Adam and me back in 2003 ready to conquer the world

On Sunday, Esendex was 10 years old – based on the incorporation details of the original business.

Like many cash-strapped companies the early years were particularly tight and there’re many stories from those first years that will be held back for our 10th birthday party in June – plus some that will not even be mentioned then!

Esendex has covered a lot of miles since its beginnings as a few mobiles ziplocked to a PC in Adam’s attic. Our initial job involved sending out the results of a triathlon by SMS (something that’s now become a standard thanks to our bright idea) but other initial work included an “order your bagel by SMS” – it hasn’t caught on!

During the initial year there were a few months when we didn’t raise a single invoice. We now have more than 11,000 customers globally, and employ 45 people with offices in the UK, Australia, Spain and the US and we have direct connections to mobile networks worldwide. Plus we are still working with many of our first customers

We’ve seen a comparable rate of change in the SMS market. When we first started the major objection raised was that “SMS was surely just for kids”. But now SMS is probably the most widely used global communication channel. And whilst the crazy-frog probably didn’t do much for the entire industry, today SMS for business has come of age: recent research by Jupiter reveals that A2P (Application to Person) SMS revenues of $70.1 billion will exceed peer to peer traffic by the year 2016.

Esendex hasn’t been in a stronger position: profitable operations in 5 countries, traction in the US having only launched last year and a range of new projects. It’s hard to predict how we’ll look on our 21st birthday but if we change only half as much as we have over the last decade, exciting times are ahead.

Some of the more interesting facts were:

• Smartphone’s share of this market continued to grow. 72.5 million people in the U.S. owned such a device, with Google Android having the largest share of the market at 34.7 per cent.
• Despite the growth of smartphones, the vast majority of American mobile devices are not smartphones.

The last fact explains why out of all the supplementary uses for a mobile phone, texting is still by far the most popular use for a mobile. 68.6 of U.S. mobile subscribers used text messaging on their mobile devices.

For brands wanting to engage with their customers the total number of U.S. mobile devices represents a huge opportunity. However, when it comes to the execution of any campaign, SMS still the most effective way of reaching the vast majority of consumers.

If you would like to know more about the different ways SMS can be used to engage with your audience, give us a call on 1-866-356-4694.

Such a movement could spell bad news for users. With less competition in the market there will be fewer choices for customers and it could lead to higher mobile service rates. As a business SMS service provider, this is clearly a concern to us. Interestingly, AT&T has responded by saying that they believe the deal will lead to greater competition and lower prices. It’s difficult to see how this could be true and even if it was, you would have to question why they would enter into a deal that would result in greater competition for them.

In their defense AT&T cite a government study that reported over the last decade, the average bill for a cellphone had dropped. And this was during a time which saw a number of large telecom mergers.

The winners in this deal are likely to be T-Mobile customers, who may possibly get access to the iPhone. However T-Mobile has always portrayed itself as a low-cost alternative to it competitors and it is hard to see how this will fit with AT&T’s image of the providing highest quality service.

The NEW Esendex API offers a powerful, yet simple, interface to send and receive messages; manage contacts and contact groups; and your accounts. We’ve built it on simple and established standards following ‘REST’ (REpresentational State Transfer) principles based on HTTP and using XML. XML is widely implemented in programming languages and reduces the need for additional libraries which can be necessary, for instance, with SOAP services.

You will be familiar with the ‘REST’ style as it is the basis of the way the Internet works in general. A client makes a request on a resource to perform an operation and gets a response. For example, you are viewing this web page because your web browser formed an HTTP GET request for this page (resource) and the server returned you a HTML representation of the web page.

Instead of Services with a list of commands, the Esendex API provides a set of resources that you can interact with. These resources are identified by different URIs (Uniform Resource Identifiers). Resources represent the different types of data for Esendex. e.g. message headers, contacts, contact groups etc.

To perform an operation on these resources, you simply create an authenticated HTTP Request with an appropriate HTTP Method. The HTTP Method verbs of GET, POST, PUT and DELETE open up opportunities to retrieve, create, update and remove resources respectively.

One of the key advantages of the Esendex API is that you can start exploring the data you can get from it straight away using only your web browser. For example, if you navigate to http://api.esendex.com/v1.0/inbox/messages (and provide your Esendex username and password when prompted by your browser), you will get a paged XML response of your inbox messages.

There’s comprehensive documentation for the Esendex API on our website which will explain all of the resources you can interact with in detail.

Our confidence in the reliability and flexibility in our new API is such that our Web to SMS application front-end, “Echo”, is based entirely upon the Esendex API.

According to Kerstin Trikalitis, the CEO of Out There Media, they have witnessed triple-digit growth rates in the previous 18 months and it appears to be a trend that is continuing this year.  ”When an ad is targeted and it is valuable then consumers do like it. We are getting response rates of 20, 25%, which shows it’s working.”

Yet marketers still need to trend carefully. As with any marketing activity, the challenge for every marketer is always to ensure that their communications are relevant and targeted correctly. And with mobile marketing, this is particularly essential – since we carry our phones with us at all time, so SMS messages are entering our personal space.

Fortunately with our Echo application, targeting individual segments of customers with the precise contents is simple to do. You can even send a totally personalized message to every recipient in a campaign. This ensures that every SMS message seems more like efficient customer service than an advertisement.

This ensures that the company culture is preserved, messages remain consistent and the brand values are maintained. It also ensures that staff in the satellites offices does not feel cut off.

This is achieved partly by regular communication via phone, email and video conference. However nothing really replaces face to face meetings.  This inevitably means frequent overseas travelling.

Many of these “keep in touch” visits, fall under the responsibility of Esendex’s CEO, Julian Hucker. Read about Julian on his latest trip around the world by viewing his blog

Onlineitdegree.com have presented some amazing inforgraphic information called “The shocking numbers behind cellphone usage” about the use of cellphones, and in particular, text messaging. These statistics are quite overwelming and will give you some idea of the growth in people’s usage of mobile phones.

Take a look at the statistics below;

For customers who send large numbers of standardised messages, it can be a very time-consuming task typing a new one out each time.

So it’s good to know that a new feature is now available in Echo which allows you to create and re-use message templates. This will not only save you time, but also make it easy to maintain consistency, avoid grammer and spelling mistakes.

Typical messages that can be sent using templates includes; Campaigns, SMS reminders, alerts and notifications. You can also use them for bulk sends and SMS scheduling. All you need to do is create a template, fill in any gaps (if applicable) and send.The process is easily explained below;

The process is easily explained below;

Step 1

Step 2

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.