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To: golfinvestor who wrote (103167)	8/22/2001 2:39:38 PM
From: Cooters	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 152472

E-mail's next rival multimedia mobile messages By Richard Baum, UK telecoms correspondent LONDON, Aug 22 (Reuters) - It's August 2002, and like other British 18-year-olds you've just received your A-level exam results. Naturally you want the whole world to know you got straight A grades, so you reach for your mobile phone and fire off text messages to everyone in your phone book. But because you topped the class in the new Mobile Communications Studies A level, you don't just send a 160 character message with some obscure combination of punctuation marks to denote the grin on your face. You attach a photograph of yourself jumping in the air, a soundbite of your loudest "whoopee!" and an animated graphic of a cartwheeling cat. Welcome to multimedia messaging. If you've just mastered the abbreviated lingo that's turned text messaging dictionaries into best sellers, then too bad: the language may already be on borrowed time. Next-generation messaging services will do away with limits on message length and allow you to add all sorts of bells and whistles to your missives. "The transition from text to full multimedia will be as important for mobile messaging as the transition from DOS to Windows was in the PC world," said Simon Buckingham, chief executive of Mobile Streams, which researches the industry. Whether multimedia messaging services (MMS) really are that revolutionary will become clearer when Ericsson launches the first MMS phone late this year. As well as a colour screen, the Swedish phone maker's T68 handset will have the wireless connectivity technology Bluetooth. That should allow the transfer of photographs from a similarily equipped digital camera to the phone, from where they could be sent to an e-mail account or an MMS handset. WISH YOU WERE HERE "Digital postcards will be quite successful," said Vesa Reijonen, mobile operations development manager at Finnish operator Sonera, which is testing MMS technology with Ericsson rival Nokia. MMS phones are also likely to come with a built-in library of graphics and sounds to spice up messages, and the dozens of successful websites that send new ringtones to handsets using text messages are certain to embrace the new technology. Third-generation (3G) mobiles, with their much expanded bandwidth, will be able to send short videos via MMS. MMS isn't the only next-generation message service. Ericsson is also promoting another, interim standard called enhanced messaging, but analysts are divided over whether it will make any impact. Of course, e-mail already provides a technology for sending long, multimedia messages. The latest GPRS (General Packet Radio Service) mobiles with always-on Internet connections make it easy to access online e-mail services like Hotmail, while phones with handwriting recognition technology or keyboards do away with the chore of coaxing letters out of a numeric keypad. But flush with the success of text messaging -- the exam season means monthly message volumes in the UK are expected to pass one billion for the first time in August -- the mobile industry is upgrading the technology. Partly it's because even with a permanent connection to the Internet, sending e-mails from a mobile is never going to be as easy as a specifically designed messaging system, especially when it comes to attaching pictures or sounds. CASH COW The bottom line, however, is that text messaging is a cash cow the industry wants to fatten further. Text message growth is already slowing -- the UK's monthly volume even fell for the first time in February -- and the prospect that GPRS devices will encourage some people to substitute e-mails for text messages must worry some operators. "With e-mail it's really hard to bill for it from the operators' perspective," said Matt Hocker, a technology analyst at UBS Warburg. GPRS users are charged by the amount they download rather than time spent online, and with Vodafone and BT Cellnet giving customers a large data allowance for a fixed monthly fee, the average user won't generate any additional profits regardless of how many e-mails he or she sends. Hocker believes MMS will form a bridge between e-mail and mobile messaging, and could even supplant it to some extent in the same way that AOL's instant messaging system has become an alternative standard through sheer volume of users. The mobile industry, naturally, is already predicting MMS will be a success. The UMTS Forum, a grouping of 3G companies, forecasts operators' revenues from MMS will approach $5 billion in 2004. REVIVING GROWTH Buckingham estimates messaging will account for more than a quarter of operators' revenues by 2007. He says most operators are not planning to charge much more for MMS than the 12 pence or so that short messages cost, although he thinks they could justify rates of three times as much. "This is where all the money will be made over the next five years," he said at a presentation to investment fund managers last week. Companies such as Logica, Comverse and CMG are certainly hoping so. They are the biggest suppliers of messaging infrastructure to mobile operators, and are hoping MMS will revive flagging growth in that business. Hocker forecasts MMS will boost the value of the infrastructure market to one billion pounds in 2006, from 400 million pounds last year. But because MMS is based on open Internet standards, he believes current infrastructure suppliers will have only a limited technology advantage over new entrants. The handful of trial MMS contracts awarded so far have gone to the old guard. Apart from the Sonera deal with Nokia, CMG and Comverse have bagged a deal apiece, while Logica is supplying NTT DoCoMo in Japan with a 3G messaging service similar to MMS. If all goes to plan, cutting-edge teenagers could be experts in the new technology well before next year's exam results. Assuming, of course, that another craze doesn't come along in the meantime. 05:14 08-22-01

To: golfinvestor who wrote (103167)	8/22/2001 2:42:36 PM
From: jazzcat2000	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 152472

"I've never been hooked up to a pager"... Perhaps with the 1X you'll be able to "page a hooker" and perform your two way??