Archive for August, 2009

Good news comes to DISCOfever!

First of all, we have joined the FSB – The Federation Of Small Businesses, the UK’s largest campaigning pressure group promoting and protecting the interests of the self-employed and owners of small firms.  Although joining the FSB offers more to us in terms of member benefits than it offers you, we hope that by joining the FSB it will highlight to you exactly how committed we are to DISCOfever and it’s future.

Secondly we have now signed up to Streamline, one of the leading providers of merchant accounts in Europe.  This means that in the next few weeks we will be able to start accepting payments by credit or debit card.  We ran a poll on our website some weeks ago and it was very clear from the results that if we offered payment by card it would be better for you.  So, we listened and that’s what we’ve done!

Soon, you will be able to pay your reservation fee or full balance by credit or debit card.  A 2% surcharge will be added to all credit card transactions (including company cards), and debit card transactions will be free of charge.

I will make an announcement both on here and our Twitter page when we are online, so keep coming back!



Ever heard of it?  It’s amazing!  I was reading about it today and it made me sit back and realise how much I depend on it.

Cloud Computing is the latest buzzword in IT, it’s been around for some time but is becoming more and more commonplace each day.

So what is it?  In a nutshell Cloud Computing is a style of computing in which dynamic services are available over the internet.   Such services include web-based e-mail services such as Hotmail where the e-mail is available on-line rather than stored on your home computer.

As an ex-computer geek (is there such a thing), I wholly embrace this style of computing for my business and it’s only when I sat back the other day I realised how much I depended on it.

When clients enquire about our services they fill in an online form, the submitted information then gets zapped into our online management system.  We can access this data from anywhere in the world.  When bookings are confirmed our online calendar is automatically updated, as are our office computers and mobile phones.  This ensures we have the most up to date information available to us at any time.

All of our e-mails, both sent and received are stored online.  If I reply to an e-mail on my mobile phone, my wife at home can see that I have replied to a particular e-mail and can even see the reply, all automatically updated without any button pressing.

If I needed to ring someone and their number was not in my contact list on my phone rather than ring me up and give me the number over the phone, my wife can simply add it to the contact list on our home machine.  This then synchronises all of our office machines’ contact lists and instantly updates the contact list on my mobile phone.  She then just e-mails me and I ring the number.

All this is available now and for very very little cost and is an amalgamation of different services provided by Apple and Google.

Plus, it’s just one of the many ways we stay ahead of the competition!