Avalanche Mobile announces IMF Control, a breakthrough text messaging control solution which helps parents protect their young children by enabling parents to see who is messaging their child, block suspicious SMS and importantly, temporarily suspend the messaging function of their child’s mobile phone during school hours or other quiet times.

IMF Control and other Intelligent Messaging Filter™ services will be demonstrated by Avalanche Mobile at Hall 4, HS6.08 at 3GSM in Barcelona from February 13 – 16.

Parents face a dilemma as they seek to take advantage of the benefits of mobile technology to keep in touch with their children and keep a caring eye on them when they are away from home. The drawback is that a mobile phone also enables the child to carry on text-based relationships with people they shouldn’t or when they shouldn’t and this can detract from the child’s safety and well-being. Until now, parents had no way to effectively control or monitor the child’s use of text messaging services and to allow the child unfettered, unsupervised use of a mobile phone was a calculated risk.

These fears are well-founded, with numerous reports over the last few years from around the world of various predatory behavior facilitated by SMS. In the UK 25 children are reported to have been sexually assaulted after meetings with adults set up by SMS. Similar trends have been seen in Japan where there has also been a rise in child prostitution. On the educational side, academic and behavioral standards have been affected so much that schools all around the world have implemented policies restricting or banning the use of mobile phones at school. However, outright bans for any of these reasons defeats the original purpose of parents providing mobile phones for their children: easy contact, better supervision and increased safety.

IMF Control which gives parents the option of monitoring text messages sent and received by their children, blacklisting unsuitable senders and with SMS Deferral, parents can even temporarily suspend the texting function of their child’s phone during school or night hours – while still enabling important messages from themselves or other whitelisted family members to get through.

IMF Control is installed transparently on layer 2 of the existing SS7 network, where it is able to monitor all SMS from the local and also foreign networks. Functions such as whitelist, blacklist, keyword alert are included. SMS Deferral will actually hold back a message during school or study hours defined by the parent, and deliver the messages later.

Mark Shiels, Avalanche Mobile’s Director Global Business, said “As a parent myself, I have faced the predicament shared by so many: whether and how to let children use the mobile phone. IMF Control literally offers control, so that myself and other parents can effectively and easily look after and supervise our children and ensure their safe use of text messaging. At the same time operators can make a serious dent in their adult churn rates and attract new subscribers through secondary SIMs for children’s use.”

About Avalanche Mobile
Avalanche Mobile is focused on enabling GSM and 3G network operators to protect, control and grow text messaging usage, applications and revenues by providing the capability for them to create new and manage existing text messaging services and revenue opportunities. With tens of millions of text messages sent worldwide every day, Avalanche Mobile has developed a patent-pending flexible platform that enables network operators to expand offerings and maximize revenue from advanced messaging services.

Avalanche Mobile’s Intelligent Messaging Filterâ„¢ (IMF) platform enables carriers to manage, personalize, prioritize and deliver any messaging service to corporate accounts, service/application providers, and private customers – customized to meet individual user needs. The IMF platform offers a wide range of services for specific purposes including IMF Control, IMF Protect, IMF Divert and IMF Priority which provide capabilities such as priority SMS services for the corporate and consumer market, parental control services, custom SMS and surge SMS management for mass-market consumer events involving public text voting.

Avalanche Mobile’s management team has decades of experience working with Mobile Operators, as well as with the operation of large data networks world-wide. Avalanche Mobile has offices in London, Singapore and Dubai.