I was really inter­ested by the sub­ject and I had a quick look at the Skebby web site. Basi­cally they offer the option to send and receive SMS using a Java appli­ca­tion sit­ting on your hand­set lever­ag­ing some free SMS ser­vices on the web, or on the oper­a­tors web sites.

You may also buy bulk SMS pack­ages from them.

I fin­ished read­ing the arti­cle try­ing to find where the rev­o­lu­tion is. No clue.

I have been read­ing about bulk SMS pack­ages from at least five years (prob­a­bly more) and there is no rev­o­lu­tion at all in this. Also, you can send SMS via the web from a very long time (I remem­ber they were on my ISP offer­ing since I was using a dial up con­nec­tion) and appli­ca­tion front ends to these kind of ser­vices were avail­able too.

More­over, I think that there are sev­eral lim­i­ta­tions using these services:

• Basi­cally you will end up receiv­ing SMSs from anony­mous numbers.
• Your data will tran­sit from a server before being sent over the net­work. This basi­cally means that your data is trav­el­ing on the net and we do not know any­thing about the archi­tec­ture or secu­rity imple­mented on these systems.
• We do not know which ser­vices this com­pany is using to send their SMSs if you use one of their pre­mium pack­ages. They may be local or for­eign com­pa­nies. In the last case the deliv­ery fail­ure may be an issue. Well, actu­ally from a tech­ni­cal stand­point there is no guar­an­tee for SMS delivery.
• Is the 1 cent the real cost? Prob­a­bly yes in most cases (but I do not really believe it) this is true but you have to give a close look at your cost plan. Just to say one, if you have to pay a fee every time a data con­nec­tion is opened it will not cost 1 cent.
• I love Java, but you will always have to con­sider that every time you will fire a data con­nec­tion your phone will ask for per­mis­sion to do that (well, on most phones). In the long run this is really annoy­ing and has a huge impact on usability.

So, is it really a revolution?

I think not, and the way the press is com­mu­ni­cat­ing this is really bad.

I per­fectly under­stand that the aver­age reader will not know any­thing about SMS pric­ing and the tech­nol­ogy behind it. What I expect is that the jour­nal­ist would per­form basic research before stat­ing that some­thing is a rev­o­lu­tion when, clearly, it is not. (At least accord­ing to my opinion).

Why do I blog this? One of the most impor­tant things about Inno­va­tion is how you com­mu­ni­cate it and while you are talk­ing about inno­va­tion you should under­stand what is Inno­va­tion and what is not.

Related posts:

1. Com­mu­ni­cat­ing Innovation
2. Inno­va­tion is a com­pany culture
3. Inno­va­tion fun­nel and funny services
4. Inno­va­tion is everywhere
5. The four dri­vers of innovation