Today, Google announced that it will be adopting a new standard for carrier messaging called Rich Communications Services (RCS), thus eventually moving on from SMS. The company also announced the acquisition of Jibe Mobile to help bring RCS to its Android products.
Here’s what Mike Dodd, Android RCS Software Engineer and Minister of Messaging, had to say (and how cool is his title?):
Mobile messaging has never been more central to people’s lives, and there is an incredible amount of innovation happening with chat applications across the mobile ecosystem. SMS carrier messaging is used by billions of people every day and enables people to reach anyone around the world, regardless of their device, carrier, app or location. However, the features available in SMS haven’t kept up with modern messaging apps. Rich Communications Services (RCS) is a new standard for carrier messaging and brings many of the features that people now expect from mobile messaging, such as group chats, high res photos and more.
On acquiring Jibe:
As part of this commitment, we’re also very excited to announce that the Jibe Mobile team is joining Google to help us bring RCS to a global audience. Jibe is a leading provider of RCS services and they’ll continue helping carriers easily deploy RCS to their users. We can’t wait to work with them and build on the great work that they’ve already done.
Letter from @JibeMobile CEO on Jibe joining @Google http://t.co/PLKLemAK3j
— jibemobile (@jibemobile) September 30, 2015
In a statement from its CEO, Amir Sarhangi, Jibe explained in a very Googly way how it started:
The big opportunity we saw at the start: to change the way people communicate using their mobile phones.
The “small” challenge we focused on: the future of messaging, the super simple mode for communication that’s favored by billions of people, all over the world.
Jibe had raised $9.1 million, describing itself as “the Cloud Communications Company for Mobile Operators, provides an open end-to-end technology platform for IP Communications.”
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