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More businesses these days are maintaining a fleet of vehicles as a more efficient means for employees to travel during and outside of working hours. In years gone by, before fleet cards became available in their present form it was a manual process of regularly collecting receipts for fuel from employees and this certainly had it’s problems; especially when receipts were lost or the service abused.

Today the more viable option for the fleet manager is to have a fleet card; the advantages and benefits present themselves to the business so that financing, maintenance of budget and convenience of use are foremost. Maybe you are also familiar with the concept of a gas card but are wondering about how it differs from the former and which option would suit your business needs? here’s a few pointers to clarify…

What is the difference between a ‘fleet card’ and a ‘gas card’?

Basically a fleet card allows fleet managers to not only purchase fuel but manage vehicle maintenance within a framework of detailed reports relating to each transaction and within a network of specified merchants. Gas cards simply allow the purchase of fuel and nothing else.

How will my business benefit from a fleet card?

* you will have full control and more efficient management of fuel purchasing and vehicle maintenence. Each transaction will be accounted for; you will know exactly how your fuel expenditure is being utilised.

* vastly reduced paperwork and no cash transactions

* you will be able to keep track of who is buying what and where

* increased security for both you, the manager, and for your employees; elimination of fraud.

* Appoint convenient fueling locations for your drivers

As`well as being aware that your business will profit from the time and money saved, be aware that a variety of fuel cards are on offer in a selection of formats such as MasterCard, BP and Arco Card. The above mentioned benefits are not exclusive to the larger organisations; if you are a smaller business with maybe just four/five vehicles the advantages will be even more apparent.

Once you have decided which card will suit your needs it is just a matter of applying, (online is more efficient), and the cards are issued normally within ten days.

Popularity: 6% [?]

I often wonder what career choices I would make if I could turn the clock back and be sixteen once again. That’s usually the age where you begin to consider what you would like to do with your life; the funny thing is at that age you rarely ’see’ yourself beyond your twenties, even thirties. When you thought about the career path you wanted to take back then did you ever visualise yourself in that career until retirement age…? I’ll bet not. It’s incredible how shortsighted we are when young.

As I say, I was thinking about what choices I would have made with the power of hindsight - so I found a great site with a quiz which matches your personality to a selection of careers; if you are just beginning to make those plans or are deciding which direction to take next, why not have a look here and see what it can turn up for you?

Funnily enough, those career selections which came up after I concluded the quiz where actually in my field of interests. One thing that struck me was how we change as we progress though our twenties and thirties - ticking the answer boxes was confronting; twenty years ago I would have answered many of those questions quite differently. Maybe this is why the career we choose at the age of eighteen bores the hell out of us when we are thirty-five. Interesting…

Anyway, it’s just a bit of fun even if you aren’t after a career change.

Popularity: 4% [?]

Mobile marketing is still very much in its infancy with numerous trials of the technologies out in the marketplace at the moment and, mostly, fairly soft-sell.

For example, many banks these days offer a text alert service to tell you when various transactions are going through your account or when you’re nearing limits or whatever. Many customers won’t even associate those with marketing as such but signing up to them gives the banks permission to send texts and in amongst the various alerts you’ve asked for you’ll also find the odd marketing text too.

On the generic text marketing front, there’s Cellit Mobile Marketing who offer a whole range of services to companies. Generally speaking they’re time-sensitive and location-sensitive applications so they’ve rolled out a service that lets you tell ticket sales outlets when you’ll be on vacation and where you’ll be so that they can text you the various offers available on shows at the appropriate time. You can expect this type of service to improve radically in the coming years as they will eventually be able to pick up on your location without you having to tell them in advance.

That’s a fairly obvious application. Less obvious is something like House4Cell which uses information that customers register about their interests in houses, prices, locations, etc. and uses this to alert them when properties meeting their requirements come on the market or prices are changed. At first glance, this seems a little over the top. Sure, you might well decide to go out to the theatre on the spur of the moment, but you’re hardly going to buy a house on the same basis, are you? This particular application seems best suited for city locations where there’s a relatively fast turnover of properties and is probably not terribly suitable for slow moving markets.

Very much in the impulse buying arena is CouponZap. This basically texts coupons for pizzas and whatnot. This is very much in the early days of development and there’s a lot of functionality to come in this area once the mobile applications start taking account of the location of the phone without having to ask the user.

What’s currently missing from all of these is the ability to detect where the phone is and generate texts on that basis. At the moment, the primary advantage is that you get direct to the customer which you usually can’t do via normal communication media.

Popularity: 6% [?]