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Almost two years ago, we posted about Telefonica Movistar's initiative to introduce SMS 2.0 in Latin America (see Telefonica Movistar moving in with SMS 2.0 in LatinAmerica). This week, Colibria announced it was selected by Telefonica International to launch a complete end-to-end 'Movistar Messenger' service with full integration with SMS across its Latin American operators. The solution offered by Colibria will be a centralized, hosted solution.

In late 2006, Telefonica Moviles Spain launched the service known as SMS 2.0 with Colibria and a few months later, both parties announced interconnectivity with Vodafone’s Messenger.

The service SMS 2.0 complies with GSMA's Personal IM initiative, one of its outstanding features is interconnectivity. Telefonica plans to incorporate this feature to enable a single Movistar community across Latin America. Another relevant feature of the service is interconnection with SMS.

There is another important initiative in the region, which is led by the GSMA with Brazilian operators (Brazil Operators fast forward with Personal Instant Messaging). It is not clear from Colibria's press release if this deal with Telefonica's Latin American operations includes Brazilian operator Vivo; last we heard Brazilian operators had agreed to launch a joint RFP for this initiative.

Two more exciting features of this service are a SIM browser that provides access for users with non-Java handsets and access to Facebook.

The SIM browser is a relevant feature for the region, even though smartphones are gaining market share there are still many users with low end handsets.

We have written before about the opportunities for advanced messaging opportunities in Latin America (see LATAM 2009: A Mosaic ofOpportunities). I am excited about this initiative by Telefonica Movistar and expect it to be very successful, particuarly in countries like Venezuela, Argentina and Ecuador.

It will be interesting to see how America Movil will react and if Telefonica Movistar will be interested in allowing interconnection with other operators, as will be the case with Claro Brazil.

Claro Brazil as well as Vivo, are part of the group led by the GSMA who have committed to the Personal IM initiative, including interconnectivity betwen operators and SMS integration.

Update on Friday, June 19, 2009 at 8:41AM by Raul

Adding link to Colibira announcement: Colibria Wins Global Mobile IM Contract from Telefonica http://bit.ly/GpqYk