Mumbai, July 17: The voice SMS market is set to
emerged globally and venture capital investors are showing
greater interest in funding companies engaged in offering the
service.
Kirusa, a leading mobile value added services provider'
today, announced USD 10 million funding from venture capital
firms Helicon Venture Partners and Nexus India Capital.
This was the third round of funding for the company which
holds a patent from the US patent office for its voice SMS
technology. It had earlier received funding of USD 9 million,
Inderpal Singh Mumick, chairman and CEO of Kirusa said.
According to Mumick, globally, the mobile phone industry
is raking in USD 585 billion as revenues from value added
services. By the year 2010, global SMS traffic is projected to
grow to 2.4 trillion messages with revenues of over 65 billion
dollar accounting for 10-20 per cent of total revenues of a
mobile carrier.
Voice SMS that enabled people to send SMS messages by
speaking has all set to become an all important communication
for people from various walks of society, he said.
Voice SMS scores over the text message as it can be used
by people who are illiterate or those who have difficulty in
a particular language. Besides, there was no emotion conveyed
in text message which is something voice SMS would make
possible, he added.
In some situations like when one is driving, it would be
the voice SMS that is used rather than a text one. Mumick said
voice SMS was a very high growth market and as per estimates,
the global market could be worth 9 to 15 billion dollar by the
year 2010.
Presently, however, the market size is only one to
five per cent of what has been projected for 2010, he said.
Bureau Report