Just over a year ago, I was an RCS (rich communications service) skeptic. A big one! Meaning: I thought that the RCS standards were too fragmented, a waste of time, and too little, too late; that they wouldn’t make an impact on enterprise/brand messaging, among other thoughts. Certainly, the RCS opportunity has been lost for person-to-person messaging, with the overtaking of SMS by various messaging chat apps such as WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, WeChat, Snapchat, and others. However, since Mobile World Congress 2017, I have started to believe that there may be, at last, hope for RCS – especially as a primary channel for conversational messaging for brands and enterprises.
Category Archive: RCS
Mobile World Congress (MWC) is the record-breaking annual get-together of over 108,000 attendees in Barcelona, Spain, interested in mobile, 5G, connected cars, devices, augmented reality, virtual reality, cloud computing, IoT, and much, much more. As I do most years, I attended (I believe this might have been my ninth). MWC is the most important event for the mobile-focused industry. This year, the theme was “Mobile: The Next Element.” The idea of this theme was to “reflect the elemental role of mobile in the lives of billions of people around the world.” While I was quite busy with over 15 meetings and discussions in our massive (and popular) SAP stand, I was able to walk around occasionally during the 4 days to try to get a better understanding of this year’s major themes.
Over the last 4 to 5 years, the world has witnessed a meteoric rise of a variety of Over-the-top (OTT) messaging apps – both for consumers and enterprises. Today, there are a dizzying variety of texting choices — most of them operating as “islands” (albeit some are exceedingly large – WhatsApp with over 500 million monthly active users [MAUs] is a prime example); however, in some markets such as the United States and Canada, SMS-interoperable OTT messaging solutions have garnered the majority share of OTT messaging apps (we call these SMS-enabled OTT messaging providers: NUVOs – for Network Unaffiliated Virtual Operators).
A few days ago, BBC News published: “Payments by text message service to launch in UK in Spring 2014.” I found this story fascinating – not that payments may be made by text message, as it’s been done for years in various markets such as in Kenya. One can also send money via smartphones, using apps, today as well. No, what is fascinating is that text messaging is once again the bearer of this payment information.