Tag: SMS

Oxford’s word of the year for 2015: ?

No joke. It was announced on the Oxford Dictionaries’ blog yesterday that 2015’s word of the year is officially a pictograph, or more commonly known as a emoticon. Which emoticon? ?. Yes, the emoticon dubbed “Face with tears of joy” has been announced as the word of the year. According to the official blog post, the emoji was chosen because it was “the ‘word’ that best reflected the ethos, mood, and preoccupations of 2015.”

Upon such news, one naturally asks “why would this be chosen?” Well, Oxford covered that question in the blog post as well!

This year Oxford University Press have partnered with leading mobile technology business SwiftKey to explore frequency and usage statistics for some of the most popular emoji across the world, and ? was chosen because it was the most used emoji globally in 2015. SwiftKey identified that ? made up 20% of all the emojis used in the UK in 2015, and 17% of those in the US: a sharp rise from 4% and 9% respectively in 2014. The word emoji has seen a similar surge: although it has been found in English since 1997, usage more than tripled in 2015 over the previous year according to data from the Oxford Dictionaries Corpus.

So, with that it is official. Looks like the use of emojis has developed into something greater than just icons to help add contextual message to our texts; seemingly, they’ve become words their self. For those wondering, there was a graphic created with the “runner-up” words that were looked into for the position that ‘Face with Tears of Joy’ took.

What are your thoughts on Oxford’s choice for word of the year? Leave a comment below!

source: OxfordWords Blog

November 17, 2015
Why growing businesses MUST embrace SMS Text Marketing – Especially in 2015

The shift from PC to Mobile is now in full swing. With “65% of all mobile phones sold being smartphones”, according to the June 2014 Ericsson Mobility Report, no longer is Mobile the future of communications, but rather the ‘present’, and the means by which information is consumed is now becoming more and more mobile.

This change in consumer behavior is attributed to smartphone penetration, which is around 30% now worldwide and continues to widen as mobile broadband connectivity continues to gain strength. In “Q1 of 2014 alone, there were 120 million subscriptions (mobile broadband) added and by 2019 we expect that 80% of the mobile subscriptions will actually be mobile broadband,” according to Rima Qureshi, Chief Strategy Officer of Ericsson.

This development results in an unprecedented use of mobile instant messaging (MIM), with actual number of messages expected this year to reach “50 billion messages per day on the MIM services and about 20 billion messages a day via text messaging (SMS)” according to Paul Lee, Deloitte TMT Head of Research. Tools like Webcilo Phone Number Generator are now flooding the internet, making it possible for SMS marketers to reach more mobile audience through text messaging.

However, despite the burgeoning volumes of messages carried over instant messaging on mobile phones (MIM) “we expect globally SMS to generate more than $100 billion in 2014, equivalent to approximately 50 times the total revenues from all MIM services, according to the 2014 Deloitte TMT Predictions.”

This disparity in revenue levels is largely due to the higher cost of sending SMS as opposed to the almost ‘free-to-use’ instant messaging apps that sprouted in the market in recent years. But, what does this information tell us?

The decline of SMS usage among consumers is attributed to the availability of instant messaging, which is relatively free to use. And it is replacing two-way conversations, i.e. email and voice calls, only because of this cost implication.

Despite this decline in number of outbound SMS text messages, people still continue to use it for more important, time-sensitive messaging because of its high open-rate. As the messaging platform, standard among all phones across the globe (whether basic or smartphone), SMS messaging gets through on any type of phone device, regardless of country, time zone, carrier connection, and does not require exclusive subscription as in the case of MIMs where one cannot send an instant message to another unless both of them use the same service, i.e. WeChat to WeChat, iMessage to iMessage, etc.

This makes the mobile phone a perfect spot for marketers to reach their existing and potential customers. As casual conversations take the MIM, people will have more room for consuming push notifications and promotional information on their SMS inbox. And with ethical implementation, the email’s loss could be SMS text marketing’s gain.

October 19, 2015
How to Start a Bulk SMS Business/Venture in Your Area

By: Joseph Onyemakonor

Now a days, the need to communicate and distribution information is very high. People are always looking for ways to share information at a cheaper, more convenient, and faster means. Bulk SMS is a way of sharing information to thousands of people at a time using special customized names as sender id. It is also relatively cheap. While most people keep going online to send this messages to organizations for free, some few has started it as a venture. I will further tell you that one can make a considerable amount of money rendering this service.

Starting a Bulk SMS business is very cheap and requires you to put a little time and money into it. It requires you to have no special skills what so ever, all you need is internet connection (I will suggest A cyber café ). Now lets get started

Goto www.googlebulksms.com or www.linkosms.com (They sell at very affordable prices), register with them and locate the pricing page. Depending on the quantity you are starting with, the price of each unit can range from N1 – N1.5. Start by buying 2-3000 units which will cost about N2,500. Payment most times is made either through bank deposit or using your local ATM card.

Its not buying the SMS that matters, it what you do with it. Next thing you need to do is to spread the word, you can do that by posting simply hand bills. You do not need to goto any press to do this, just type on Microsoft word and print it then make multiply photocopies and post it around.

In most cases, the people that use this service are Churches, Mosques and Schools. Prepare proposal and send to all of them. You proposal should be very interesting and versatile. Tell them they get to send the SMS with Customized Name of their own organization and it is also at a very affordable price too.

Submit your proposal to as much organizations as possible and you will get more profit from it.

When charging them from the service, charge from N4 –N10 per sms. You bought at N1 per SMS. When you send to about 500 people from a particular organization, you make up to N4000.

Start now and write a proposal and send out. You will make over N10 -50000 once you get start with this little venture

August 8, 2012