MSN and Vodafone today announced plans to launch a first-of-its-kind seamless instant messaging (IM) service between PCs and mobile phones.
Customers of both companies will be able to see the “presence” of their contacts and exchange instant messages between MSN® Messenger on a PC and Vodafone Messenger on mobile phones and vice versa. By offering customers a seamless PC-to-mobile messaging option with instant messaging, MSN and Vodafone will expand communication choices, delivering an enhanced messaging offering for MSN and Vodafone customers who want to stay in touch with friends, family and colleagues.
The service will bring together customers of MSN Messenger, the world’s largest instant messaging service with more than 165 million customers worldwide, and Vodafone, which has almost 155 million customers around the world, as messaging continues to grow in popularity on PCs and mobile phones. Initially, MSN and Vodafone will launch the messaging service in various European countries, including Spain, before the end of the year.
In Spain, over 7 million internet browsers use MSN Messenger and additionally 11.5 million Vodafone customers can benefit from this agreement.
The service will be based on the familiar mobile commercial model of “Calling Party Pays”, where users will only pay for messages sent and not for connection. As they do today, Vodafone customers will prepay or pay for the service through their monthly bill, while MSN Messenger customers will be able to pay through packages available in connection with MSN Messenger.
Building on and complementing the messaging success of SMS, instant messaging between PCs and mobile phones enables new service benefits to customers such as immediacy, the ability to tell whether a contact is available to receive a message (presence) and the ability to see the text of whole conversations. By adding the service functionality of IM and by connecting MSN and Vodafone customers, both companies expect more frequent interaction between PC and mobile customers, resulting in more traffic.
Commenting, Victor Castro, Managing Director of MSN Spain, said: “Our focus is on the development of on-line communications services and above all, the integration with mobile platforms. This agreement with Vodafone will enable us to make a significant advance towards the definition of an interactive communications centre designed for our more than 9.5 million users in Spain, for whom immediacy, personalisation and value added services are our greatest assets”.
Antonio García Urgelés, Director of the Consumer Business Unit of Vodafone Spain, added: “We have brought together two of the world’s largest messaging communities with a first of its kind for both industries – a seamless PC-to-mobile instant messaging service. Vodafone customers will now be able to use IM and its additional service benefits to stay in touch with mobile and PC friends and family.”
In Spain, one in every two internet browsers use on-line instant messaging, with MSN Messenger as the preferred service, offering 90% coverage. Over the last two years, “Fenómeno Messenger” (Phenomenal Messenger) has grown in strength, particularly since the launch of new additional services such as full-screen video-calling, personalization capability, the sending of messages to mobiles, etc.