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^{The idea is 24 years old} The Father of SMS receives The Economist award

Finnish consultant and investor, Matti Makkonen, received earlier this month The Economist’s Innovation Award of Computing and Telecommunications for his work on Short Message Service (SMS) text messaging.

The idea of the SMS services was first discussed by Matti Makkonen in a pizzeria in Copenhagen with two other Finns, Seppo Tiainen and Juhani Tapiol. The discussiontook place 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.

“Without international collaboration the SMS would not have become a global success story, says Matti Makkonen. Today the SMS is available on global scale on a wide range of networks, including 3G networks.

Makkonen, retired from his executive position at Finnet operator group, is now a shareholder and a board member in a young high tech company called Bookit.

The small Finnish company has created an innovative platform for managing easy to use dialogues on SMS. The systems, called Bookit iSMS, has become quite popular in Bookit’s home country Finland, where people are using the iSMS in many services. More than half of the Finnair’s passengers do their check in with iSMS.

An air traveler can get his boarding pass by answering with letter A to Bookit’s iSMS service request on his mobile phone.

Makkonen, a member of the board of directors at Bookit, calls Bookit’s innovation very clever because it uses the benefits of an already existing SMS standard but manages SMS transactions intelligently by adding “finger prints” to each message. The network does not notice these secret fingerprints and as a result the iSMS service can be used by any of the existing 3.2 billion SMS users anywhere in the world and on any phone.

The intelligence of Bookit’s iSMS service is called Bookit DDM (dynamic dialogue matrix) and it has received 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.

In order to do a business transaction on SMS, it is imperative to know exactly the authenticity of the messages and to interpret the dialogues correctly.

Jukka Salonen, the president of Bookit, explains the popularity of iSMS: “People do not 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 an SMS message is so easy that most people answer the message instantly and this explains the popularity of the service.”

Salonen thinks that Matti Makkonen is just the right person to receive the Economist’s innovation award because he is 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.

More info on the future of the SMS and an interview of Matti Makkonen can be viewed at [Bookit’s net-tv](www.bookit.net/television].

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