Kirusa reaches voice SMS milestone with 1bn calls

Rating: Developing nations really love this stuff

In Europe and North America, it’s very easy to forget than millions of people around the world can barely read or write. Which makes text messaging kind of difficult, of course. The obvious solution is ‘voice SMS’ where basically you send a message telling some-one that you’ve left them a short voice message. A number of suppliers can offer voice SMS including Bubble Motion. However, rival company, Kirusa, has just reached a significant milestone which should enable it to correctly claim to be the world’s leading developer of mobile social media and value-added services (VAS). Kirusa’s voice SMS and mobile social media applications are now deployed by over 30 carriers across 20 countries. The company has just announced that in July [2012] it processed over one billion calls in a month.That figure is impressive given that monthly traffic on Kirusa platforms was just 250 million calls twelve months ago. So the figure has quadrupled in a year.

Plus, cumulatively, Kirusa platforms have now processed 10 billion calls. If nothing else these figures demonstrate the scalability of its platforms.

GoMobile News suspects, however, that it’s not going to be voice SMS that will be experiencing the growth in future. It’s going to be voice social media.

Both Kirusa and Bubble Motion offer solutions which link voice to Twitter notifications, for example.

The great advantage to voice-centric VAS is, of course, that you don’t actually need a smartphone to use them. They work equally well on featurephones.

As Mrinal Roy, COO with Airtel Ghana, observed, “Kirusa’s feat also points to the high adoption of voice SMS Service and mobile social media.”

He continued, “Given the huge potential of mobile growth in Africa we are sure that Kirusa will play a defining role in the adoption of value added services in the continent.”

Read more about Kirusa’s milestone here.