Mobile phone service provider, Birla AT&T, announced the launch of a messaging information service, ''Mssngr,'' to its 200,000 subscribers in Maharashtra, Goa and Gujarat, on the low cost SMS channel.

''Mssngr'' is powered by technology from wireless application service provider, iSolv, who had recently launched mChat (mobile chat), another wireless mobile technology. This will make a range of value added data services accessible to the wireless carrier subscriber.

The new service, available in chat-mode, will be extended in three phases. The first will allow basic person-to-person messaging connectivity, the second from person-to-Internet and the third will be with sites which give specific information.

Talks are on with entities like HDFC, NDTV, etc., for the purpose. Initially, the information will be of the "lighter" category, such as jokes, horoscope, and banking, said Rajat Mukarji, vice president, business development, Birla AT&T, at the launch of the service, in Pune.

"This will be the first salvo of services. All AT&T subscribers will have a dedicated email account. Over the next couple of months, some of the services that would be added to the range would be banking, downloading tunes, graphics, (which would be handset dependent), interactive games, railway schedules, airlines schedules, and in fact all the ''yellow page'' information services," said Mr. Mukarji

"The ''Mssngr'' service comes as a combination of connecting the wireless world with the Internet world," says iSolv MD, Milind Agnihotri. "The power comes from harnessing content and marrying it to mobile technology, and bringing those applications to the end user device. Essentially, it''s bringing the power of mobility to the Internet."

"It would be possible to pick up and choose any HTML content, strip them of the colour and audio, and bring them over as messages, " says Mr. Agnihotri.

Initially, AT&T has pegged the cost at Re 1 per outgoing message for the sender, while incoming messages will be kept free. Mr. Mukarji believes the competitive cost band will help attract users and traffic, and increase volumes. "As the services and applications grow, the volumes will be staggering," he says.

He cites the experience of UK where messaging services had peaked to 10 billion messages per month, spread across 10 million subscribers. Or that of the Philippines, where the subscriber base jumped from 1.8 million to 3.6 million over a nine month span after messaging service was introduced. "We anticipate a user rate of 100 messages per month on an average", he says, conservatively, once the slew of services is all in place.

AT&T will add a number of services, including specifically programmed ''alerts'', such as regular updates on stock portfolio prices, cricket scores, news flashes, etc., so the services will be ''highly interactive and real time''.

With the evolution of newer wireless technologies such as WAP, GPRS and 3G (and concomitant tightening of security in the internet arena), services would move further up the value chain, says Mr. Agnihotri. These would funds transfer, stock trade, and new applications such as multimedia, images, audio, even voiced animated messages.

As Mr. Mukarji observes, "The mobile phone is fast moving from being a ear-piece into an eye-piece." Soon you can expect to find people clutching cell phones, not to their ears -- but focusing in front, before their eyes.