25 years ago, the first SMS text message was sent. The message? “Merry Christmas.”
The first text message was sent in 1992 from Neil Papworth, then a developer at Sea Group Telecoms, which worked with Vodafone to develop the first SMS network. Seen then as the next step in executive paging, text messages have come a long way from that first computer-to-phone message.
A few fun facts about texting:
- Over 20 billion texts are sent every day and an additional 30 billion messages are sent each day on WhatsApp
- More people have access to mobile phones than to toilets
- Every phone comes equipped with texting capabilities built-in, making it the most consistent feature
- 95% of texts will be read within 3 minutes of being sent, making it more effective than email (which only has a 20-30% open rate)
- 75% of Millennials prefer texting over talking
Of course, the growth of text messaging is not all rainbows and unicorns, particularly when it comes the use insecure SMS networks in healthcare. It’s hard to disrupt this easy and pervasive technology, so much ingrained into our daily communication patterns. At Telmediq, we’ve worked hard to make our solution just as easy - and more valuable - than plain texting, to add that much-needed disruption to shift the workflow onto a secure platform.
Want to see how we have successful driven users to adopt secure texting?
Sources: OpenMarket, Adobe, WhatsApp, CBC