Coke is in the business of selling delicious colored sugared water -- in volume. Makes sense that they would focus on SMS, which billions of people can utilize. Still, it points to some of the issues with a cool, futuristic NFC infrastrucutre: in the early days, there is no economic benefit to have multiple options (e.g. NFC via smartphones and physical credit cards and cash, etc).

Which is why Coke and Starbucks and the low-cost Square service are necessary. They help to fund the infrastructure, reduce the costs, the risks and increase awareness of using our mobile devices in place of wallets.

Atlanta-based Coca-Cola has hundreds of these vending machines in place in Norway, Sweden, Finland and Great Britain through a partnership between a Coca-Cola bottler and Ericsson.

Consumers can use SMS or cash to pay via the machines.

There is no need for registration or to download an app.

When consumers use SMS to pay, the cost of the purchase ends up on their mobile phone bill.

“We are going to consider this for other countries as well,” Mr. Busk said.

The challenge is that the machines do not make economic sense unless they do not accept any cash – which requires regular machine maintenance – and only accept credit, contactless and SMS payment methods.

“We have 1.7 billion servings a day and a massive number are cash transactions, with vending a big area,” Mr. Busk said. “The challenge we face is that you don’t really get to a great economic advantage until you can safely pull all of the cash out that.”

The more apps, content, location-based services, videochat and other services we get on our smartphones, the less our appetite for SMS is sated.

Sybase 365 is a SMS messaging hub supporting multiple carriers. They just reached 1 trillion messages.

One trillion messages is equivalent to processing approximately 32,000 messages per second for every second of one year. With the phenomenal global growth of mobile messaging, Sybase 365 claims that it is rapidly accelerating beyond the 1 trillion milestone, as it currently processes more than 1.5 billion mobile messages per day.

While it took eight years to get to 1 trillion messages, based on current and expected traffic growth, Sybase 365 should hit the next trillion messages in 2012.

No other communication medium has the ability to reach more people than SMS, according to Sybase 365.

I love Facebook. Only not like that. I just think it is going to continue to grow and pull in more ads, more location-based advertising, lead the global change to social commerce, create a worldwide virtual gaming platform, offer an alternative to cash and credit cards. Pretty much everything.

Which is why I love SMS GupShup. It's a SMS-based social network in India. It lives on the mobile phone. It is more popular there than Facebook and Orkut. From Mobile Marketing Watch:

SMS GupShup the text-based social network has reached 35 million total users while adding over 1 million each and every month.

These figures show SMS GupShup surpassed July traffic on Facebook (with 21 million unique visitors) and Orkut (with 20 million unique visitors) — two social networks who have long fought for social dominance in the region.  Granted, SMS GupShup differs, but it shows mobile’s dominance in India.

There are roughly 550 million mobile phone users in the country and only 50 million web users, according to the company.  With a 10 to 1 mobile-to-PC ratio and SMS serving as the most popular communications platform, the market is ripe for SMS GupShup to take off, which it obviously already has.  The startup currently processes more than 500 million messages a month and accounts for over 5 percent of all texts sent within India.

The company has leveraged its massive user base into a profit machine as well, using its “groups” feature to create SMS-based communities around brands on the network.  With over over 3.5 million groups surrounding brands such as Microsoft, eBay, pepsi, Nokia, Ford, and Dell, the startup is on to something huge.

So easy, even our Secretary of State can do it!

“I just texted a contribution myself, because we know from our own experience, particularly in Haiti, small donations can add up to make a big difference,” Secretary Clinton said earlier this week. “Americans have always shown great generosity to people facing crises worldwide. So I urge Americans to join this effort and send some much needed help to the people of Pakistan.”

The Secretary was talking about the recent floods in Pakistan, from which 1,400 people have died and more than three million people have been affected, according to the United Nations. In response, the mGive Foundation (the charitable partner of Mobile Accord, which serves hundreds of U.S. philanthropic organizations and has raised more than 95 percent of all funds gathered via mobile giving) and several of mGive’s disaster relief partners has launched text donation campaigns that will aid victims by distributing tents, relief supplies, and humanitarian assistance.

We will formally begin my age of the Great Leveling by 2016 -- and I predict at least 2 billion smartphones in operation by then.

Companies like Shorthand Mobile are making that date seem conservative. They are using lower-cost mobile phones and SMS to enable low-cost, limited mobile web and applications. From TechCrunch:

Launching in beta today on select Motorola and Nokia handsets on AT&T and on Windows Mobile phones, Shorthand TextApps use SMS to expand access to top brands and mobile content including social networks, local search, sports scores, weather forecasts, movie times, news and entertainment. TextApps is an app you download which then creates a more intuitive UI for text-based apps.

Once you download Shorthand, it uses your SMS text messaging plan to connect you to the web content you want. Apps in the TextApps library include CitySearch, Netflix, Facebook Mobile, Twitter, The New York Times and Yelp. Of course, Facebook, Twitter and others have independently integrate with SMS for their sites but Shorthand claims to add more functionality by almost recreating a basic smartphone app. Shorthand is also now available in India on all major carriers and will launch in Brazil this spring. The starup will offer localized TextApps for these countries. Shorthand is free to download, but you will be charged for SMS messages via your SMS plan with your carrier.

As we wrote in our initial review, year, the technology behind is very basic so users shouldn’t expect to see a iPhone like Facebook-app on their phone with TextApps. That being said, the fact that Shorthand has struck deals with Nokia and Motorola to include its offering on their phones and could become a useful way to incorporate extra functionality into basic mobile phones.

Oh, another thing. Microsoft remains a PC-centric company. They are not gaming. They are not enterprise. They are (still) not mobile. The smartphone is the computer. The PC is the word processor. Because of all their talent and management acumen, I do not expect them to be extinct by 2016. But I do believe their stock will be no higher than it was in 2000. Yes, boys and girls, that's a 16 year flat line.