More than tea and coffee combined? No way, thought I, promptly spilling my morning caffeine shot everywhere. But according to market research analyst Mintel, the UK greeting card industry is the most successful of its type in the world and worth over £1.3 billion annually.

In 2006 an estimated 800 publishers produced more than 2.87 billion greeting cards for the well wishing British public.

The average Briton sends 55 greetings cards a year, which is the highest usage on the planet. Apparently the US is a long way behind in second place with Australia in third place.

We launched in January 2008, and SentForever’s ethereal alternative has been used to relay a plethora of good wishes for all occasions including birthdays, Valentine’s day and Mother’s day, and soon we will be covering our first Father’s day too..

We like to think that we are offering an unusual and innovative alternative to greetings cards. After all, many greetings cards are simply thrown away after a few days, while the messages sent with SentForever will be travelling across space and time for the rest of the sender’s and the receiver’s lives – and also on for an eternity afterwards too.

In a world where so much is transient in nature, and paper greeting cards are thrown away after a few days, SentForever’s service is the ultimate way of showing commitment to someone special. In a billion years the sun will become a giant red star and engulf the Earth erasing all traces of our individual existence, but the messages transmitted by SentForever will continue their way through the universe for the rest of time.

So what are you going to do? Send an unusual and unique message to somebody as a thoughtful gift – or buy some more coffee! And which one will be more beneficial for your health I wonder?

It’s Father’s Day on Sunday in a good chunk or the world. Make that everywhere – except for Australia and New Zealand where it’s in mid-September. And answering the question as to why that is will probably make an interesting blog post somewhere I’m sure.

We’re actually running a SentForever “Send a Message for Father’s Day” promotion with a number of newspapers around the world, where readers can send a message to “Eternalise your Dad on Father’s Day”.

I’m sure dads will find the technical aspects of the SentForever service more interesting than mum’s so here’s a bit for them.

SentForever use a specially dedicated transmitter at BT’s Goonhilly earth station in Cornwall, UK for all our message into space transmissions. Using powerful radio waves which travel at the speed of light in space, the SentForever messages travel at about 671 million miles per hour.

Upon transmission, in the blink of an eye, the eternal messages are passing 450 miles above the French Mediterranean coast. They leave our solar system around 5 hours later, and if transmitted in the direction of Alpha Centauri (the nearest star other than our own sun), they will arrive in just over 4.2 years. And all the messages that we send continue to travel for the rest of eternity too.

So, the newspaper readers will be sending their dads a rather unique Father’s Day gift this year – I hope they’ve been good!

If you’d like SentForever to transmit an unusual Father’s Day gift or message for your dad this year let us know. If we find it interesting and we are able to do it, then we will arrange a special free transmission for you as a thank you for your suggestion.

By Chris Thomason