2 Trillion SMS messages

Often many of us simply don’t pay attention to signs of growth or are unaware until some new development, meme or technology has hit critical mass and we then must pay attention to it.

We’ve all known for some time that mobile phones hit critical mass globally and that Millenials and GenX’ers are using text messaging as a primary means of communication. What you might not know is the volume of messages and Cellular News had this to say about a recent Gartner report:

As the popularity of SMSs continue to grow, Gartner forecasts 2.3 trillion messages will be sent across major markets worldwide in 2008, a 19.6 percent increase from the 2007 total of 1.9 trillion messages. Mobile messaging revenue across major markets will grow 15.7 percent in 2008 to $60.2 billion, up from $52 billion in 2007.

Asia/Pacific and Japan are the biggest consumers of mobile messaging. Gartner estimated that there were 1.5 trillion messages sent in 2007, and the number will grow to 1.7 trillion in 2008. Volumes of short messages and picture messages will increase, but growth rates are expected to slow in line with the saturation of mobile connections.

As I discussed in this post Mobile Global Grid: When the World is at Your Fingertips, mobile technologies — and especially smartphones — may already be the primary way many of us stay connected to others and is increasingly putting the world of knowledge at-our-fingertips. With messaging schemes growing quickly (e.g., Twitter, Pownce, Jaiku) and mobile providers ostensibly opening their networks (e.g., Verizon and AT&T) to other devices and potentially more unrestricted data use, a rich always-on, always-connected critical mass of people will be using much more than simple SMS and it behooves any of us in business to keep tabs on this growth.