All Things Digital

The bottom line is texting is at least four times more expensive than transmitting data from Hubble, and is likely to be substantially more than that.

– University of Leicester space scientist Nigel Bannister

If wireless providers applied the per-byte pricing scheme they use for SMS texting to other data transmitted over their cellular networks, it would cost nearly $6,000 to download a single 4MB song. Yet the price of text messaging has doubled industrywide in the last three years.

Why?

A good question. And one that’s finally being asked by Congress. On Tuesday, Sen. Herb Kohl (D., Wis.), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Antitrust Subcommittee, sent letters to Verizon Wireless (VZ), Sprint-Nextel (S), AT&T (T), and T-Mobile (DT) asking them to justify their outrageous text messaging prices. “What is particularly alarming about this industrywide rate increase is that it does not appear to be justified by rising costs in delivering text messages,” Kohl wrote. “Text-messaging files are very small, as the size of text messages are generally limited to 160 characters per message, and therefore cost carriers very little to transmit.”

Kohl noted as well that the companies appear to have changed text-messaging rates at nearly the same time, with identical prices. A troubling coincidence, given that together they serve more than 90 percent of U.S. cellphone users. Said Kohl, “This conduct is hardly consistent with the vigorous price competition we hope to see in a competitive marketplace.”

Makes for great profit margins though …

Well, it’s about time. With 48 billion text messages sent every month in the United States and one of every eight American households using only mobile phones for communications, it’s finally occurred to the federal government that a nationwide cellphone alert system might be a good idea.

And so yesterday the Federal Communications Commission announced plans to develop an emergency-alert system that would broadcast SMS messages to cellphones and other mobile devices wherever a crisis occurs. The Commercial Mobile Alert System, as it’s been dubbed, will deliver three different types of text alerts to mobile phone subscribers: presidential alerts concerning terrorist attacks and whatnot; imminent threat alerts warning of natural disasters; and Amber Alert child abduction warnings.

Sounds like a nice comprehensive program. Too bad you won’t see it for another two years, at least. Unless you happen to live in a region like Contra Costa County in Northern California, where a tech-savvy local government is already hard at work on its own geographically targeted emergency alert system.

Zingku, Jaiku. Jaiku, Zingku. Sounds like the makings for a reprise of David Letterman’s infamous Academy Awards “Oprah, Uma” gag. But really, they’re the names of Google’s latest acquisitions in the wireless communications space.

In late September Google purchased mobile social-networking start-up Zingku. Now it’s gone and bought Jaiku, a Finnish company that offers an “activity stream and presence-sharing service” similar to the more widely known Twitter. Two months. Two mobile social-networking start-ups. Google never explained its plans for Zingku. What’s it going to do with Jaiku? Who knows …

“We plan to use the ideas and technology behind Jaiku to make compelling and useful products,” product manager Tony Hsieh wrote in a post to Google’s corporate blog this afternoon. “Although we don’t have definite plans to announce at this time, we’re excited about helping drive the next round of developments in Web and mobile technology.”

Ah. Helping to drive them the way you drove Dodgeball? To that happy place where social-networking apps go to die? Kidding, of course.

Anyway … Why did Google choose Jaiku over Twitter, a similar company with far greater brand recognition? “The answer seems pretty obvious to me,” says Tim O’ Reilly. “Jaiku isn’t a ‘lifestreaming’ company per se. They are a mobile company in the business of creating smarter presence applications. Far from being a runner-up behind Twitter, they are a leader in a category most people haven’t fully grasped yet. Google is clearly thinking a lot about mobile, and so they do grasp it.”

Of course, there’s another answer to that question as well. Twitter founder Evan Williams, whose previous company, Blogger, was acquired by Google in February 2003, may not have wanted to see another of his creations doomed to irrelevance by the search giant.

Which is not to say Twitter won’t be acquired. As RedMonk analyst James Governor points out, the company is probably looking pretty good to Yahoo right now. “Google and Yahoo are in dueling acquisition mode, and Yahoo is almost certain to respond,” said Governor. “Especially since Twitter has begun to use a footer on SMS messages it sends out–which could of course be used as a microbillboard.”

Yahoo finally beat Google to something. It brought its email client out of beta before Gmail.

This morning Yahoo officially relaunched Yahoo Mail, ending a two-year public test of the Web-based email service that began in September 2005. Its overhaul completed, Yahoo Mail is no longer just a Webmail client, it’s a “social communication” tool. “Our goal is to make (Yahoo) Mail a more social experience,” John Kremer, vice president of Yahoo Mail, told Reuters. “We really look at ourselves as sitting on top of the largest dormant social network out there.”

To that end, Yahoo Mail now boasts SMS (short message service) support, offering its users the ability to send text messages to cellphones. It’s the first free Web-based email service to offer that feature, and it’s almost certainly starting a trend by doing so. Notes Paul Ruppert, founder of mobile-market consultancy Global Point View, SMS usage is exploding: “The future of mobile messaging with over 3 trillion text messages annually would logically seem well secured,” he wrote in a post to Mobile Messaging 2.0. “A well of demand currently from 2.1 billlion users globally is not going to dry up over night. Plus, all the trends are upward. There is revenue and SMS usage growth in even the most mature country markets such as the U.K. Message-dense nations with high percentages of young populations, mostly in Asia, continue to come online to mobile. Even in markets like the U.S., which lagged in embracing the ease and power of texting and seemingly preferred email and instant messaging, text messaging has become an intimate aspect of daily lives, especially for those 15 to 25.”