Esendex company news

My thoughts on the budget

For those of you who watch BBC East Midlands, you may have seen me on “Our Economy – The East Midlands Today Debate” and also a feature on my hopes for the budget on the local news.

The most disappointing announcement for me was that Nottingham has missed out on it’s bid for the Super Connected Cities fund. It’s a real shame for the city. There was an additional, smaller, fund announced so hopefully the bid team can dust themselves off and we can go again.

The day before the budget there were various discussions about discounted lending for small businesses (those with less than £50m turnover). This is an amendment to the existing Enterprise Finance Guarantee Scheme where the government underwrites this lending, protecting the banks.

What hasn’t changed are the rules around lending. So it will only be beneficial if the problem is the cost of credit rather than access to credit for small companies. Unfortunately what I am seeing is a problem with the latter rather than the former. I would have liked to have seen more focus on making finance and mentorship available to first time entrepreneurs.

I believe that the Chancellor has taken a fairly big gamble with taxation. He’s reducing the taxes of the wealthiest in our society, both personal and corporate, with the hypothesis that this will stimulate investment and spending. It will be very hard to judge whether this has had a directly attributable effect whatever the outcome.

Esendex and its team members are probably broadly better off as a result of this budget. Whether the country is, remains to be seen.

This leaves us with an important responsibility. We must continuing growing, exporting and investing so that we can further contribute to our local economy and community.

Hot off the press: Internet World 2012

We’ll be exhibiting at Internet World next month (24 -26 April), demonstrating the benefits of SMS services for businesses. In preparation for the event we’ve just printed some striking new brochures.

If you’re visiting Internet World, you’ll find us located in the mobile village on Stand M3 at Earls Court in London. Our friendly SMS experts will be ready to answer all of your questions and will be talking about how you can benefit from SMS to transform the way your business communicates.

Internet World is also a great place to find the best providers of ecommerce platforms, content management systems, social media, cloud and hosting solutions and all things digital marketing.

If you’ve not already registered, it’s FREE to do so online. Last year the event attracted over 11,000 visitors and this year is set to be even bigger. As the ‘must go to’ event for businesses, we hope to see you there.

SMS is still the favourite platform for UK mobile users

Despite smartphones revolutionising the mobile industry, new research has found that the traditional text message is still the king of mobile communication.

A new study published by Acision, the mobile communications company, has revealed the role that SMS messages play in everyday life for UK consumers.

After surveying 1,000 mobile users in the UK, 63% of which were smartphone users, research proved that SMS is still indispensable.

Results from the survey found that up to 95% of the participants stated that they actively use SMS. Even more interestingly, 93% of Brits who own a smartphone admit to regularly communicating via SMS, despite having Instant Messaging (IM) services on their handset.

Further data showed that 51% of Smartphone users said they would be “lost without” an SMS facility.

“Reports that suggest that SMS is on its deathbed, it seems, have been greatly exaggerated. In fact, it appears that smartphone and feature phone owners alike are united by their affection for text messaging,” commented Jorgen Nilsson, Chief Executive at Acision.

Converging platforms

Interestingly, research reveals that far from being in competition, SMS and IM services are actually complementing each other.

Nilsson stressed that what is particularly interesting is that SMS seems to excel on devices that have been more commonly associated with IM services.

“After looking at these results it is clear that while IM is growing in popularity, it still has a long way to go to catch up with the reach, reliability and ubiquitous nature of SMS. Analysts are predicting that Mobile IM will exceed 1.3 billion users by 2016, compared to over 5 billion users with access to SMS today,” concluded Nilsson.

While IM is useful to communicate with people in an everyday environment such as family or friends, SMS is the best tool when looking for a more formal way of communication. This is why business SMS is a great service that provides fast and effective communication by keeping a respectful distance from the user at the same time.