The Rise Of Messaging

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Matti Makkonen is a software engineer who passed away a couple of months ago. My
guess is that you didnt hear of his death, and you most likely dont know who he w
as. However, Makkonen is probably one of the most important individuals in the d
omain of communications. And by that I mean on-the-level-of-Alexander-Bell- importa
nt: He invented SMS.
If you didnt realize how pervasive SMS has become, think again. SMS is the most-u
sed application in the world. Three years ago, it had an estimated 4 billion act
ive users. That was more than four times the numbers of Facebook users at the ti
me. Messaging, and particularly SMS, has been slowly taking over the world. It i
s now fundamental to human communication, and it is why messaging apps such as W
hatsApp and WeChat are now worth billions.
While messaging has become central to our everyday lives, its currently only used
in the narrow context of personal communications