2196: Infobip Discuss the 30th Anniversary of SMS Messages

On Dec. 3, 1992, a 22-year-old Papworth texted "Merry Christmas" to Richard Jarvis, a director at Vodafone who was at a company Christmas party. It was the first time a cellphone user had ever received words instead of a voice call on their device. Papworth was a developer and test engineer for Sema Group, which was rolling out the world's first short message service (SMS) center for Vodafone U.K.

This noteworthy event later led to Papworth being featured in a Best Buy Super Bowl commercial, a Jeopardy! question, a book and the Museum of Global Communications. It also gave rise to an important new medium now used regularly by most Americans and employed by billions of people globally.

Neil Papworth discusses the changes he has seen since sending the first text message. Best known as the first person ever to send a text, Neil made his indelible mark on the world of communications – and the annals of tech and text history – early in his career.

In addition, Infobip recently revealed insights from their 30th Anniversary of the SMS report, so I invited Ivan Ostojic back on the podcast to join the discussion. In 2020, Infobip became the first Croatian company to reach unicorn status. In the past 12 months alone, over 5 billion people have used Infobip solutions and services.

Ivan shares insights from the report and discusses the future of SMS and other means of messaging for business purposes.

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