Text Messaging and Convergence


IM and VOware are wonderful tools that bring our remote employees and friends back into a tighter circle. Unfortunately, those tools require at least a laptop to function. However, many times, we are in a supermarket or at a bus stop during bounded work hoursor at least what used to be bounded work hoursand are not carrying our bulky laptops.

Text messaging, also known as SMS, was invented by cell phone companies, not computer companies. Thank goodness for that, because phone companies have always better embraced interoperability among their competitors. (Could you imagine if your AT&T cell phone could only call other AT&T customers? The computer world thinks nothing of having such restrictions, at least among end-user applications, unfortunately.) Now that cellular networks are all digital, it is pretty straightforward to combine text messaging with voice. Text messaging is disproportionately used by teenagers currently, partly because they are more often away from a computer (and therefore away from IM) and partly because it is cool. Text messaging is far more rudimentary than IM. For one thing, you lose the "awareness" of who else is on. (There is neither a buddy list nor a suitable display that could even show one.) Furthermore, you are relegated to typing messages by using a phone keypad that has only eight useful keys. It is very cumbersome to type a message of any length.

The good news is that more functions are coming to your cell phone thanks to convergence. The cell phone manufacturers are getting creative and making mobile phones smartermore like PDAs. In turn, the makers of and PDAs are now carrying cell services. It is pretty clear that the future will bring us pervasive, simple, cell-enabled devices that allow nearly the same set of messaging capabilities that our bulky computer counterparts offer. As a result, a new challenge will arise: how to receive the right message on the right device.

Ken Kuenzel, CEO of Covergence, a start-up that specializes in message routing among various technologies, states, "It is a significant problem now getting the right message to the right tool for the target user. People want to see a given message as soon as possible. That could mean they want it delivered to their cell phone as a text message if they are on the soccer field, or to their computer via e-mail if they are flying in an airplane. They don't want to process a message twice, and they don't ever want to miss one either. Couple all that with the fact that the back-end business systems for these various technologies are all different and don't mix well. This is turning out to be an important problem to solve." Companies such as Convergence are now appearing to help solve some of the management, interoperability, and integration problems. The future holds hope that we will properly receive messages on our various devices in some coordinated fashion.



    Inescapable Data. Harnessing the Power of Convergence
    Inescapable Data: Harnessing the Power of Convergence (paperback)
    ISBN: 0137026730
    EAN: 2147483647
    Year: 2005
    Pages: 159

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