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Keep up to date with current news and highlights from the SMS industry

A ‘hacking’ time had by all…

hackdayAt Esendex we’re always extremely excited to see the inventive new ways in which our customers use our SMS API to create business solutions. But why let our customers have all the fun ?  We decided to let our developers loose for a couple of days to see what cool stuff they could come up with!

Last Thursday we held our first ever Esendex Hack Day.  Our developers were taken off their day-to-day jobs and given just two days to create a fantastic new product from scratch. There were two rules to follow: to use the Esendex API to solve a consumer problem and to report back by 3pm Friday.  The impressive diverse range of new products that were created in such a short space of time proved how powerful and flexible our APIs are (and how clever our developers are of course…).

Alex, John and Darren build an SMS service based directions finder, called “GetMe2″.  Our Locations Based Services and Google Maps were untilized, the service enables customers to text a place that they want to get to (e.g. ‘New York’, ‘coffee shop’, etc) and get directions back through SMS.  This is great for the high percentage of people without a smartphone and those of us with smartphones who struggle to get 3G reception.

Neil and John identified that not every business has Outlook or Exchange.  They interfaced the Google calendar with the Esendex SMS API to create an appointment booking service. This service could be used to text appointment requests, updates and SMS confirmations to both the calandar owner and the customer.

Jonathan created a product call ‘Atlas’.  Car parking data was streamed to allow drivers to find out by SMS how many car parking spaces were free, in each of the districts car parks. Drivers could choose a district or even a specific car park to find out in real time where the best place to park is.

And Scott took the festive season as his inspiration  to create a Secret Santa Organizer ! It takes all the administration away and works totally anonymously – meaning you’ll never find out who bought you that horrible jumper…

The Hack Day was a brilliant success and shortly the team will be showcasing their work on their own blogs. We’re looking to run a similar event next year for the wider development community, so if you’d like to join in please get in touch.

Posted by Geoff
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What is SMS?

For those of us that work within the industry, the answer to this is pretty obvious. However it is easy to assume that because some of us know what SMS is, everyone else does too. If you analyse the last 12 month’s search engine data for the keyword “SMS”, the most frequent question asked in the US relating to this was “What is SMS?” So here is a brief explanation.
SMS stands for Short Message Service. It is frequently referred to as text messaging or “texting” and is a method by which messages can be sent to a cell phone via another cell phone, a computer connected to the Internet, a regular land line, or a handheld device such as a Blackberry.
SMS has grown in popularity because it is a quick and convenient way of sending a short message to someone. One major advantage of SMS is that it is supported by 100% of GSM mobile phones.
According to the International Telecommunications Union, 90% of the world’s population is covered by mobile networks and it estimates that 6.1 trillion messages will be sent in 2010. In many countries this explosion in popularity has been driven by the texting habits of teens. Research from Neilsen, suggests that in the US alone, teenagers send on average an SMS message every 10 minutes.
Businesses have been quick to realise the benefits of SMS too. Typical uses of business SMS include:
• Confirming appointment and deliveries
• Managing incidents, emergencies and sending systems alerts
• Customer service team communicating via SMS with customers
• Sending reminders to customers – such as insurance renewals, garage services, hairdressers etc
• Send last-minute promotions to existing customers via SMS
• Communicating with employees internally.
If you would like to more about SMS or how it can be used within your business to increase sales and drive costs, drop us a line.

For those of us who work within the industry, the answer to this is pretty obvious. However it is easy to assume that because some of us know what SMS is, everyone else does too. If you analyse the last 12 month’s search engine data for the keyword “SMS”, the most frequent asked question in the US relating to this was “What is SMS?”  So here is a brief explanation.

SMS stands for Short Message Service. It is frequently referred to as text messaging or “texting” and is a method by which messages can be sent to a cell phone via another cell phone, a computer connected to the Internet, a regular land line, or a handheld device such as a Blackberry.

SMS has grown in popularity because it is a quick and convenient way of sending a short message to someone. One major advantage of SMS is that it is supported by 100% of GSM mobile phones.

According to the International Telecommunications Union, 90% of the world’s population is covered by mobile networks and it estimates that 6.1 trillion messages will be sent in 2010. In many countries this explosion in popularity has been driven by the texting habits of teens. Research from Neilsen, suggests that in the US alone, teenagers send on average an SMS message every 10 minutes.

Businesses have been quick to realise the benefits of SMS too. Typical uses of business SMS include:

• Confirming appointment and deliveries

• Managing incidents, emergencies and sending systems alerts

• Customer service team communicating via SMS with customers

• Sending reminders to customers – such as insurance renewals, garage services, hairdressers etc

• Sending last-minute promotions to existing customers via SMS

• Communicating with employees internally.

If you would like to more about SMS or how it can be used within your business to increase sales and drive costs, drop us a line.

Posted by Robin
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