South Africa's Onli SMS App Seeks to Update the Messaging Old Faithful By Adding Encryption, Translation and Adding to Message Length

London — Technologies change quickly but behavior changes much more slowly. SMS is still the default messaging platform for millions of Africans. But little attempt has been made to update or improve what it can do. Russell Southwood spoke to Ivan Kartun, CEO, Onli.co.za who will be launching a beta Android app shortly that will change things.

Kartun has an engineering and electronics background and told me that the idea for Onli came to him in a flash. He then spent a month doing a proof of concept. The platform uses an intelligent encryption, compression and referencing algorithm:"Nothing much has changed about SMS in twenty years and this really makes changes".

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