Mobile users now send over one billion text messages globally every day. Stereotypes takes the premise of texting – sending quick messages to your friends – and extends it to colour screen multimedia handsets. With StereoTypes, each message arrives with a quirky animated caricature that delivers a greeting along with the text message.

There's a whole host of characters to choose, from the outrageous to the sophisticated, and each one has its own range of animated actions to suit their personality and the mood of the message. What's more, all that fun is as simple to use as existing SMS messaging: all the user does is type in the text and the system adds the appropriate animation based on the content of text message.

In addition to sending avatar messages, Stereotypes users can manage their buddy lists and store their preferred avatar.

Stereotypes works on current generation 2.5G and 3G MMS phones and will scale to accommodate new video handsets on 2.5G and 3G networks.