The company that put messaging on the phone

An idea about availability

In the late 1990s two kinds of messaging were growing fast and had nothing to do with each other. On the PC, instant messengers were spreading because they showed you something the telephone never had: whether the person you wanted to reach was actually there. On the phone, SMS was becoming enormous, but it was blind. You sent into the dark and hoped.

The idea behind Followap was mobile instant messaging, when instant messaging was still just on PCs. Presence was an important part of it.

That distinction shaped everything the company built. Its product was never a consumer app. It was infrastructure sold to mobile operators, so that the operator could run its own messenger, brand it, bill it, and address every subscriber by the identifier they already had.

November 2000: the first one

An agreement was signed on 23 November 2000, between Followap and Eircell — Ireland’s largest mobile operator, with over a million customers. Branded ‘e-merge messenger’, Followap’s iFollow platform was scheduled to go live in early December 2000. It was the first instant messaging service commercially available on mobile phones: bi-directional between WAP handsets and PCs, with buddy lists, presence, and interoperability with the internet messengers of the day.

Eircell’s e-merge portal carried the banner: “Instant messenger — now with free SMS invite”. It was a buddy list that spanned phones, PDAs and PCs and talked to ICQ, AIM and Yahoo — see who is free, leave messages for the ones who are not, send to a group at once, block spam, keep the history.

To sign in you gave your mobile phone number (087) — last seven digits only. Not an account, not a screen name.

Our partnership with Followap allows us to deliver the world’s first mobile instant messaging service to our customers, and we are in no doubt that it will offer them real value.

Kieran Mahon, Media Development Manager, Eircell — 23 November 2000

2001–2002: Vodafone

Eight months later the largest mobile operator in the world signed on. A global agreement with Vodafone Group made Followap the sole provider of its instant messaging platform, rolling iFollow out across the group’s operating companies starting with Omnitel in Italy and Eircell in Ireland.

This is a significant step in our ability to offer our customers advanced mobile services on a global basis. SMS already contributes a significant amount of revenue to Vodafone. Instant Messaging will help drive a new wave of SMS communication across our networks generating further revenues in this important messaging sector.

Fritz Joussen, Global Product Management Director, Vodafone — July 2001

Omnitel Vodafone launched commercially in May 2002, putting the service in front of more than 18 million subscribers. In parallel the company started the Mobile Device Partnership Program, working with handset makers to embed its iMMS client — instant messaging and MMS in one interface — directly into devices, so that using the service required no download at all.

Vodafone called Followap “the sole provider of Vodafone’s Instant Messaging global platform”. The messenger shipped with Vodafone live!, the group’s flagship consumer proposition: “With the launch of Vodafone live! we also see the launch of Vodafone Messenger, an instant messaging service.” By its 2006 annual report it was running in 11 countries, with full compatibility with Microsoft’s MSN Messenger.

2003–2004: making it a standard, not a product

A messenger that only reaches one operator’s customers is not much of a messenger. The lesson of SMS was that interoperability, not features, decides whether a messaging service becomes universal — and Followap spent the middle years of its life on that problem rather than on the product surface.

In April 2003 iFollow v2.2 was certified for Wireless Village — OMA IMPS at the Open Mobile Alliance’s interoperability event, giving the company the largest Wireless Village footprint in the industry. In December,Followap and Jabber completed server-to-server interoperability tests: two competing vendors proving their servers could federate, on behalf of two competing French operators who wanted their customers to be able to talk to each other.

The same period pushed presence outward into other services. Interoperability testing with Motorola put the presence server inside the operator’s IMS core and wired it into Push-to-Talk. A Presence Extension for Qualcomm’s BREW let outside developers build presence-aware applications — multiplayer games that could see who was free to play, address books that showed availability.‘Instant Voice’, built with NMS Communications turned a chat into a voice conference, or scheduled one that dialled itself the moment everyone became reachable.

2005: Sequoia backs it

By 2005 the thesis had a name and a market. Turkcell, then among the five largest GSM operators in Europe, launched TurkcellMessenger on the iFollow Presence Solution. Two months later Sequoia Capital led the company’s Series C round, with existing investors including Carmel Ventures, alongside a release of the Presence Platform rebuilt to run as a SIP application server over IMS core networks.

Doug Leone and Michael Moritz — the two partners who, between them, ran Sequoia — had already seen the potential of mobile messaging. Jim Goetz, meanwhile, knew Followap well from his time as a general partner at Accel, whose portfolio extended deep into carrier and networking infrastructure. Accel never invested in the company. But after Goetz moved to Sequoia and turned his attention to mobile, the opportunity looked different. In June 2005, Sequoia led Followap’s Series C.

February 2006: the interconnect

The most consequential week in the company’s history was 3GSM in Barcelona, 2006. Orange and Vodafone announced they would link their mobile instant messaging communities — the first multi-national operators to commit to it, under the GSMA’s open-standard principles, using the familiar ‘calling party pays’ model. China Mobile, O2 UK, Telefónica Móviles España, T-Mobile International and Turkcell publicly backed the approach.

On the same day, the technical half of the story: Followap’s Interconnect Platform powered Vodafone’s interconnect IM gateway. Federation, applied to consumer messaging — a Vodafone Messenger customer identified by their mobile number, reachable from another network or from an internet messenger, without either side having to care which community the other belonged to.

It was not only announced in Barcelona, it was shown working there. At a GSMA meeting held inside the congress halls themselves, with the major mobile operators present, Allen Scott of Followap demonstrated the interconnect — messages crossing between networks, addressed by phone number. The operators who would have to agree to the thing saw it run first. That meeting is where the line to RCS starts.

It is worth pausing on what that meant. The industry was attempting, in 2006, to build for mobile instant messaging what it already had for voice and SMS: a federated system with no owner, where your identity is your phone number and any network can reach any other. That is precisely the thing the messaging apps that followed did not do.

2006: onto the handset

The rest of that year was deployment. Bouygues Telecom in France in January. 3 Scandinavia in July, bringing MSN Messenger to 3’s network. Mobinil in October, Egypt’s largest operator. And in September, a small landmark: the LG U300 shipped with the world’s first IM key — a dedicated messaging key on a shipping handset, one press to the user’s community, running Followap’s embedded client. Followap had been the first third-party IM application a manufacturer integrated into a phone.

November 2006: NeuStar

NeuStar acquired Followap for approximately $139 million in cash. At acquisition Followap had 17 mobile network operators as customers, covering over 160 million subscribers, and became the core of NeuStar’s Next Generation Messaging group.

Mobile IM is the next major global messaging revenue opportunity, as it represents both the functional evolution of SMS and has an existing 1 billion plus global SMS user base into which it will grow.

Pete Nuthall, Mobile & Wireless Industry Analyst, Frost & Sullivan Europe — November 2006

The platform kept going under the new name. Russia followed in 2007 brought mobile Messenger to 48 million VimpelCom subscribers under the Beeline brand. In 2008 Celcom selected the platform for Malaysia, aiming to make it the first country in Asia where any mobile subscriber could message any other, on any network.

And it was being used. In June 2008 Vodafone Portugal announced that Vodafone Messenger had passed 300 million messages, running at around two million a day, at three euros a month. That was one country out of the eleven Vodafone was running the service in. Eight years after Eircell, mobile instant messaging was a paid service that ordinary subscribers used every day.

Acquired just before the iPhone was announced

Followap was sold on 27 November 2006. Six weeks later, on 9 January 2007, Steve Jobs announced the iPhone. It shipped in June 2007, and the App Store opened in July 2008. Followap was sold, in other words, in the last weeks of the world it had been built for: one where software reached a handset because an operator put it there. Sequoia argued against selling, but nobody in that room knew what was six weeks away.

The rise of WhatsApp

From 2009 the smartphone and the app store brought WhatsApp, and then Telegram — messengers that solved the same problem by ignoring the operators entirely. They kept the one idea the operators had been right about, your phone number as your identity, and threw away the part that made it universal.

Sequoia Capital, which had led Followap’s Series C in June 2005 and held a seat on its board, went on to become the only venture investor WhatsApp ever took — roughly $60 million across 2011 and 2013, led by Jim Goetz. The same thesis about messaging on phones, on both sides of the iPhone.

RCS

The work Followap did with the GSMA in London from 2006 — the interconnect principles behind the Orange and Vodafone agreement, and the Personal IM initiative that the NeuStar acquisition release described as “a pan-industry, mobile operator-hosted messaging service… a critical complement and an upgrade to existing mobile messaging services” — is the same programme that became RCS.

When the GSMA announced Personal IM services going live in November 2007, the operators it named included Turkcell, VimpelCom and Celcom. All three were running Followap’s platform. When RCS was taken into the GSMA’s work programme in 2008, its founding feature list read: conversational messaging, in-call multimedia sharing, and “an enhanced phonebook with presence information” — which is Presence-Enhanced Contacts, the thing Followap had been shipping since 2004.

RCS is now the default messaging system on Android, and since 2024 it runs on the iPhone too. Presence in your address book, chat carried by the network, addressed by the number you already have, working across carriers: what a phone does by default today is what Followap sold to Vodafone in 2001. It took roughly eighteen years and a different name. The whole chain is set out here.

The question was Followap’s, and it asked it first: make messaging on a phone as immediate as messaging on a PC, addressed by the number you already have, and able to reach anyone. The company got there in November 2000, with merely a WAP handset in Ireland.