Sailing through the freeze: our fondest moments of 2010

Happy Holidays, everybody! I'm looking back on 2010 on the last day of the year... and I'm proud to say my friends at Rapide have had their best year ever. What's interesting is that if you take all the exciting things happening in mobile... they've also happened to Rapide! Here's my little run-down of some of them.

1. Growing like crazy... in the UK 82% of people now have mobile phones, 45% of them "smartphones" - with things like Internet access, video and multimedia, and applications on top of the phone functionality.For apps developers, the market's set to grow at over 60%  a year between now and 2014 - not just number of users and apps available, but the actual, real, folding green banknotes people are prepared to spend on them. There's no vote of customer satisfaction better than actual money now, is there?

And the same's happened at Rapide! Lots of new starters mean the office is getting a bit crowded these days, but nobody's complaining; we serve over a third of the FTSE-100 and our basic business, SMS marketing programmes on their behalf to employees and customers, grew by much the same big percentage - we now arrange over 3m text messages a month plus assorted other services from conference calls to voice broadcasts. The best bit, though, is that we haven't lost the "family feel" plenty of visitors to the University of Warwick Science Park comment on. And that's something we're determined to keep, however big we become.

2. Radical summer highs.... 2010 was the year network operators across the year saw bandwidth usage explode; voice bandwidth now takes up only a small percentage of total cellular traffic, and rightly so. Rapide believes mobile sites will be fundamentally different to "mainstream" web sites - often single-function or an application rather than a miniature version of a large site - and tied into infrastructural mobile services like SMS rather than just the web paradigm. (Oops, apologies for using a word like "paradigm" - that's one of my New Year's Resolutions dealt with...)

While talking of explosions, people are still talking about Rapide's trip to Las Vegas; it's possible they're still talking about it in Vegas, too. Including a couple of things we'd prefer to keep quiet about. (Who was it saw the sun rise from the top of a building they shouldn't really have been at the top of, I wonder?) But a bit of work got done too: the team came back with various ideas and projects that bubbled up in North America, and our new version of the Rant & Rave sentiment analysis engine is awesome. Really, it is. Ask anyone at Rapide for a demo.

3. ... and battling winter lows. Much like other parts of the UK, the Rapide office had a cold-related disaster related to frozen pipes and flooding. The best bit though - and the thing that kept a smile on MD Nigel Shanahan's face - was that even a flooded floor didn't interrupt customer service for one second. I won't blow our own trumpet too much here, but let's just say the processes worked, backups functioned, and not a single client was inconvenienced. (Although we can't say the same for one IT guy who whizzed into the office at 3am...) Even the Prime Minster supports it!


So we're looking forward to a terrific 2011 - and we'll keep you posted of new developments at our three new blogs on Mobile Marketing, Customer Feedback, and Employee Engagement: click through for a look (they've all got RSS feeds too.) Thank you for being part of Rapide's year!