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And so this is Christmas ….
22 years ago the first SMS was sent (December 3rd, 1992) with a simple message: Merry Christmas.
From that lonely message we grew to 160B in 2012 and then they started to slow down. Not such a big decrease, all in all. But this is because many people around the world are still without an (affordable) access to mobile internet. In the US last year the number of internet text messages reached 150B, au pair with the SMS and in 2014 it is estimated at 300B (whilst the expectation is that SMS year total in US will be less than 145B). In Mexico, 90% of text messages are now going through the Internet (because SMS are still relatively expensive there) and overall the SMS biz of Telecom Operators has lost close to 50B$ (due to fewer SMS being sent as well as to the bundling of free SMS in subscription fees). In an estimate published in February 2014 by the end of 2014 WhatsApp should have managed close to 7,000 billion messages worldwide! Today we might see a new WhatsApp record, over (last one was 66B messages in a day) as digital wishes overwhelm paper ones.
And so this is … a blended Christmas, as we say in EIT ICT Labs, the digital with the analogue, bits with atoms.
A big hug to all the EIT ICT Labs community and to all those that, one way or another, are using Information and Communication Technologies. This should leave pretty few out!
Have a look at the Digital Christmas clip, it is not new but still… worth seeing, once a year.
