One thing that we constantly see is that businesses are clamoring to include mobile messaging as part of their consumer outreach. As has been stated many times, many places, an SMS message is typically read within the first few minutes of receipt, by over 90% of the recipients. That includes Person-to-Person (or P2P) as well as Application-to-Person (or A2P). To reach consumers and encourage them to engage, businesses are increasingly turning to mobile messaging as their primary channel.
SMS
In late July 2016, there were a significant number of news stories that have “declared the end of 2FA over SMS,” as the US NIST has recommended that the Out-of-Band delivery channel of SMS for 2FA tokens to be deprecated in the next version of their guidelines.
This is a piece about mobile messaging – SMS to be precise. Remember SMS, that mobile messaging medium that has been decimated by non-SMS chat applications like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, WeChat and many others? Well, it is still very much around, live and well and, I’ll say it: prospering.
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.
I published my first set of mobile predictions in January 2008. This is my tenth installment. My blog has had several iterations since it was initially part of the Sybase company blog space (we were known as Sybase 365, back then). When SAP acquired Sybase, most of my postings were migrated to the original SCN for Mobile area and now to the “new” SAP Community Network blogs. Some of the very old postings (before February 2011) are unfortunately no longer available in existing SAP archives.
Over the past few years interesting phenomena has been occurring in the United States as well as Canada. Consumers continue to text each other (called Person-to-Person or P2P); however, unlike in many other regions such as Asia-Pacific and Europe, they continue to use SMS at rates not enjoyed in these other regions for several years.
Worldwide, SMS-based mobile messaging continues to evolve and innovate. Nowhere is this more apparent than in A2P or enterprise messaging. Numerous analysts have forecast that enterprise messaging (or A2P messaging as it is sometimes called) will continue growth and prominence through at least the rest of this decade. Why is this?
Ok, this is definitely a late 2016 predictions article – especially since it is the week after Mobile World Congress 2016. But, in my defense, not THAT much happens until after MWC, so maybe I’m not cheating so much. This is my ninth (yes 9th!) annual prediction blog posting.
Have you ever forgotten a password? I know that I have. I do all the time, in fact, although over the last year or two, I’ve gotten better at managing my password schemes (yes, I have schemes that I’ve memorized to generate new passwords). But forgotten password recovery is a “popular” mechanism in which bad guys can gain access to your account. So, we must incorporate a number of checks to disrupt and prevent attempts to gain access to accounts.
April 24th, 2015 ushers in a new era of the Apple Watch. As many others did, I watched with anticipation, the March 9th Spring-forward Apple announcement that included information about the Apple Watch. Apart from the availability and pricing, little new information was provided that we really didn’t already know. As I review a large number of tweets, opinions, and articles, the first results indicate a very mixed set of views (from extremely positive to extremely negative [“the iFlop”]).