With Facebook recently revealing that 41% of their ad revenue came from mobile, we thought we’d look into some more amazing facts about mobile.

Here are our top 10 facts about mobile:

1. There were 6.8 billion mobile subscribers in 2012. China lead the way with 1.16bn, followed by India with 0.91bn and then the US with 0.32bn. Australia comes in with 16m mobile handset subscribers.
2. The top 5 markets in terms of their share of the global smartphone sales in 2012 were:
   • China – 26.5%
   • US – 17.8%
   • India – 2.5%
   • UK – 4.5%
   • Brazil – 2.3%
3. The top 5 smartphone operating systems were:
   • Android – 68.8% (497.1m)
   • iOS – 18.8% (135.9m)
   • BlackBerry OS – 4.5% (32.5m)
   • Symbian – 3.3% (23.9m)
   • Windows – 2.5% (17.9%)
4. The top 3 smartphone venders were:
   • Samsung – 30.4%
   • Apple – 18.4%
   • Nokia – 5%
5. There were 7.8 trillion SMS messages sent in 2011 and a predicted 9.6 trillion to be sent in 2012.
6. SMS marketing will be worth US150bn in 2013.
7. In 2012, 10.1% of webpage views were viewed through a mobile handset, up from 5.8% in 2011.
8. By 2016, Application to Person (A2P) messaging will overtake Person to Person (P2P) messaging.
9. 92% of all people have and keep their cell phones within arm’s reach 24 hours a day, with 90% of them reading their text messages within 3 minutes of it being delivered.
10. And finally, 50% of smartphone users said they have bought a product on their phone.

Esendex co-founders Julian Hucker and Adam Bird share their thoughts on the deal and plans for the future.  New CEO Geoff Love explains his role and how he intends to drive the business forward, while Nick Jordan from Darwin Private Equity explains what the attraction of Esendex was in the first place.

You started the business with a £2,000 investment, working at your kitchen table and the company has just been acquired for £11m – how do you feel?

Julian Hucker: Like everyone has won! I’m obviously delighted that we’ve completed the acquisition but this is a good deal for everyone involved: all the original shareholders, Darwin – who will help Esendex grow to its full potential – and the whole team at Esendex who can look forward to many years of exciting growth.

Adam Bird: Immensely proud of the part I’ve played in building the team and making this possible. Companies should be places where great people can achieve great things and it feels like we’ve made that happen.

Why did you decide to sell the company and accept an offer from Darwin?

Julian Hucker: I believe that the people who set up businesses aren’t necessarily the best people to run them when they are mature.  Esendex needed a new management team to have the remit to grow and run it, and shareholders who are able to back it to its full potential.

Adam Bird: As a founder, shareholder and executive you have to simultaneously wear three hats and reconcile the demands of each. In my role as executive, I recognised that the company needed to realise the full opportunity that is there for it and it needed shareholders with the ambition of Darwin to support the management team. This is the right time for Esendex.

You will remain with Esendex in a consulting role, but will undoubtedly have more free time – how do you plan to spend it?

Julian Hucker: For many years I’ve been an enthusiastic but time-crunched triathlete. I now intend to commit to my training to try and achieve my dream of qualifying for the GB Age-Group Team. I think it’s worth a shot!

Adam Bird: After a relaxed summer with my family and a bit of cycling, I’ll be starting it all again with a new venture. Hopefully I can add another successful tech business to the Nottingham economy.

What attracted you to acquiring Esendex?

Nick Jordan (Partner, Darwin Private Equity): Darwin’s strategy is to search for markets where there is a high growth potential and then acquire the companies that are leading those markets and have the businesses or technologies best equipped to take advantage of growth opportunities. Esendex is the leading provider of mission-critical application-to-person SMS services to enterprises using its proprietary technology and is run by an outstanding management team. This is exactly the kind of investment we want to make.

How will this acquisition help Esendex realise its growth ambitions?

Nick Jordan (Partner, Darwin Private Equity): All the the key components are in place – a great product, sector leadership, a strong management team and motivated workforce – but we feel having a single investor with experience of supporting high growth businesses can help Esendex realise its potential. Geoff will also be supported by Tim Duffy, the co-founder and former CEO of conference service provider Meetingzone, who will join the Board as Chairman. We also have additional funds we can provide to the business to accelerate entry into new countries or to acquire businesses that will fit well with Esendex.

Geoff, how has your day-to-day role changed?

Geoff Love (formerly COO will now be CEO):  In simple terms my role now encompasses every aspect of the business including finance and development – which is the other half of the company I wasn’t previously responsible for. I am really looking forward to working far more closely with these teams.

What is the biggest opportunity you see coming from this acquisition?

Geoff Love: In one word – growth. With Darwin backing us, we now have the financial clout and independence to grow more aggressively. This may be through expediting the organic growth of our current core markets, opening in new ones, targeting market segments we currently don’t focus on, new product development or through the acquisition of other businesses. It’s going to be hard work but it is going to be fun!

What is your personal motivation for driving Esendex forward?

Geoff Love: I want to make Esendex the best it can be to fulfil its potential. We have built a great business but we know there’s so much more we can do. A2P SMS is still in its infancy and we need to grasp the opportunity that Darwin’s ownership brings. I want to see everyone play their part in this and, by being the best that they can be, help us become the best that we can be.

Optus become the first major Australian carrier to use this SMS filtering technology.

Recently Optus began filtering its SMS traffic on its network – what does that mean? What it means is that if the messages are not coming through a preapproved route, i.e. directly through Optus or a network that connects to Optus, then it’s likely that the message will not be delivered.

Why have Optus done it? The answer is twofold, firstly, it helps protect Optus’ customers from receiving an abundance of spam SMS from off shore services, so there may be a few less winners of the euro mobile lottery! Secondly, it’s about revenue leakage – over the past number of years the networks have seen a plateauing of revenue coming from Premium Rate SMS, but an increase in revenue coming from non-Premium Rate SMS, or as we call it Business SMS.

Every time a network receives an SMS from another SMS network it charges an interconnect rate for delivering said SMS. Network filtering ensures all messages accepted and delivered to the handset come through the correct channel – when it doesn’t, it’s called grey routing. Now grey routing routes the messages in various ways designed specifically to avoid any interconnect charges, the analogy is like me asking you to mow my lawn, but not paying for it.

So what’s happening? Well, a few companies using grey routes have already increased their prices, but for the most part, to be honest not a lot, and one of the reason for that is because Optus are sending through successfully delivery receipts on blocked messages – yes, that’s right, Optus aren’t telling routes which messages have been blocked and which messages haven’t been blocked, so as a matter of course Esendex are recommending to everyone to test the services they’re using in two ways; send a message to an Optus handset with a numerical originator (basically send a message coming from a mobile number) and then send another test message from an alpha numerical originator (i.e. your business name) to see whether they’re going through.

Whilst Optus have had the filtering on the in the background collecting the data on which routes to block, we’re still not expecting to see the full blocking for a couple of months, so it would be good practice to keep sending test SMS to your Optus handsets over the course of the next 2-3 months to ensure your messages are in fact getting delivered.

And what’s the next step? Well, the next step will be Vodafone (VHA) investigating filtering – although at ~24% market share at the moment, they are the last of the providers to implement filtering in Australia, which will see a total clean-up of the market, although for some, it means messaging costs will jump up significantly, overall it will be much better for the market and a clean-up of spam messaging, which let’s face it, no one wants to receive.

When we brought on 15 Love as a customer, we were all very excited. 15Love is a news agency that specializes in the sports world and is particularly responsible for the communication of Brandt during the Tour de France. Brandt being the sponsor for the most combative rider comp; the red bib.

15Love are responsible for sending out details of this competition to their press relations. One of the challenges they faced was getting the information out in a timely fashion, as explained by 15Love:

“The time between the riders finishing a stage, the Awards ceremony and sending information to journalists to write their articles is very tight. It was therefore necessary to find a quick and effective solution to communicate the name of the winner of the Combativity award every day.”

By using our Online SMS platform, they are now able to send out all the information to many people in a short amount of time. Journalists no longer had to wait until official press releases were released, which could often be up to an hour after the race and awards ceremony. Now the information was sent instantaneously.

Many of us will be tuning in to watch the Tour de France, starting this weekend, cheering on our fellow countryman Cadel Evans as he embarks on his Tour de France challenge. Although I’m English, so I’m cheering on Chris Froome.

Let us know who you’re supporting.

As you can imagine this is a big event in the world of Motorsport and many of you will probably be excited by the prospect of sitting down to some quality motor action. The Le Mans 24 hours schedule is as follows (all times in AEST):

Thursday 20/06/13

06:00 – 08:00 – Qualifying

00:00 – 04:00 – Free Practice

Friday 21/06/13

03:00 – 05:00 – Qualifying

06:00 – 08:00 – Qualifying

Saturday 22/06/13

19:00 – 19:45 – Warm-up

23:00 – Race Start

Sunday 23/06/13

23:00 – Race finish

The Le mans 24 TV coverage is on Eurosport and starts at 10:45pm. Make sure you tune in.

Esendex’s involvement in the race is, for the second year running, to provide DIALOG with their SMS solution. DIALOG is a company that have, for 20 years, been designing and developing innovative solutions for businesses.  For the Le Mans 24 they have created a dedicated system, integrated with our SMS API, for sending rankings of the race in real-time to subscribers of Automobile Club de l’Ouest, the organizer of the race.

Last year over 70,000 SMS messages were sent out over the weekend, and Eric Champion, the Director of DIALOG, explained when referring to Esendex that “the first collaboration was a success and we can only congratulate ourselves.”

Also for last year’s event, DIALOG invited one of our sales advisers to attend the race from the paddock, you can read about his experience here, if you can read French, or have a translator available.

Informa also say that by 2014 there will be 50 billion messages sent via chat apps compared to just 21 billion text messages sent.

What does this mean for text messaging? Well, in my opinion it means that the growth of text messaging will inevitably slow down, at least in the P2P (person to person) sector. Text messaging is still projected to grow, so it’s not as though chat apps are necessarily
replacing text messaging, but merely chat apps have a
different demographic and different use.

Chat apps, particularly the likes of WhatsApp, Viber, KiK and the like, effectively act like MSN messenger did a few years ago. People use them to chat to their friends, send pictures, videos and other media all for “free”; it doesn’t mean they are not still texting. Saying that each message sent from one of these chat apps replaces a text message is similar to saying an illegally downloaded song represents a lost sale. Who is to say that the song would have been purchased had pirating not been an option. Likewise, who can say that a particular message would have even been sent if only text messaging existed?

We, here at Esendex, are not worried about the claim that OTT will replace text messaging. In fact, we believe that text messaging is only just starting to see its golden years, as our CEO Julian Hucker explains, “in the next couple of years, we expect SMS to enter a ‘golden age’ for business communications.”

The growth of chat apps is inevitable and many network operators are starting to restructure their price plans, including making changes to data plans and making SMS more enticing for people to continue using. Many also believe that networks have an option to provide their own IP based communications service. They have access to a large subscriber base and could make a success of it, if done currently.

However, at the end of the day, SMS is the only ubiquitous messaging platform available on the mobile phone. The big problem with OTT messaging is that the recipient needs to have a smart phone, needs to have credit available or still within their data plan and needs to have the right app, otherwise you can’t guarantee the person will receive the message. With SMS, all they need is a signal.

A few days ago we celebrated 40 years of the mobile phone, which got me thinking about just how much has changed over the years.

In 1973 the first ever call was made from a mobile phone, by Martin Cooper of Motorola, cheekily it was made to a rival, Joel of Bell Labs. The mobile phone in question weighed 1 kilogram and only had 20 minutes of battery life, which puts complaining about the iPhone battery into perspective.

10 years later, in 1983, the Motorola DynaTAC was launched; it was the first ever mobile phone to be offered commercially. The list of features for this phone was very limited; you could simply talk, listen and dial. It could store 30 numbers and it measured in at 23cm x 13cm x 4cm. The battery life was improved upon but it still had just 35 minutes of talk time and 8 hours on standby. It also cost a whopping US$3,995, which is US$9,209 in today’s standards. Worst of all, it couldn’t even send and receive SMS!

Compare this to today’s mobile phones, which have HD/retina quality screens, 1080p video cameras, can access the internet, run games, play films, can be used as a SATNAV, manage daily tasks and do almost anything through downloading apps. The list seems almost endless. The phones today are, when you think about it, absolutely unbelievable.

The big question now is what does the next 40 years hold?

We hope you enjoy…

Recent reports show Peer to Peer messages declining due to Over The Top, or OTT, applications such as BBM (Blackberry Messenger), Apple’s iMessage and WhatsApp. Chances are that your friendship group all have the same application, same types of phones and a network connection. Why pay for a message when you can send one for free?

However, Application to Peer or Business to Consumer messaging is different. Here’s why:

• Businesses cannot guarantee all their customers have a smart phone
• Businesses cannot guarantee all their customers have a particular application
• Their isn’t a standard platform for mass communication by social media

The ubiquity and directness of SMS is the reason why this market is growing in popularity and the reason why Esendex has grown by 25% in each quarter since starting in 2001. It doesn’t matter if the end-user has the latest smartphone or an old-fashioned Nokia 3210, if they have WhatsApp, are on Facebook or have an internet connection. They can all receive an SMS.

The only other communication channels that have the reach of SMS for a business are email, telephone and direct mail. Email suffers from channel noise, telephone calls are expensive and direct mail can be expensive and ineffective.

When businesses need to be sure that the message has got through – be it confirming a delivery or the status of a mortgage application – you can’t beat SMS for cost-effectiveness and reliability.

Here’s some examples of how our customers use SMS:

Sales Promotion
SMS messages can be sent and read within seconds, can include many different calls to action such as webpages, directions and phone numbers. Not only can this be done in-house, saving media overheads, there is no time lag between sending a communication and being able to analyse its effectiveness.

Improve customer service
Order status updates can be used to prevent incoming calls; delivery notifications can be used to make sure the customer is in to receive the goods and SMS surveys can be used to close off the experience and get feedback. All of these examples not only help to improve communication and therefore customer service but they can also help to reduce overheads.

Increase staff effectiveness
SMS are used to communicate directly with field-based employees with instructions on where to go for their next job, appointment cancellations or to inform staff of available shifts. All without relying on complex and expensive telecommunications systems.

Communicate in a crisis
A message can be reliably broadcast within minutes no matter where the recipients are or what time of day it is. We have customers that send server system alerts, alarm system alerts and for adverse weather conditions for schools.

Reduce operating costs
Creating efficiencies with human resource or working capital has presented opportunities for our customers to redistribute resource to other areas of their business. Examples include sending confirmations and reminders to customers to reduce no shows and usine SMS to replace paper based or telephone communications.

Overall, SMS presents a very viable communication channel for businesses to get their voice heard in a quick and cost effective manner. Using SMS is increasingly becoming the communication of choice which is why Esendex has grown every quarter since establishing itself in 2001.

Our service quality and reliability are the guiding principles that underpin our promise of “every message matters”. We pride ourselves on providing high quality business messaging services from marketing messages for small independent operations to mission critical messages for large multinationals. We never compromise our service promise, and whilst continuing to exceed our SLA’s is always at the forefront of our minds we’ll never compromise on quality just to speed things up.

Recently, we’ve been focusing not just on reliability but on improving the performance of our API and responsiveness of our online messaging application Echo. We’ve listened intently to the feedback you, our customers, have given us and targeted a few key areas that you have told us are most valuable to you and your workflow.

So what’s changed?

• Viewing sent messages is over 8 x faster – This means that you can navigate to any of your sent messages instantly
• Looking at individual messages is now over 30 x faster – If you send or receive a large number of messages and spend a lot of time going from message to message you’ll appreciate drilling into the detail faster than ever before
• Viewing your inbox messages is nearly 3 x faster – See your new messages arriving instantly with the improved inbox load times – invaluable if you’re constantly monitoring your inbox

So how did we do it?

It’s really down to a combination of factors. We’ve been investing heavily in our core infrastructure and have been able to take advantage of the benefits this cutting edge technology can bring. We’re also a fastidious bunch always looking to improve ourselves and the systems we work with. And with over 10 years’ experience, we’ve been able to apply our knowledge to address some of the problems and bottlenecks our rapid growth would pose to more traditional messaging systems; ensuring these performance improvements are here to stay.

But, as you’d expect, it doesn’t stop there! We’re already pursuing further enhancements through a combination of strategic improvement and system maintenance programmes.