SMS company's message has ring of confidence

"One number to send a text message from any country in the world," is how founder Garry Donoghue described Plus SMS's business vision at the company's annual meeting in September.

A company backgrounder says major global brands could save millions in overheads and create a "whole new dimension in business" by marketing a single text number for international competitions, polls, promotions, or services.

While the company's rocketing share price suggests the concept, and Plus SMS's ability to make it happen, have been embraced by shareholders, little has been said about the technicalities behind the scheme.

According to a Stock Exchange announcement it has "signed agreements with numerous carriers in a significant number of countries which provide exclusive use of over 3000 numbers to be used for the routing of SMS [text] and MMS [picture] messages using short number codes".

Yet the only deals it has specified are with Telecom New Zealand, Pakistan's Pak Telecom Mobile and Lesotho Telecommunications Authority.

Lesotho? At first glance it seems unlikely that this small southern African nation of 1.8 million could be an integral part of a text marketing phenomenon.

But a "business proposition" document posted on the Lesotho Telecommunications Authority's website gives clues about what Plus SMS is up to.

The document says in return for building a local call centre, employing Lesotho staff and bringing revenue-generating international text traffic into the country, Plus SMS would be given exclusive use of the country's text network through Lesotho's international access code, +266, to initiate promotions and information campaigns with international media organisations and global brands.

A glance at your cellphone keypad will reveal at least one multinational might be interested in this sequence of numbers - it is an alpha-numeric combination that spells "+CNN".

If Plus SMS can convince global broadcaster CNN to promote text campaigns through the single, global +CNN number, it could mean millions of messages flooding into Lesotho, with the local telco and Plus SMS both pocketing a share of the "termination" revenue generated.