Personal Instant Messaging





		February 09-Personal Instant Messaging

IMformed - the latest news on Personal Instant Messaging

Welcome

The end of 2008 was a busy time for PIM. Four new PIM services were launched in November and December in Asia and Europe. There are now 40 live PIM services worldwide and indications are that this will continue to grow throughout 2009.

We expect to see significant developments in Latin America in the coming months – including the launch of interoperable PIM services in Brazil. Further activity and new PIM service launches are expected in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Asia in 2009 and further developments are expected in North America too. For more details of recent developments see Global Progress Update below.

With growing interest in improving the user experience for PIM services, and increasing awareness of the opportunities that RCS (Rich Communication Suite) may offer PIM operators we have asked leading operators and vendors to comment on these issues – see the comments below.

We are always interested in talking with operators about their plans and to provide any assistance we can. If we can assist you in any way, please don’t hesitate to contact us.

Last but not least, we hope to see many of you at the PIM Showcase (see below) and RCS Seminar (18th Feb 9:30-12:30, Hall 5, Level 0, Aud 3) in Barcelona next week.

Kind regards
The Personal IM team

GSMA Personal IM Showcase:
Connecting Mobile Communities
Mobile World Congress 2009

Location: Mobile World Congress – The Fira, Barcelona, Spain
Date: Tuesday 17th February 2009, 14:00 – 16:30
Seminar venue: The GSMA Seminar Theatre, GSMA Pavilion, Hall 7, Stand 7P01

Dear Industry Colleague,

On behalf of the GSM Association, we would like to invite you to the Personal IM Showcase: Connecting Mobile Communities, to be held at the Mobile World Congress 2009 in Barcelona, Spain.

The Personal IM Showcase brings together some of the leaders in the Mobile IM industry to share with you their experiences, successes and challenges in developing world class Mobile IM services. The focus of the showcase is “Connecting Mobile Communities” highlighting the developments in interoperability between mobile operators and Web2.0 communities such as social networks and the potential for richer messaging experiences.

The showcase will feature presentations and live demonstrations from operators and vendors who will be showing some of the innovations that will help to create a dynamic and compelling mobile messaging user-experience and help to build connected mobile communities.

If you are interested in offering Personal Instant Messaging services to your customers or just want to learn more about the potential opportunities from the development of the mobile messaging market, you should attend this event.

How to attend the PIM Showcase

Places are limited and attendees will be accepted on a “first come, first served” basis – apply today to avoid disappointment. This seminar is a FREE additional option subject to the purchase of a Mobile World Congress Exhibition Pass or Conference Pass. Select the “Personal IM Showcase” option when registering. To register, please visit the registration website at www.mobileworldcongress.com

If you have any questions, please contact the PIM team by email on pim@gsm.org. We look forward to seeing you at the Personal IM Showcase in Barcelona.

Sincerely yours,

The PIM Team

The Personal IM Showcase is sponsored by:

Global Progress Update

After a busy few months running up to the end of 2008, it has been a quiet start to 2009 for new PIM service launches. However, we expect there will be more new announcements at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona next week.

One exciting development that we have not yet reported, as it happened after we published the last edition of IMformed in December, is that Megafon launched its Personal IM service on 16 December last year. This new service, based on the NeuStar IMSC, will be branded Chat to be in-line with the two other two PIM services live in Russia from Vimplecom and MTS. Interconnect with Vimplecom’s Chat service has been established and it is expected that interconnect between all three PIM services in Russia will be live in the next few months.

Work is also progressing in Portugal, Indonesia and Korea towards national interoperability – more news on these projects in the next newsletter

What lessons can we learn from the User Experience of PIM services? How can these lessons be reflected in next generation services such as RCS?

At least three lessons can be learnt from the first commercial launches of PIM services:

Poor user experience leads to low market adoption. A service must be simple, easy and effortless for the end-user, if it intends to be mass market. User experience comprises several different aspects such as service discovery, application integration with device capabilities (address book, MMS gallery, etc), battery life, etc
Industry support is also key. In particular Telcos, Infrastructure vendors and Handset manufacturers need to be on the same wavelength.
Last but not least, the same service definition, interworking and interoperability are also crucial.

For example, if users themselves must install an application in the device in order to make use of an IM service, the reachable customer base is drastically reduced. The same applies if a separate buddy list needs to be created from the scratch in order to chat with your friends, or if the user wonders whether his friends will required a particular device to be able to chat with him.

This does not happen for instance in RCS, where your buddies are already the contacts in the address book of your phone. A service must be defined based on a top-down approach and following a user-centered design, first looking at the consumer needs and defining the main use cases in such a way that the user experience is enhanced. User experience is key for success and it is being taken into account from the beginning in RCS, where specific working groups have been created that are dedicated to this topic. Some of the lessons learned from IM services are serving as a valuable input for RCS and are part of its specifications.”

Pablo Casso
Head of Messaging Services Development
Telefonica

Turkcell Messenger was launched in February 2005 as one of the very first operator IM services in the world. TurkcellMessenger has evolved into a broad platform where users have a very strong and personal relationship with each other and with the community as a whole. Turkcell Messenger is now accessible not only on mobile downloadable & embedded clients, but also on the web, wap and a PC client. The favourite mobile access channel for the users is downloadable and embedded clients.

Consumers use different features of the service that fulfill their needs and expectations. In addition to IM, they use text & picture messaging frequently. Almost 70% of the Turkcell Messenger traffic is pay-per-message. The service includes the free InfoBuddy service which provides weather forecast, headline news and sports news in IM format several times a day . All a user needs to do in order to receive these alerts is to add the relevant InfoBuddy to his Buddy List. TurkcellMessenger users are able to interact on a peer-to-peer basis with their contacts as well as with the community in general through the use of chat rooms. Chat rooms are still one of the biggest value propositions of Turkcell Messenger.

Burak Ertas
Division Head, Consumer Value Added Services
Turkcell

What we’re seeing is the evolution of IM. IM is not just a simple conversation; it’s much more than that. IM can breathe life into all communications through presence information, emoticons and status updates. However, what’s really interesting is that it is a spring board for all IP services which can come together in one single application, the IM address book.

Users want access to all of their communications services, including IM, SMS, voice or email all from one place on their mobile. They don’t want to have to dip in and out of different services, instead they want to click on the person, see what’s they’re doing and then click on the service. A key lesson NeuStar has learnt is that users have a strong desire to keep connected, share snippets of information or content at any given moment and be able to see the status update of friends and family. They want to be given the choice of how to communicate and they don’t want to be restricted by networks, handset capabilities or communities.

Looking forward, we need to meet this demand – users don’t want to have to log in separately to each social network or IM community and change their status in each one. They want to be able to seamlessly access all sites and they want the data they enter on one site to be functional across any system and accessible from one application on the handset.

What we’re seeing now is IM services and applications embedded on a handset from launch integrated with the address book. We are seeing operators market these services within data bundles and packages to the youth segment. In short, marketing and pricing can make or break an IM service but the user experience is the most important to get right. Working together with operators as their neutral and trusted partner, NeuStar helps its customers bring innovation to market to help create the next generation user experience.”

Guenter Krauss
SVP and General Manager
NeuStar NGM

An entire generation of consumers aged between 15 and 35 is avidly embracing social messaging and networking tools such as Instant Messaging, which provide a virtual hang-out to collaborate and share everyday life experiences, as well as engage in a variety of real-time interactions - professional, informal, or intimate - with a wide user community. As emergent consumer demand gains momentum, operators have the opportunity to capitalize on the viral nature of the service and develop Mobile IM as a single-stop shop for converged community-based communication and media experiences. Equipping users with the ability to retrieve email attachments, conduct real time conversations with buddies on the same or a different network, shift from a text message to video-conferencing over the same IM session, or use an embedded icon to upload and read recently posted blogs and share music playlists without having to browse individual URLs or log onto separate sites, presents a compelling proposition to drive future revenues.

The effective realization of this vision is predicated on seamless inter-working between services, networks and devices. Operators need to learn from the initial experience of launching IM. Several mobile IM service providers have witnessed a marked upward trajectory in consumption patterns by enabling users to communicate between conventional text and IM messages with mobile and online communities within and across select networks. IM service providers have, however, only scratched the surface. From the customer’s perspective there’s been little visible change, with users for the most part experiencing a fragmented messaging environment. While the range of social networking and messaging options are expanding exponentially, users need to manage individual address books, multiple inboxes and different accounts for various social networking services. The key elements of an integrated service experience are a set of shared enablers and components including presence and location, federated authentication enabling single sign-in for multiple services, unified address book across communities and common social inbox to backup user contacts and contact availability over a set of standards-based, scalable, services delivery platforms.

Vikram Shanbhag
VP Value Added Services
Bharti Telesoft

Colibria has been rolling out PIM services now for many years. We have learnt that a PIM service will not deliver a successful service on its own. The user experience has to include additional features such as viral invites to join the service; sent to the user’s phone address book. It must include applications which the user can access from day one to drive usage such as gaming apps, information apps - news etc, and entertainment apps. The advantage of these applications is that the user can access them from day one promoting usage. Finally the most important user experience element that we see is the ability for the user to access other messaging and social network sites through the PIM service. The PIM service is perfect for this being interactive and also able to deliver/upload pictures, whilst also being deployed on a wide range of handsets globally.

For RCS to succeed, it will need to also access a broad subscriber base. This could be an issue as RCS clients are being mainly targeted on new handsets and the danger is that users are unable to find a big enough community to use the new RCS services with, especially in the critical time just after purchase. We also believe that an RCS service that is closed to other messaging and social networks will be limited. There is a great opportunity currently for RCS to be a gateway into these networks whilst creating added value through setting of common status, and posting of messages across multiple networks.

Guy Reiffer
VP Product Marketing
Colibria