Bookit Oy: The Inventor of SMS, Mr Makkonen Received an International Innovation Award
HELSINKI, Finland--(Business Wire)--
Mr Matti Makkonen had discussed the idea of a Message Handling
Service for GSM digital mobile phone in1984 in a pizzeria in
Copenhagen with two other Finns Mr Tiainen and Mr Tapiola during a
conference of mobile phone communication's future. When the
development of GSM digital mobile phone standard was extended from the
Nordic countries initiative to global ETSI workgroup, the idea of SMS
was proposed to be included as a global standard. Makkonen reminds
that global collaboration is essential in order to bring the new
technology to global scale. "Without this international collaboration
the SMS would not have become a global success story", says Makkonen.
Today the SMS is available on global scale on a wide range of
networks, including 3G networks.
Makkonen has already retired from his executive position at Finnet
but is now a shareholder and a board member in a young high tech
company called Bookit. This small Finnish company has created an
innovative platform for managing easy to use dialogues on SMS. Bookit
calls their product the iSMS, because it is interactive and easy to
use. The iSMS has become very popular in Bookit's home country
Finland, where people are using the iSMS for easy to use bookings. For
example, more than half of the Finnair's passengers do their check-in
with iSMS. The service is very easy to use since the user
automatically receives a check-in request from Bookit's iSMS service
and can check-in simply by replying with letter A. Passengers are
extremely satisfied since they avoid queuing and can proceed directly
to the gate because Bookit completes the dialogue by sending an iSMS
boarding pass directly to their mobile phone.
Makkonen says Bookit's innovation is very clever because it uses
the benefits of an already existing SMS standard but manages SMS
transactions intelligently by adding "fingerprints" to each message.
The network doesn't notice these secret fingerprints and therefore the
iSMS service can be used by any of the existing 3.2 billion SMS users
globally on any phone. The intelligence of Bookit's iSMS service is
called Bookit DDM (dynamic dialogue matrix) and it has many
international patents. While the messages are delivered as a standard
SMS message, the iSMS server monitors the SMS message flows and uses
the "DDM - fingerprints" to authenticate each individual message.
Using these fingerprints, the right answers are matched correctly to
the right question. In order to do business transactions on SMS, it's
imperative to know exactly the authenticity of the messages and to
interpret the dialogues correctly.
Mr Jukka Salonen, the president of Bookit, explains the popularity
of iSMS: People don't like to memorize complex keywords or do not
bother installing software into their phone but they all know how to
reply to an SMS message. One-letter-reply to SMS message is so easy
that most people answer the message instantly, what explains the
popularity of the service. The standard SMS network, the mobile phone
or the user do not notice Bookit DDM fingerprints so they work
automatically in all existing phones and can be used globally on any
operator's network.
Mr Salonen thinks that Makkonen is just the right person to
receive the Economist's innovation award because he's a man with a
clear vision of the future but is also able to put decades of hard
work to achieve his visions. When Matti was working on a NMT standard,
many people laughed at the idea. Who would need a mobile phone? When
he suggested an idea of a short message service SMS for the next
version of mobile phone GSM, people already took him seriously,
because NMT had become an amazing success story", says Salonen.
"Matti has a talent to listen patiently to people much below him
in the organization - then suggest out of a box idea. I was just a
young guy, when I joined Telecom Finland in 1996. Matti was top
executive but yet he took time and patience to listen to my ideas of
making PC applications available to a mobile phone. Matti listened
carefully and replied: "Why should we limit mobile applications to
things we normally do on PC! Mobile phone has advantages that PC does
NOT have: It fits nicely in your pocket, so it's always with you. You
can use it with one hand and press buttons with your thumb, even when
you are moving. Think if we could make reservations, payments and
quick and easy transactions by just pressing one button". Makkonen
explained that the mobile phone will become the remote controller of
our lives and people will do most of their bookings and payments with
a mobile phone.
Because of Makkonen's vision and decades of committed work, 3.2
billion people enjoy using the SMS on their mobile phone. The iSMS is
delivering Mr Makkonen's vision of mobile phone based booking
transactions and therefore this interactive version of SMS is quickly
gaining popularity because it works on any mobile phone and on any
mobile network without installing any software into the phone.
More info on iSMS and interview of Matti Makkonen can be viewed at
www.bookit.net/television
BookIT Ltd
Jukka Salonen, Managing Director
Tel.: +358400 312 311
jukka.salonen@bookit.net
Copyright Business Wire 2008
