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Europe�s wireless Internet has proven a graveyard for hype. WAP was crap, and the dream of lucrative 3G services lured carriers to the brink of bankruptcy. But now there�s a service that�s actually making money — premium SMS. The irony: Unlike 3G, it�s about as low tech as you can get. Last winter, debt-ridden carriers discovered they could charge a premium — $1 a shot — for commercial Short Message Service downloads: ring tones, screensavers, cartoons, any tiny burst of data. By summer, premium SMS was pulling in $56 million a month. That�s good news for big carriers and for upstart providers like K-Mobile, a Paris company that claims 6 million young customers from Sweden to Portugal. Is that because no one hyped it in advance?
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