Remember Jote from mobile services innovator, Anam? I met him back at CTIA to catch up and he mentioned that they were working on a big new client but he couldn’t say anything about it. Turns out it’s Telenor — one of the fastest growing mobile operators on the planet with 143 million subscribers in 12 countries.
I caught up with Jote, VP of Global Sales, to find out the gossip. Telenor were, it seems, having an issue with text spam that they wanted fixed pronto. After a competitive pitch against some of the well known usual suspects, Telenor opted for Anam’s Smart Services platform. The platform has an Anti-SPAM offering that detect scanning, spoofing and spam content and prevent it from reaching the subscriber handset.
Telenor can, if they choose, take advantage of the platforms other possibilities — including money transfer, multi-sim services (text messages received simultaneously on more than one device) and ad-funded SMS services.
“Did it fix the spam issue, then?” I asked Jote, knowing that, contractually, he couldn’t be specific.
“Anecdotally and without going into specifics,” he replied, “Within a short period of install, we’ve seen a significant spam reduction.”
Excellent. Proof is always in the pudding.
For Anam, the fact that Telenor — a Tier-1 level operator has adopted their services — helps to validate and consolidate their status as a serious player with an expanding, proven track record delivering services at the highest levels.
Jote is particularly keen to talk to operators about text messaging and what Anam can do to help generate revenues and boost user retention. This is all to important many mobile operators who are increasingly having to move to unlimited text models as a result of market demand. The real arse is that a lot of operators seem to think of text as just a simple basic function that’s in decline (from a revenue standpoint).
As Jote pointed out during our chat, “The excitement and hype has died down from other alternative forms of sexy applications that, alas, don’t quite pass the ‘grandma’ test. Text is mass market, ubiquitous and, frankly, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”
Here here.
There’s so much more that can be done with the medium — and I’m pleased to see Anam moving to do this. For example, I’d pay a small amount of cash (4 quid a month?) to T-Mobile to have my text messages immediately redirected from my account there to my Vodafone account. Or to get texts on multiple devices. Or to have them archived online.
It’s slightly depressing how badly mobile operators have managed text services in the past. Anyone would think that all I can do with the technology is send, receive and get charged for downloading ringtones. There’s so much more!
Anyway, I’m pleased to see Telenor leading the majors, but what about a Vodafone or a T-Mobile? We live in hope. Nice work Anam!