E-Government Bulletin says in their new issue that according to the law court of Great Britain a reminder about the failure to pay the fine sent per text message works better than per letter. Usually 40 per cent of those who got a letter, paid the fine; yet 75 per cent is the result of a recent pilot of a text message reminder. It connects well with the ideas we tried to relate when talking about using text messages in different organizations.

For several years the Nordic Mobile Media conference has been organized in Latvia and Lithuania. Now the scope has been broadened and the first Central European mobile media conference has been organized – mid-May in Prague. As expected, a lot of people were present, including my humble self, to find out how the Central European market differs from ours and what could we learn from them or take over. And vice versa.

After two days at the conference it seems that services like m-parking, m-payment, m-state etc. that are quite spread here, are viewed as “emerging services” – which is definitely a step ahead compared to the time some years ago, when no one even talked about those services. At the same time SMS services with periodic taxation (so called “clubs”) are more spread in Central and Eastern Europe than here. Our service providers are only making first tests with these.

Widely discussed new “future services” like mobile TV, selling full-length songs through mobile phones, mobile search etc. are still in the testing phase everywhere – some have achieved promising results, the majority still has nothing else to show than the bare existence of the service.

I’d better finish now. For those who are more interested, the organizers have put up slides of the speakers, from which I would bring out good overviews about mobile (service) market in Russia, the Czech Republic and the whole of Central and Eastern Europe.