Mobile messaging company Mobispine has announced its fourth company acquisition in one year. It has bought out MMS specialist Fun Text, and its parent company Image Semantics. Overall, Mobispine now has 30 mobile operator partners, to which it provides both SMS and MMS services. But while the future of SMS seems assured, does MMS have a place in the growing mobile services market?
The overall aim of Mobispine is to create operator-level solutions for MMS – for both consumer and enterprise use. Mobispine was already active in the MMS arena. It operates Desktop Messaging, which allows MMS to be sent from your PC. Fun Text is more aimed at getting consumers to use MMS more, by automating the process and letting users more easily create multimedia texts. The last time we heard from them was around Christmas, when it launched an “emotional messaging” service.
Via IntoMobile
From the release:
“The combination of Mobispine and Fun Text creates a company with the scale and resources to deliver innovative mobile messaging services to a global audience” said James Pycock, one of the Founders of Fun Text.
“We strongly believe in the opportunity for innovative consumer and enterprise messaging services and we are delighted to bring Fun Text into the Mobispine portfolio” said Dusyant Patel, CEO at Mobispine.
What we think?
I’m really not convinced of the future of MMS – at least in Western Europe and the US. It falls too much between SMS and higher-tech services. SMS is still insanely popular, mainly because it is an incredibly short, fast and easy way to communicate between people, devices or services. Theoretically MMS should be just as popular, because it allow more characters and multimedia attachments. The problem there is that MMS is doing a job that a lot of other services do better. Want to send a short message? Use SMS. Want to send a longer message? Mobile email. Want to send a file? There are a growing number of cheap, easy-to-use file sharing services that will allow larger, more varied files to be sent for a smaller cost. MMS isn’t a bad services, it just isn’t as cheap or convenient as SMS.
But like I said, that might only apply in the more advanced mobile markets. Mobispine is claiming recent contract wins in Russia and India, as well as running offices in five different countries. MMS might not be all that relevant in Europe and America, but that’s not to say there’s no market anywhere.
