Invest in Finland

Finnish consultant received the Economist’s Innovation Award

01/11/2008

The inventor of SMS is a Finnish Consultant Mr. Matti Makkonen. He presented the idea in Copenhagen during a conference of mobile phone communication's future in fall of 1982. Initially conceptualized as Message Handling Services, SMS was proposed to be included in the GSM digital mobile phone standard as early as in 1984 by the Nordic Countries.  SMS was originally designed as part of GSM, but is now available on a wide range of networks, including 3G networks.

Matti Makkonen has already retired from his executive position at Finnet but he is still working as a consultant and board member for Bookit Ltd. Bookit has developed the next version of the SMS called iSMS.

The president of Bookit, Mr. Jukka Salonen appraises Matti Makkonen as one of the greatest visionaries in telecom technology:

“Matti Makkonen is a man with a clear vision of the future. 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 Jukka Salonen.

In Finland already over 20 % of the population is using the next version of SMS that is called the intelligent SMS (iSMS). For example, more than half of the Finnair’s passengers are able to walk directly to the gate because they have received their iSMS boarding passes into their mobile phone. The genius of the iSMS is that it looks like a standard SMS and works on all mobile phones and networks and therefore everyone knows how to use it. More than a million people have used the iSMS to book different type of services. The intelligence of the iSMS is built on the network side, so the service automatically recognizes the user and his transaction, even if the user is just pressing a single button.

Source: Economist, BookIT