Jongla, a Finnish messaging app, is attempting to make headway into the mobile messaging market with the introduction of stickers. You read correctly—stickers. The app is free and available in any HTML5 capable browser, such as Android (News – Alert) and iOS. Similarly to most messaging programs, it has notifications, location information, and photo sharing. Thankfully, the app also adds your address book rather than having users manually enter each contact.
Where do the stickers come in? Jongla wants make a play at a younger audience by offering these “stickers”, which act as emoticons, or emoji, but are larger, more detailed, and more specific. The stickers are available now for $1.99 for a pack of 16.
The question of whether the market needs another messaging app is the real kicker here. With so many apps to choose from, including Whatsapp and Kik, which already have huge user bases extending into the tens of millions, it seems there might not be room for another competitor.
Jongla feels differently in that they believe their pitching toward a 15-24 year old market and will hit an untapped resource. The stickers seem a bit more reasonable when viewed in this light. On top of that, according to research by Juniper, the mobile messaging market will exceed 1.3 billion users by 2016 and will generate more than 70 billion in revenue, overshadowing P2P use.
With those figures in mind, it is time to consider that Jongla may have a pretty good idea what they are doing, as there might soon be enough pie for everyone to have a slice. The looming question that should be on the minds of service providers everywhere, is, with this large of a predicted push into mobile messaging market, what will become of old fashioned SMS messages?
Edited by
Brooke Neuman