Congratulations to Chris Bartlett, Commercial Manager AsiaPac Region, who is February’s Employee of the Month. Adam, Esendex CTO, presented Chris with the award earlier this week.

Chris was nominated by the Management Team as despite being many thousands of miles from Head Office, (and managing with a 9-11 hour time difference too) he has always sought to challenge the status quo: especially in looking at new sales initiatives and pricing models.

He’s always interested in the business’ performance and profitability and has a keen eye for detail. This keen eye was fundamental in resolving some business process issues at the start of the month, so thanks Chris!

We have made some changes to our blog today, to help users to navigate around more easily. Essentially, we’ve merged the UK blog, Support blog and Developer blog into one “Esendex UK” blog. We’ve also created categories so you can choose to read posts relevant to a particular area of interest.

We know that many of our customers use our blog to receive support posts or technical updates only. Consequently, we’ve created a technical category within the blog which will cover support, infrastructure improvements, product updates and all things Developer/API related.

Those of you that currently subscribe to the Support and Developer blogs don’t need to take any action as you’ll continue to receive updates from the technical category RSS feed. We’ll also continue posting all new blog entries to Twitter.

For all newbies, you can choose to receive an RSS feed of our blog in its entirety or from the Technical category only. It’s up to you!

If you’ve got any feedback on this change or have any ideas on how we can improve our blog, send an email to marketing@esendex.com

….Darren Liddell, Senior Developer, for his dedication and commitment to improving the SMS message delivery standards for our customers in January.

January 2010 marks the first time we’ve run the Employee of the month award. As a company we’re looking to recognise those who go above and beyond their job description to really make a difference and in doing so, encapsulate our company values of entrepreneurship, integrity and the highest quality of service.

He was presented with a (very heavy) trophy and £100 to spend on a posh dinner at anywhere he chooses. Note – even Hart’s is affordable with that money, if you stick to 2 courses, or forgo the wine!

Congratulations once again Darren!

Darren (left) looking very pleased with his trophy

The Mobile Data Association has today released its 2009 mobile messaging review and the figures show continued strong growth in SMS and MMS messaging. 265 million text messages were sent on average each day throughout 2009, whilst MMS (picture messaging) volumes reached a total of 600 million by the end of the year.  Annual SMS messaging volumes have increased by a staggering 23% from 2008 to 2009.

Despite regular stories commenting on the possible demise of SMS messaging, both its simplicity and ubiquitous nature, continues to win through with consumers and businesses alike.

This is certainly our experience at Esendex. SMS messaging has been mainstream for years now, but despite this, new businesses start to use SMS for the first time every-day, and once they do, they often increase their SMS volumes, add 2-way SMS messaging or start to communicate with different groups as they look for applications of SMS across new areas of the business.

We were amazed with the number of schools and colleges that contacted us during the recent bad weather wanting to use SMS for the first time to communicate with parents and staff. But we shouldn’t have been. We have been established in the market for 9 years now and it may feel like SMS is a well established business communication technology to us, but for many organisations, they are only just starting to realise the benefits.

The full press release from the MDA can be read here.

Here at Esendex, we consider ourselves to be a fairly healthy, not to mention, competitive bunch. This coupled with our ongoing sponsorship of Richard Stannard, GBR triathlete meant it was only right for us to enter the London Triathlon this year.  (more…)