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Common in Asia, text messaging via cellphone catches on in USA
July 28, 2005
It takes the number of characters in this paragraph -- just 160 -- to flirt, avoid traffic jams, balance your checking accounts, help Africa and win a generation.
Text messaging on cellphones is finally taking off in the USA. It has been around for years and is a huge part of life in Japan and South Korea. But in the U.S. market, text messaging had caught on only among teens and American Idol fans voting for their favorites -- until the past year or so.
Now this seemingly bare-bones medium -- a message limited to 160 text characters transmitted to a cellphone screen for a few cents -- is a raging phenomenon.
“It’s clearly exploding,” says Sky Dayton, co-founder of EarthLink who is now running a U.S. joint venture, SK-EarthLink, with South Korea’s biggest cellular operator. “It’s an example of how a medium evolves into something you never expected it to. Who knows where it will go from here.”
About 5 billion text messages are sent a month in the USA, up from 2.8 billion a year ago, according to the wireless trade association CTIA. But the real story is in the inventive …
