Anam scores with World Cup SMS deal

Brrring. An Irish goal! Brrring. An English player just got a yellow card. Brrring. A Brazilian save! Welcome to the sound of the World Cup 2002.

Thanks to Irish wireless software company Anam and Swiss/German wireless content company WorldZap, the next two World Cups promise to bring in a chorus of ringing mobile phones, as sports fans sign up to receive a short message service (SMS) message every time a particular incident occurs.

"Now you can take the kids to the park and watch the match," says Mr Mike Brady, chief executive of 14-month-old Anam. The company has provided similar software to Irish sports content company Setanta, which allows individuals to go to an Internet site and choose the sports information they'd like to receive. The service is just one of the ways in which SMS messaging is growing up and finding a commercial and business niche, rather than simply being the technology beloved of "spotty teenagers", says Mr Brady. "People don't see it as a business tool, but the market is backing SMS."

This low-tech alternative to WAP - the technology that lets mobiles connect to and receive content from the Internet - is attractive because it can be used cleverly to do many of the basic jobs of WAP, without WAP's "pain".

While WAP is more versatile "it's a fairly horrible experience", says Mr Brady. Users have to wait for the phone to dial in and connect with services, data transfer times are slow, connections are dropped, and often the biggest hurdle is simply enabling the phone to work properly with WAP in the first place.

Business people needing to access corporate networks to get a customer phone number or a name may find the value of using WAP outweighs the pain. But Anam is betting that they'd be much happier with SMS, which - as any parent knows - even a child can use.

Anam is targeting the "enterprise market" - the corporate world that might find an SMS network of value to employees, and consumer-slanted companies such as WorldZap and Setanta that can turn SMS into a service.

Anam's software lets customers build an "SMS message space" that intelligently sorts information under a keyword such as "new mail" or "weather". When a person sends an SMS message with the keyword, the phone connects to a gateway website linked to the keyword. A phone user can then retrieve e-mail or other basic text data as further SMS messages.

An SMS system could also be set to notify a bank customer that his or her credit card account limit had been reached and ask if he or she wished to transfer funds into the account. A text message indicating "yes" would cause the transaction to be completed remotely.

A sport and entertainment site might send a text message to alert a subscriber that, say, a goal has been scored in a football match and offer a link to draw the person to the website for video footage - for now, delivered over a website, but by 2003, over video-enabled handsets.

"This is low-tech stuff. It's nowhere near as sophisticated as what you can do with WAP," says Mr Brady. But SMS handles many tasks simply and well, and much more cheaply than a WAP connection. He also notes that only 4-5 per cent of handsets are currently WAP-enabled, although that's expected to rise to 50 per cent in the next 18 months.

Unlike most wireless software companies, who target mobile operators, Anam is going after three markets, says Mr Brady - large corporations with a mobile workforce; the financial sector; and content providers such as WorldZap and Setanta.

"We saw the enterprise market was being totally ignored," he says. Anam's product can be used to create both SMS and WAP gateways, and the company recommends offering both.

Two former employees of SSE, the Irish security software spin-off of Siemens, and an Aldiscon employee set up Anam. Mr Brady, who headed SSE, was joined by former SSE chief Internet architect Mr Paul Keogh, now Anam's chief technology officer, and Ms Louise Murray of Aldiscon, now chief operating officer at Anam. The company received £1.5 million (P1.9 million) in seed funding from Mayfair venture capital at its launch.