Vancouver company discovers lost continent.

Upside Wireless provide an international text messaging service that allows it’s customers to send and receive text messages to and from any country in the World, regardless of which network operator it’s customers are with. It provides this service through it’s consumer website www.ipipi.com. They have over 300,000 customers worldwide. Upside Wireless is one of the very few companies with the ability to send and receive text messages to any phone on the planet. The company, established in 2000, provides a unique lifeline to many customers, providing a means of communication to families and friends using simple text messaging.

The company is witnessing unprecedented growth due largely to the increasing migration of people between countries. This migration is fuelling a need for people to keep in touch with friends and family back home, beyond the use of email, with something more immediate, personal, and importantly mobile. Over the past 15 years, the number of people crossing borders in search of a better life has been rising steadily. At the start of the 21st Century, one in every 35 people is an international migrant. If they all lived in the same place, it would be the world's fifth largest country with 175m people.

Global migration affects every country; they are all either places of origin, transit or destination for migrants. While the major countries of emigration are in the developing world, not all the major immigration countries are developed countries. It is estimated that, in 2000, Western industrialised countries absorbed about 40% of the world's migrants. This displaced, global audience communicate using email, IM, social networks, voice, mail and SMS. These consumers have a need for a simple, easy to use, cost effective means of keeping in touch with their families back home. The growth of mobile continues unabated worldwide, mobile subscribers have reached 2.1 billion globally and SMS revenues are forecast at $50bn USD by 2010 driven by almost 2.38 trillion messages.

The total number of mobile subscribers worldwide at the end of 2005 grew to 2.129 billion and mobile phone penetration globally is forecast to grow to over 50% by 2009. Key growth is in the Asia Pacific region, with vast opportunities in China, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Thailand, Indonesia, Vietnam and the Philippines. By 2011, the Asia Pacific region will account for approximately 50% of the world’s entire mobile subscriber base, with a staggering 1.067 billion subscribers between China and India. The number of mobile subscribers in Africa at the end of 2005 was 113.55m; this is forecast to rise to 378m by 2011.

Worldwide, SMS has emerged as the cheapest, quickest, easiest form of peer-to-peer mobile communication ever known and is still growing in all regions. Other mobile messaging technologies, (e-mail, instant messaging (MIM), and to a lesser extent push to talk (PTT) and video messaging), are growing in popularity. Mobile Instant Messaging (MIM) has a strong future in certain markets, particularly the US and Europe. However, a large proportion of global mobile subscriber growth in the next 5 or 6 years will be from low-income per-capita emerging markets fuelling continued growth for basic SMS services.

No other non-verbal form of communication in the world is used by so many individuals and is experiencing such a rapid expansion of its user base. The big success story is SMS, text messaging remains the most dominant mode of mobile data communication. High costs and cumbersome procedures keep customers from fully embracing more advanced applications so far. As an example, in 13 Asia-Pacific markets’, including China and India, mobile data contributed 20% of annual mobile revenue, of this 20%, up to 90% was revenue generated from text messaging.

Commenting on this extraordinary growth, Jonathan Lyon, Director of Marketing at Upside Wireless, says “The advent of cross border text messaging now makes it possible for people to communicate cost effectively, immediately no matter where in the World they are. We have over 300,000 customers from every corner of the globe. From as far afield as the Tokelau Islands in the Southern Ocean to Afghanistan, China, and India. It's amazing but we have customers in every country and region of the World who use IPIPI daily."