I’ve long argued that one of the reasons MMS is slow to take off is that it’s hard to compose a meaningful message. This is obviously on top of the high cost of sending, the operators’ connectivity issues and simple usability.
What I mean is, apart from just sending a snap as a visual cue of what’s happening to you right then (as in “wish you were here” or even “I bet you wish you were here”) you need to invest time and thought into composing the right juxtaposition of image and text – and perhaps audio too. So although a picture might indeed be worth 1,000 words, an sms can do the job far quicker and just as effectively. Not to say more cheaply too.
One of the ways of overcoming this problem would be template MMS construction, which would make dashing off a quick MMS a simpler job. But even now, the options built in on the phone, or even accessible from a mobile website (OK Enrique?) are very limited as far as I know.
But now an Israeli company, IDT Video Technologies, has come up with a very clever bit of kit that solves some of the pain I’ve been pointing to. Their Mobile Chameleon product makes it very easy to change and annotate a simple image, with quite radical results.
IDT don’t sell direct to the user, but via the operator, so there are many ways in which it can work at street level. But one scenario might be that you’re pissed off about something and want to tell a friend in a light hearted way. So you snap yourself with your camera phone like this:
You then send it to your friend, via a special short code, captioning it with “I’m angry”. The short code then routes it through IDT’s server, which sees the keyword “angry” and animates the picture accordingly. When it gets delivered, moments later, your friend sees something like this:
The technology is capable of a lot more than this simple example, like changing the background or putting the head in a new environment:
Of course, there are issues with using this kind of system as I’ve described. For a start, you can’t preview what your photo will look like. And you need to communicate what the options available are for the keywords. So it might work much better as a mobile website, which IDT’s technology supports anyway.
I see the big opportunity here for operators to use this as a great way of promoting MMS usage. In other words, adding this facility as a free feature and using it as a marketing tool. Unfortunately, I think operators will use it to try to charge more for an already highly priced service. Which means that both this technology and MMS will continue to languish sluggishly in the data shallows.
Maybe, an operator somewhere will seize on this and start to maximise the potential of the richer messaging. It’s certainly not THE answer, but it’ll certainly help.
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