I thought Americans text message a lot.. But it is still only half of how much Europeans do. Amazing. Untapped startup potential maybe?
What I really want to see is comparable data for Japan. But like this blogger suggests the data is scarce. As a culture, they do blog and text message a lot though.
"A third of South Korean students send over 100 SMS messages a day"
That'll give you an idea of how much more Asian countries use SMS than European ones. Also Japan tends to be a special case as they use different protocols. There mobile email is popular whilst SMS is non existant.
As for startup potential, look at twitter for a start. They added the ability to make one-to-one private text messages into a one-to-many public broadcast network. Theres plenty of other possible permutations left to try.
What I really want to see is comparable data for Japan. But like this blogger suggests the data is scarce. As a culture, they do blog and text message a lot though.