My company is developing an MMS Publishing System. The target market
for the product will be businesses such as agencies, publishers and
content providers who manage, deliver and receive content, in the form
of text, pictures, photos, animations, speech, audio and video, from a
desktop to multiple users of 3G and 2.5G based mobile phones. These
businesses we anticipate will use the system to acquire new customers
or retain and support existing customers. I want to know if such a
product exists today as I cannot find any potential competitors.
The US Patent office (uspto.gov) lists these five patents if you look
for MMS. Maybe the assignees or inventors (both listed in the patents)
might be a starting point for finding competition.
1 6,373,817 Chase me system
2 6,252,952 Personal user network (closed user network) PUN/CUN
3 5,768,513 Multimedia messaging using the internet
4 5,661,781 Message notification system for card users
5 5,623,538 Shared distribution of internal message storage
facilities by a plurality of communication terminals
A friend of mine works at X-Ca which seems to deliver a product with
similar capabilities.
It's not really my field of expertise, so take a look at:
http://www.x-ca.com
Kind regards,
rhansenne-ga.
If there is a company, then they are likely still trying to stay below
the radar as MMS is only just starting. In general, I presume your
solution is supposed to work via a GSM/GPRS mobile phone or card
attached to the Desktop, which would make me worried about sending out
huge amounts of messages. If you are talking about an XML solution
which is talking to one of the current SMS providers, then this is a
different idea.
In general, you can look for competitors with every single SMS
provider out there though I think. Take this one for example.
SMS.ac: http://www.sms.ac
Fastest growing service ever. 400 providers in 170 countries
connected. Doing SMS and having registered MMSbox as a trademark.
There you can already see that they will also support MMS. They also
have a, yet to be opened, Developer Network. What that means, in my
mind, and that's a guess, is that they will have a way for people to
access their service via an application or something else to send
messages. This means that any authoring tool that can create a message
that is compliant to the MMS standard should be able to send messages
via them. For big volumes, the option to be connected to the carriers
is the largest barrier of entry I would say.
In general, any company that is now helping companies send out SMS is
a potential competitor. For a list of some of them go here:
http://dir.yahoo.com/Business_and_Economy/Business_to_Business/Communications_and_Networking/Telecommunications/Wireless/Global_System_for_Mobile_Communications__GSM_/Short_Message_Networks__SMN_/
So there are really two answers. One, I do not know of any companies
creating an MMS content management solution or authoring solution at
this time. There probably are some though.
Second, any SMS provider will make sure they move to MMS and provider
companies with access to send them easily. This will probably be
similar to SMS sending which now works via simple scripts and HTTP to
their servers.
I hope this helped a bit.
Good luck on your venture. MMS will be huge, so you are looking at a
very interesting market.
bizkiffer
 I could use some help again...
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Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS) Publishing System