OK, so we know that voice is the killer app for mobile phones; SMS has got the young and blue collar trade sewn up; and ringtones and logos do a roaring trade in the consumer space too. We also know that WAP is cwap and that 3G is late. Very late. So what's next up on the mobile phone money-making menu?
Pictures. And colour pictures too, sent by our mobiles, or so Nokia and Yankee Group would have us believe. According to the research house, the next-gen multimedia messaging services (MMS) market will be worth $10bn in Europe by 2006.
Nokia says that half of its handsets will be MMS-enabled by 2003.
MMS technology is nearly there already - if not the infrastructure, or the handsets (and the latter will have to be much cheaper than currently envisaged). But you can see from the income generated by logos, ringtones, SMS etc. why industry players have such high hopes of raising their ARPUs (average revenue per user) through MMS-driven premium content.
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