Digital Bridges announced that its SMS games available on mobile network operator O2 have generated more than eight million messages sent by O2 subscribers in the UK in only nine and a half months.

Picture shows Brian Greasley CEO of Digital Bridges.

Furthermore, based on the immense success in O2's UK market, both companies have decided to make a number of Digital Bridges' titles also available to O2 customers in the Netherlands. The games have gone live earlier this month and already have seen a significant uptake. Discussions to expand Digital Bridges' entertainment portfolio into O2's other markets are underway.

"We certainly have come a long way in an extremely short timeframe," said Brian Greasley, Chief Executive Officer at Digital Bridges. "We originally started out with a portfolio of simpler games such as 'hangman' and 'anagram' to provide an easy and uncomplicated user experience. We since have added several new and fun games, as well as romance-oriented services and branded titles such as the Big Brother and Men in Black II games - with huge success as our game-play statistics prove."

While the mobile industry is building the future aiming at providing a smooth path to the much-anticipated 3G services, financial markets are expecting players to keep average revenue per user (ARPU) on the increase today. It is therefore crucial to not only keep an eye on an increased use of voice services, but to also convince consumers to use existing data services like SMS and WAP. Entertainment applications constitute an important part of these data service offerings.

"SMS use in the UK rose from virtually nothing in 1998 to over 1.4 billion messages a month recorded this August," said Tim Raby, Head of Games at O2. "We took advantage of this boom by providing higher-level services such as Digital Bridges' SMS games. As a result, both companies were able to achieve a considerable amount of traffic and revenue leveraging this wide-spread but until recently dormant technology."