SMS Long Code Finally Arrive

So finally IPL starts its third edition on a big note. IPL, in my opinion is not so much about cricket as much it is about the advertisement revolution that it has brought to this country. Zoo-Zoo's were launched in the last season of IPL, and the advertising fraternity does realize that it has been THE most talked about advertisement in a long time. They made an entry again today and people were again fascinated by them.

But it was another advertisement that grabbed my attention. Abhishekh Bachchan, asking people to play a contest on their mobile phone by sending a sms to a regular 10 digit number. It can easily pass of as a regular advertisement asking people to vote over SMS. But NO it is not normal at all. Here's why.

At the turn of this century, Realty shows made a huge impact on the Television industry and how viewers interact with it. Every realty show would ask their viewers to vote by sending a SMS to a short code. These short codes were extra VAS numbers (regular short code would cost Rs 3 and this one would cost Rs 6). Viewers did not realize but both the television shows and the mobile operators made loads of money when millions of viewers started sending their sms.

But now after almost 10 years, in my opinion number of people sending sms to a short code has started to decline. You will want to participate in a reality show and make your star a winner. But after some time the novelty of method dies down and your rising phone bill start to make you choosy about when to sms.

And so Abhishekh Bachchan asking you to vote by sending SMS to a long code, marks a huge shift in the way producers view this consumer market. They are ready to forgo the money they were making on the shortcode and really focus on consumers interacting with them over sms.

This option has been there for a long time. But people were just not aware that the kind of interaction that they do over a short code, by paying premium cost could be done on a regular 10 digit mobile number. This will now change. You will start to see more and more long codes coming in advertisement and TV contests now. And I am really excited to see this change coming in the market.

Way to go AB.

Announcing mQuote - Stock Quotes on your mobile phone

A lot of people do not invest in shares. But those who do invariably end up checking their stock prices atleast once daily. No I am not talking about a day trader, but someone who just owns Infy shares because a lot of his friends asked him to buy it in the recession. Since then he has not bought any other share, but still keeps checking the price of Infy share daily and smiles within.

In my opinion after mail checking, stock price must be the second most religiously performed activity for us. No Twitter, you are too early in the game. Even though the price most often does not change drastically day to day, there is this unexplained desire to see what the current price is.

It gets worse when you know that the market is choppy on a given day and for some reason your boss has put you on a day long workshop where you are just not able to check your stock price. Or when you are on your vacation and your wife has imposed a strict no mail checking rule on you. What do you do? Wonder if you could just check that stock price on your mobile phone? You can now.

For all those obsessive stock price tracker I present mQuote. mQuote is a SMS based service which provides you real time price of your stock on your mobile. Just SMS quote <company code> or quote <company name> to 9220092200 or 9243000111. And instantly you will receive the current price of that share. The website http://mquote.heroku.com, provides a demo so you can test it out and feel comfortable using it.

As usual this is one of a hobby thing I did and so maybe quite buggy. I do not take responsibility for the information being provided by this service. Don't hedge your bets based on the information provided by this service. Do use a reliable source of information in case you want to trade a scrip.

Note: 9220092200 is a mumbai local number, and 9243000111 is bangalore local number. From any other location you will have to prefix 0, and it will a STD SMS charge for you.

SMS - Telecos next Turf for Price War

Looks like while every one was fighting to cut the price per voice call, no one realised how costly sending a SMS became in comparison to a voice call is. About 10 years ago, when mobile operations began in India even incoming mobile calls were charged. And today both the price as well as duration for payment has hit measurable limits (1 paise per second). But even in this tumultuous time, the price per SMS had just remained the same. one rupee per sms.

But if todays article in Times of India (SMS Prices set to crash) is to be believed, the fight between the operators will soon shift from voice to sms. After all SMS is the second most used service after a voice call. It would have been anybody's guess that SMS prices are going to crash next. In fact the recent unilateral SMS interconnect charges imposed by Airtel would have been a direct cue to TRAI to wakeup and regulate this medium. Moreover the lobby of SMS aggregators was gaining momentum to bring some order here.

I find that article in Times of India quite funny though. Times of India, in its typical style of saving the world, expounds on how it exposed the obnoxious price of a SMS to the world. Having seen its report, how TRAI jumped into action and is going to bring out a regulation as soon as it could. The description of measuring the cost of a SMS by its data size and time to transmit over the network makes the article only funnier.

Humor aside, I think this news should be a respite to all those companies providing services around SMS'es. The cost of an Application sending a SMS to user was fairly low. As a result we saw a lot of innovative applications such as mobile alerts, advertisements on mobile, emails on mobile etc being born. But the problem was that the communication was usually only one sided. However, if the price of SMS sent by user also drops, it will create space for more feature rich interactive applications.

I can definitely see more people using the SmsTweet application (updating twitter status by sending sms) if the price per sms drops. I can make it more interactive by letting users download their friend's status on their mobile phone.

What is your opinion? any nice ideas around SMS?

(Picture Credit: http://www.squidoo.com/)