GoLanguages – March 2011 Newsletter

SUMMER TIME

The clocks go forward 1 hour in the UK on Sunday 27 March

PUBLIC HOLIDAYS

• Good Friday – Friday 22 April
• Easter Monday – Monday 25 April
• Royal Wedding – Friday 29 April
• May Bank Holiday – Monday 02 May
• Spring Bank Holiday – Monday 30 May

PROJECT SCHEDULING

The 3 weeks at the end of April and the beginning of May will be very busy.

• The week starting on Monday 18 April will be a 4-day week.
• The week starting on Monday 25 April will be a 3-day week.
• The week starting on Monday 02 May will be a 4-day week.

If you have any projects needed during this 3-week period, please book them early and leave plenty of time in your scheduling for delivery.

THE DEATH OF OLD TECH

When we first started GoLanguages, virtually all jobs were received from clients by fax (or as hard-copies or on floppy-disks in the post). The fax was the indispensable tool of our working day, with multiple machines sending and receiving faxes all day long.

Fax usage started to decline when we invested in bulletin board technology that allowed clients to send and collect projects from us through direct dial-in modem-to-modem data connections. Very few clients had the suitable technology in place at their end: mainly our IT clients and the PR companies that served IT clients.

Then along came email, with clients having their own domain driven systems, and suppliers using the vanguard email services of CompuServe and AOL.

Today, jobs are mainly placed and delivered by email, though an increasing number of clients use Skype and OS X iChat to book projects with us.

For years, the fax machines have sat forlorn, ringing only when spammers have been kind enough to offer us water-coolers, car finance deals, and debt recovery services.

And so, finally, we’ve decided to bin the faxes and the fax lines completely. As of today, we’re happy to say that GoLanguages is a fax-free zone. All those years of trying to decipher illegible faxes and cutting down entire rain forests to produce vast quantities of fax paper are thankfully over.

The fax is dead. Long live technological progress.

THE DECLINE OF OLD TECH

Over the years, we’ve also noticed a decline in landline telephone usage. We used to spend hours talking to clients and suppliers by phone, but today people increasingly rely on email, Skype, private messages on Twitter, and mobile phone texts and calls.

We get more calls to our mobiles and Skype than to our landlines, and a fair percentage of landline calls these days are unwelcome telemarketing spiel.

We now give priority to our clients and suppliers by filtering all incoming landline calls through an automated call-screening service.

If you need to talk to your project manager, just call them on their mobile or Skype. Alternatively, Skype or email your phone number to us and we will call you immediately.

TWITTER

You can add us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/#!/GoLanguages – not all tweets are language related!

SKYPE

Our main company Skype name is GoLanguages.