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MMS is a new and important standard for messaging services on mobile telephones that allows one to send and receive not only textual messages, but also pictures, video-clips and recorded sound-files. The MMS phone is represents a new kind of mobile media, combining the qualities of the digital camera, the Internet, the voice recorder and the mobile telephone. This paper examines the issue of MMS in terms of its development as a grounded genre and traces the use of this concept using findings from a recent field trial among three work groups. It examines the practical use of MMS among different categories of professionals. Our point of departure has been that MMS needs to develop as a unique genre of communication with socially recognizable characteristics to be successful.

In order to better understand the use of this media, a field trial with MMS use in three different groups of users was launched in June 2003, 2 giving employees in different mobile teams free access to MMS for a period of 6 months. The groups where all relatively small but in many respects they were highly integrated with a dense internal network of communication. The three groups included 1) a team of mobile salespeople for a soft drink company, 2) a group of real estate salespeople and 3) a team of carpenters.