Valentine's Day is mobile messaging's busiest time of the year, according to mobile ecard provider Sharpcards.

Sharpcards is offering a range of branded mobile ecards to its loved-up users.

"The point is that MMS is now an exciting part of the messaging mix and carriers and mobile marketers are starting to take it seriously," said Will Walsh, CEO of Sharpcards, London.

In 2009 MMS is expected to bring in revenues of $31 billion around the world, that's over $1 billion more than SMS did only 5 years ago when it was hailed as a massive success.

"MMS enables a richer experience for an increasingly demanding customer base keen to communicate with more emotion and personality," Mr. Walsh said. "Sharpcards is shaping the way in this new wave of rich-media messaging, partnering with the likes of Disney and Hallmark to deliver a truly compelling alternative to SMS.

"However U.S. carriers still need to sort out their operability issues with MMS and they should be encouraged to do so sooner rather than later," he said.

The mobile messaging market raked in around $130 billion in revenues by the end 2008 and is on target to increase that to $224 billion by 2013.

Although the majority of this is made up by SMS, the popularity of MMS has been increasing steadily over the past few years.

In 2008, Sharpcards sold over 1.5 million mobile personal greetings worldwide, with around 20 percent of those sales (300,000) coming from Valentine's Day alone.

Forty percent of mobile ecards were bought in the four hours between 08:00 and 12:00 (around 30,000 greetings sold per hour).

Also, 56 percent of sales occurred before midday.

"In the future MMS will be a key tool for mobile marketers," Mr. Walsh said. "Ecards could also be a useful tool for companies to get their message across at an appropriate time.

"Furthermore Sharpcards is building up a huge wealth of information around messaging, giving further insight to customer behavior around communication -- what people send, to whom, why and when," he said. "With this understanding, huge opportunities will emerge for opt in and minutely targeted marketing campaigns in the future."

Sharpcards sent 363 marriage proposals through mobile ecards on Valentine's Day 2008: Perhaps not the most traditional way to 'pop the question' but unfortunately Sharpcards doesn't know whether there were 363 yeses.

Sharpcards currently runs messaging services for Orange, T-Mobile, AT&T, Verizon and H3G.

"The Mobile phone is the communications tool of this century -- and so it is only natural that it will play the major role in bringing love together on Valentine's Day," Mr. Walsh said. "On the way out is the hand written letter; a greeting card is rather old fashioned.

"Using the PC is still fine and will attract massive usage across the states, but a mobile application like Sharpcards' ecards service enables a far more intimate and exciting way to spread the love over Valentine's Day - it's cool, it's inexpensive, it's immediate and above all it's convenient for the time-pressured youth of today," he said.

"People are constantly looking for new ways of impressing their friends and a mobile ecard is the perfect vehicle for this."