Matti Makkonen (16 April 1952 – 26 June 2015) was a Finnish engineer in the field of mobile communications. He was employed (among others) by Nokia Networks and the then Telecom Finland (branded as Tele), as well as Finnet Oy. Makkonen played a leading role in creating the mobile communication unit of what is today TeliaSonera. In 2008, Makkonen was awarded The Economist Innovation Award in the computing and telecommunications category for his work on text messaging (SMS).

Makkonen was born in Suomussalmi. He graduated as an electrical engineer from the Oulu technical college in 1976. Subsequently, he worked at the Telecoms and Postal agency (PTL, TeliaSonera) as a systems engineer, developing wireless communications services for the NMT mobile networks (1976–1983). 

He was also the vice president of PTL 1984–1988 and at the same time actively involved in the development of the GSM-technology until 1988. He became the president of the mobile communication unit in 1989, which had been renamed Telecom Finland. He also served as the vice president of the Mobile Communications Group during 1995–2000. In 2000, he was briefly the president and board member of the Mobile Internet operator unit of the company, which at that point had been renamed Sonera.

SMS (short message service) is a text messaging service component of most telephone, Internet, and mobile device systems. It uses standardized communication protocols to enable mobile devices to exchange short text messages. An intermediary service can facilitate a text-to-voice conversion to be sent to landlines. SMS, as used on modern devices, originated from radio telegraphy in radio memo pagers that used standardized phone protocols. These were defined in 1985 as part of the Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) series of standards. 

The first test SMS message was sent in 1992 and it commercially rolled out to many cellular networks that decade. SMS became hugely popular worldwide as a way of text communication. By the end of 2010, SMS was the most widely used data application, with an estimated 3.5 billion active users, or about 80% of all mobile phone subscribers.

According to en.wikipedia