New CHANNEL BUZZ

A little more than a year ago, Telefonica Moviles Spain and Colibria announced the launch of SMS 2.0 (source Colibira Press release, Nov 2006). Earlier this year, both parties announced interconnectivity with Vodafone’s Messenger (source Colibria Press release, Feb 2007).
Telefonica has been working hard this year to bring the same service to Latin America. This should be an interesting move, given the difficulties IM/Presence vendors like Colibria and Oz have had introducing a Portal IM gateway service in Latin America.
SMS 2.0 is much more than an upgrade to an SMS platform/service, it is actually a repackaging of what we know as Operator IM. The new 'feature' of this service allows seamless communication with subscribers that do not have the service (SMS 2.0 is a presence application), and they can exchange SMS messages that will be received by the other subscribers through the SMS 2.0 application.
While SMS 2.0 can be expected initially to have a limited scope (it requires an application loaded in the handset and is available only for certain handsets), the integration with other messaging solutions, specifically the traditional SMS should help its introduction.
This makes us think that perhaps the time is coming for new services based on server/client applications, where an application has to be loaded in the subscriber's handset, and services such as Mobile Instant Messaging and SMS 2.0 are perfect examples of such services that can be successful VAS launches in the region.