- 1 MIN READ - 07 Aug 2019
The second Payment Services Directive (PSD2) is less than three months away from enforcement. While the regulation’s text is lengthy, a key component of the law is its extended reach in comparison to the first directive. PSD2 applies to all payment service providers and affiliates, including account information service providers and payment initiation service providers. In addition, the law applies when at least one part of the transaction is in the European Union. This means that payment service providers and their affiliates outside of the EU must comply with the law when the payer is in the EU. The additional geographical reach guarantees the same level of security expectations for all EU residents regardless of the location of the payment service provider.
Read more- 1 MIN READ - 29 Jul 2019
In today’s world, it feels like the technology changes faster than we can keep up. As technology becomes even more ingrained in our lives, it’s obvious, that for our own good, regulations need to evolve as well. And it’s extremely important that business owners and leaders understand new regulations to adapt in the best way possible.
Read more- 1 MIN READ - 05 Jul 2019
Read more- 1 MIN READ - 04 Jul 2019
As regulations like the General Data Protection Rule and the new Payment Services Directive roll in, technology departments reassess the security tools they currently use and try to understand which new tools will be deemed necessary. Regarding new tools, it’s fair to ask, “do we build our own, or do we seek out a partner and buy the tool."
Read more- 1 MIN READ - 06 Jun 2019
According to Gartner by the end of 2017 around 50% of businesses will choose cloud-based services as the preferred option for authentication (up from about 20% today).
Read more- 1 MIN READ - 31 May 2019
Read more- 1 MIN READ - 30 May 2019
Let’s face it. Two-factor authentication is still widely under-used. Google painted an alarming picture: 90% of its Gmail users haven’t enabled 2FA in any form.
That’s nuts. Gmail has 1.2 billion active users and most of them don’t use anything more than a password to protect their accounts. But email accounts aren’t the only concern –what about everything else? Internet users average (globally) over 90 online accounts. Americans have an average of 130 online accounts and people in the UK have 118 online accounts.
It only takes one hijacked account or account breach to have an impact on someone’s life and become costly for businesses.
Businesses know they must put in the effort to protect their users –and GDPR mandates it. Yet UI/UX developers and product owners walk a fine line between user experience and securing their customers.
Read more- 1 MIN READ - 09 May 2019
Read more- 1 MIN READ - 30 Jan 2019
SMS messaging has become an expected feature in customer engagement platforms, which involves communicating information to people. Even more so when information sent to the client needs to be received immediately, rather than whenever they get around to opening their inbox on a busy Monday morning, buried underneath an avalanche of emails.
Read more- 1 MIN READ - 28 Jan 2019
Selecting an SMS provider from a pool of many can be daunting task. What should be considered when picking a partner? What are the variables?
Read more- 1 MIN READ - 26 Jan 2019
Remember the days when you sent “;)” in a text message when you were being facetious with a friend or flirting with someone? Well, unbeknownst to me, that’s not cool anymore because emojis illustrate emotion much better than emoticons since they’re actual pictures (emojis and emoticons are not the same thing.)
I’ll probably still use emoticons because I’m old school, and it’s much easier to type a colon and parenthesis than thumb through emojis –I digress.
Read more- 1 MIN READ - 24 Jan 2019
An important aspect of the new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR,) which is easily overlooked, is potential liability from third parties who handle your customer data. If a data breach is caused by a partner, and your customer data is stolen, accounts are hijacked, or any other harm is done, substantial fines may be on their way –to your company.
Read more- 1 MIN READ - 24 Jan 2019
We often see client support packaged into software products, whether it includes general support tickets, to live chat, to dedicated account managers. And it comes with a cost to the software publisher, which is often passed on to the clients. As product features expand, support tends to suffer, with reply times increasing, quality of support declining, and costs expanding to solve service issues quickly. Eventually, the personal touch of client support fades.
Read more- 1 MIN READ - 23 Jan 2019
In a previous blog, we discussed Flash SMS and how it’s used to ensure confidentiality with SMS messaging. Well, Messente’s API provides two more features that help hide message content:
- 1 MIN READ - 23 Jan 2019
SMS has some tricks up its sleeve. While familiar to most as a simple communication tool, SMS also provides solutions for both confidential and time sensitive situations. This is where flash SMS comes into play.
Read more- 1 MIN READ - 18 Jan 2019
It’s often that we are asked, “what is your average delivery rate in (fill in the blank) country?” People usually expect an answer like, “98%.” Yet cost efficiency and SMS conversion is more important than a percentage number; without context it doesn’t mean anything.
The more important question pertains to how delivery rates are calculated. Let’s point out that there are mobile operators in some countries that do not send delivery reports, or if they do, they are unreliable. Is the delivery rate statistic based on messages sent and the number of messages that received a “delivered" status? That is the most common and brutally simplified way to calculate delivery rate. First of all, in fact, it is best practice to start with clarifying whether or not the mobile number databases contain phone numbers that are deliverable.
Read more- 1 MIN READ - 15 Jan 2019
SMS routes and connections are the core of delivering SMS messages. It’s like a neocortex; where connections help SMS messages move between endpoints and applications. Also, similarly to connections in the brain, there are stronger and weaker connections. Stronger connections are shorter, meaning less mid-points, or none. Weaker connections have multiple mid-points where information can get lost.
Read more- 1 MIN READ - 15 Jan 2019
As with any service, product, tool, or feature used, certain terminology comes along with it. This can get quite confusing when the terms used seem familiar, but are used to describe events that aren’t.
Such is the case with SMS delivery statuses, and mainly the four mentioned in the heading. Here is a quick run-down of what they mean and why they’re important:
Read more- 1 MIN READ - 15 Jan 2019
Throughput is a term used to describe how many messages can be sent per second. For example, a throughput of 10 messages per second suggests an SMS connection can submit (and receive an acknowledgement) for up to 10 SMS messages per second.
Read more- 1 MIN READ - 22 May 2018
Note: This is article #3 of our GDPR awareness series. Read about data processing and the 3 pillars of GDPR as well.
As May 25th is only a few days away, it’s important to review all systems and measures taken one last time. And, if you haven’t yet, let your customers know about them, too.
Read more- 1 MIN READ - 15 May 2018
Note: This is article #2 of our GDPR awareness series. Read about data processing and customer communication as well!
The subject of the new European privacy protection laws has many of us confused about the purpose of rules within the legislation.
Read more- 1 MIN READ - 08 May 2018
Note: This is article #1 of our GDPR awareness series. Read about the 3 pillars of GDPR and customer communication as well.
The boogeyman creeps closer and closer as the 25th of May looms, but don’t fear, it’s not as bad as it may seem.
GDPR takes effect, but it’s still okay to process (obtain, transmit, handle and store) personal data. The ‘why’ and ‘how’ just got a bit trickier.
- 1 MIN READ - 17 Apr 2018
Over the years, I've had the good fortune of
talking to and doing business with many entrepreneurs and CEOs from a variety
of industries. Some are first-time founders of small startups, while others are
amazingly experienced serial entrepreneurs. Many of them are extremely
successful in what they do.
So naturally, while listening to them talk about their businesses, I've always
tried to spot any fundamental takeaways –the small drops of universal business
advice distilled from those hundreds of conversations.
And it seems to me that a lot of the most profound business truths seem to
point to a direction that I would call, "keeping it real.”
- 1 MIN READ - 10 Apr 2018
Over the last few months we’ve been setting the direction of our Omnichannel messaging API and our development team has started working on it. Considering transparency, we wanted to share the progress we’ve made on the API and give our clients something to look forward to, as well as helping clients prepare their systems for the next generation of our A2P messaging API.
Read more- 1 MIN READ - 03 Apr 2018
“Grey routes” is a loosely used term in the telecommunications industry. Frankly, the industry-specific meaning of grey routes is useless to most of our clients. Brands and businesses send messages to their customers and they expect those messages to be delivered, which is what our SMS API does well.
However, it’s important to understand the premise of grey routes, because they affect SMS service quality, an important topic to us and we hope is important to businesses that use A2P SMS APIs.
- 1 MIN READ - 06 Mar 2018
We're back from Mobile World Congress –the largest mobile technology event in the world –and it's time to categorize all the bits of information acquired during the roughly 60 meetings our team collectively had in Barcelona.
Read more- 1 MIN READ - 28 Feb 2018
We shipped part of our team to Barcelona this week to connect with the global mobile tech community, showcase our messaging platform, and spot trends in the global SMS messaging industry.
Read more- 1 MIN READ - 16 Feb 2018
The humble SMS is a widely used tool and as such it is no miracle that municipalities use it widely as well. With high delivery, open rates and the majority of SMS opened within the first 3 minutes, there are few other means of communication that can reach people as fast and as reliably. Not to mention that the SMS works with any device, so recipients don’t have to have an internet-connected smartphone.
Read more- 1 MIN READ - 13 Feb 2018
The enterprise messaging space is full of innovative solutions. Some of them find their place in the mix of communication channels. Some of them quickly fade away and make room for others.
While Facebook Messenger has transformed how small businesses communicate with their customers, the short-lived MMS is one of the most notable technologies of the past that did not live up to expectations.
Read more- 1 MIN READ - 06 Feb 2018
It’s a well-known fact that without logging we don’t really understand if our systems are functioning properly. Or worse, if something goes wrong, it’s next-to-impossible to understand why.
However, today’s software architecture is more modularized as opposed to a more monolithic approach employed in the past. Individual applications are now often isolated into application containers (e.g. LXC, Docker) to decouple complex systems into more easily manageable chunks which can be easily deployed, replicated, secured and provisioned.
Read more- 1 MIN READ - 12 Dec 2017
While persistence in sales is key, there is fine line between following up a few times to make sure the message was received, and bombarding someone’s inbox or phone until they flat-out refuse to work with you, or block you.
Read more- 1 MIN READ - 14 Nov 2017
Recently, I’ve had several discussions about company culture. And here’s a common question: How do you build a culture that supports growth and create a workplace that everyone’s happy being part of?
Read more- 1 MIN READ - 23 Oct 2017
I’m excited to announce that this month brought some well-deserved recognition for the people at Messente, as we reached high rankings in a couple “top company” lists in our industry.
Read more- 1 MIN READ - 18 Sep 2017
- 1 MIN READ - 12 Sep 2017
As technology became more integrated into our lives, personal data, security, and privacy have been a hot topic. Last January, the long process of creating and agreeing on new legislation designed to reform the legal framework for ensuring the rights of EU citizens to a private life was completed, and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR – Regulation (EU) 2016/679) was born.
Read more- 1 MIN READ - 05 Sep 2017
We’ve seen all kinds of countries and market situations at Messente –from Europe to Latin America, to Southeast Asia. The telecommunications industry landscape is unique in every market, but there are patterns.
Read more- 1 MIN READ - 26 Jul 2017
Our SMS API connects with various software which send requests to deliver messages to millions of devices. Yet as no software is perfect, there have been cases where we have received requests to send an unusual number of messages from one account. Typically, this is a clear signal that a client’s system has a glitch and is sending messages that they did not plan on sending. While our goal is to deliver every SMS, we have a system in place to prevent looped messages from occurring.
Read more- 1 MIN READ - 18 Jul 2017
Making an informed and educated decision when choosing a messaging partner requires navigation in the application-to-person (A2P) ecosystem. Asking the right questions early is the basis for avoiding costly mistakes and having a strong partnership. These five fundamental features will help you build a framework for asking questions and guide a structured conversation when shopping for an A2P vendor
Read more- 1 MIN READ - 11 Jul 2017
8tracks, a social internet radio service, recently announced a data breach, losing a copy of their user database, which includes email addresses and passwords. While 8tracks ensures their users that passwords are encrypted, hashed, and salted, they still recommend that users change their passwords with their service. Their CEO also moved on to explaining that their (over) 18 million users “refrain from using the same password across multiple sites,” use a password manager, and user two-factor authentication.
Read more- 1 MIN READ - 10 Jul 2017
Unauthorized access to accounts in the online trading industry should never be taken lightly and definitely leads to malicious or criminal activity, which not only concerns personal user data, but also financial transactions and the safekeeping clients’ money.
- 1 MIN READ - 20 Jun 2017
In the series about sales research, I touched upon allocating about 30% of your research time on finding new ideas and possibilities around sales tactics. But how do you actually do it and what do you look for?
Read more- 1 MIN READ - 31 May 2017
Despite the straightforward question, comparing services objectively can be very complex, as they cover a wide range of specifics, often requiring specialized knowledge. Luckily, there are several best practices to follow.
Read more- 1 MIN READ - 28 Apr 2017
This is the third and final installment of, “Digging for Gold,” thoughts and ideas on B2B sales research and prospecting. If you have not yet read part 1 and part 2, they’re quick reads, so catch up!
Read more- 1 MIN READ - 22 Mar 2017
This is a continuation from the previous article and focuses on the methods of research and how to find leads.
- 1 MIN READ - 23 Nov 2016
The number of different industry events has grown a lot over the last years so picking the right one to attend can be a huge task. From location to pricing and from speakers to booth options - there are a lot to consider before committing yourself to a selected few to tackle.
Read more- 1 MIN READ - 28 Sep 2015
SMS is a great tool for marketing campaigns - it’s cost efficient, with one of the highest conversion rates, and it’s super simple to get started. That all sounds great, but it is vital to monitor the traffic, as well to understand how did the users carry out what you planned for them to do on your site.
Read more- 1 MIN READ - 23 Sep 2019
Adding a link to SMS message is an smart and easy way how to engage and send information to your customers.
Read more- 1 MIN READ - 26 Jun 2019
Here at Messente we know how important it is to manage authentication within your applications, while keeping the logic clean and possibly automated.
- 1 MIN READ - 26 Mar 2019
SMS Sender ID (also referred as to SMS Sender Name) is the information that is displayed to the recipient as the sender of the SMS when a message is received at a mobile device.
Read more- 1 MIN READ - 26 Mar 2019
I would like to share some secret tricks we have been using for years to increase usable sms content length.
Read more- 1 MIN READ - 05 Mar 2019
5 questions to ask yourself about SMS sending.
Read more- 1 MIN READ - 04 Mar 2019
Implementing SMS messaging to your existing web app is always a hassle and takes some time to get everything right.
Read more- 1 MIN READ - 29 Jan 2019
TOP 5 reasons, why SMS or text messages fail to get delivered.
- 1 MIN READ - 09 May 2016
Sure, SMS might be old, but it’s a newly-accepted retail solution. If you’re trying to keep your balance in the industry, you need to innovate. Today’s retail marketers are getting creative, and they’re rolling out astounding deals through text messages.
- 1 MIN READ - 08 Dec 2015
Based on the latest surveys on retail consumers' intentions and reactions we offer three simple thoughts how to be top of mind for the last decisive weeks of this year’s Christmas rush.
- 1 MIN READ - 11 Feb 2015
One of the key trends of 2015 for web apps and services will likely be a much wider adoption of 2-step verification.
- 1 MIN READ - 18 Nov 2014
Did you know that the number of online searches like “perfect christmas present“ or “dress for christmas party” start increasing in numbers right after Halloween?
Read more- 1 MIN READ - 23 Sep 2014
In Messente we like tools that are dead simple and easy to integrate.
Read more- 1 MIN READ - 27 Aug 2014
How to Whitelist IP Address Range for Messente API
Read more- 1 MIN READ - 12 Jan 2014
SMPP has long been industry standard for sending SMS over the Internet but HTTP API’s have quietly made it’s way to the top.
Read more- 1 MIN READ - 07 Apr 2013
There are many things at home that you could automate and make your life easier.
Read more- 1 MIN READ - 27 Jan 2013
Before smartphones conquered the world of mobile phones, SMS was widely used for more than sending regular SMS text messages.
Read more- 1 MIN READ - 18 Oct 2012
Ability to send out notification SMS can be most invaluable to system administrators, as it allows to send urgent notifications to admins with ease.
- 1 MIN READ - 26 Mar 2019
In a recent article (it's in Estonian, but you'll get the gist of it in this blog,) Tele2 - a local mobile network operator in the Baltics - highlighted a few interesting trends about the growth and decline of certain types of SMS messaging traffic.
Read more- 1 MIN READ - 15 Mar 2016
Current api2.messente.com HTTPS certificate will be updated on 24th March 2016.
- 1 MIN READ - 10 Nov 2014
Current api2.messente.com HTTPS certificate will expire on 15. November 2014.
- 1 MIN READ - 04 Jun 2013
Yesterday Imre from Nortal shared his Microsoft.NET client API for sending SMS messages to mobile phones using services provided by Messente.
Read more