Law Technology

Two Trillion Text Messages

By Dennis Kennedy

I've been working on my annual legal technology trends article (PDF of 2007 article) and was struck by the follow stats I found in a post by Steve Borsch on the Connecting the Dots blog.

He cites to a Gartner report Summarized in part in Cellular News:

As the popularity of SMSs continue to grow, Gartner forecasts 2.3 trillion messages will be sent across major markets worldwide in 2008, a 19.6 percent increase from the 2007 total of 1.9 trillion messages.

Those are "world-changing" numbers and I thinking, like Steve does, that there are significant implications to these numbers, not the least of which might be in the realm of electronic discovery.

The money quote from Steve's post:

With messaging schemes growing quickly (e.g., Twitter, Pownce, Jaiku) and mobile providers ostensibly opening their networks (e.g., Verizon and AT&T) to other devices and potentially more unrestricted data use, a rich always-on, always-connected critical mass of people will be using much more than simple SMS and it behooves any of us in business to keep tabs on this growth.

I was at a reception last night where people were talking about how IMs were changing the working world and how use of IM was increasing. Look for IM to play a bigger role in collaboration.

To learn more about instant messaging, especially for lawyers, check out the column Tom Mighell and I wrote on the subject two years ago, the column that actually led to us writing our upcoming book on collaboration tools and technologies.

[Originally posted on DennisKennedy.Blog (http://www.denniskennedy.com/blog/)]

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Technorati tags: legal technology instant messaging IM electronic discovery

Full post as published by DennisKennedy.blog on December 19, 2007 (boomark / email).