Bidnet – is a popular and easy way to gain new products with low prices. It is a web based cent-auction that allows people to obtain product with much lower net value. Unlike the usual English auction, participating in Bidnet is priced and with each bet the product’s end price raises up for 0,01 Ls.

“The one-time participation’s price varies between 0,75 Ls and 0,36 Ls. It depends on the channel and at once bought credit. At the moment, people can participate via banklinks, Paypal and SMS”.

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More than an year has passed since the publishing of the first SMS-novel. It was created in Finland and it was called The Last Messages.

The entire narrative consists of mobile phone text messages, describing the life of a fictitious IT-executive in Finland who resigns from his job and travels throughout Europe and India, keeping in touch with his friends and relatives only through text messages. The author, Hannu Luntiala, has created around 1000 messages and replies of the main character . The author has left errors in the SMS messages, too so they look even more authentic.

“I believe that, at the end of the day, a text message may reveal much more about a person than you would initially think,” said Luntiala, who also is head of a company that keeps databases on people living in Finland.

The Bulgarian football team CSKA Sofia recently has problems with a large debt. They owed money to some other teams and organizations. Before the crisis they were the winners of the elite A-group. After the problem arose they were threatened by loosing their rights to play in the 1st group and being returned to the local leagues. Moreover, their right(as the winner of the Bulgarian championship) to take part in the Champion’s League was withdrawn.

To help their favorite team, CSKA Sofia’s fans have started to collect money through an SMS-campaign. Each SMS sent, containing the word CSKA, to a special short code is worth 2.40lv(a bit more than 2EUR) and is going to an account for covering the debt. The good news is that the fans have collected most of the needed money and the most severe sanctions won’t bring down the team.

Such strategy is used by some other football team in the process of selection of future players. The SMS sent is granting vote rights to the sender and earns revenue to the team – money needed to buy the new player. How can you play bad after such selection?

Everybody likes to see/experience ads, which are not very annoying and still very easy to remember. It’s even better when they are requesting a certain level of interaction that gives us, as targeted people, the feeling of participation or even collaboration. Such innovative ideas are the main target of The International Advertising Festival.

The 55th International Advertising Festival has passed recently and it pronounced this year’s winners of the prestigeous golden lion statuette. The Media Grand Prix award went to Forsman & Bodenfors Gothenburg for their innovative and interactive MMS campaign, created for AMF’s pension plan.

AMF Sweden let consumer take a picture of himself and send it to AMF through MMS. Then, the sender was returned an MMS with a picture of himself, but 30 years older. As a result, the consumer is more attracted to adopting a pension plan. This was a brand building exercise for AMF resulting in 300.000 uses(Sweden has 9,1 million inhabitants) within the month of the campaign, while the target was 50.000. Isn’t this a really successful campaign?

Many of our clients have asked what are the next countries and when are we planning to launch the service there. Well, we have been preparing some countries for some time already.

During this summer Fortumo is expanding to several countries in different continents. In the 1st phase we decided to open our service in China. Why China? Big market, hundreds of millions end-users, one of the fastest growing market may be some of the reasons.

Did you know that:
* there are 1.3 billion people living in China
* China has the biggest Internet user’s community in the world, they have 228.5 million Internet users (2008 first 6 months report)
* China’s mobile penetration was 34% in 2007
* in 2006 mobile phone users sent 429 billion text messages (on average 967 text messages per user)

Stay tuned new countries are coming soon.

Beijing 2008 Olympic games are getting all the attention this week and the next one. Are you also keeping an eye on some event? Great thing is that it is fun to predict who will win and keep the fingers crossed all the time.

What do you think – will Michael Phelps win 8 gold medals in Beijing 2008?

* If you think that Michael Phelps will win 8 gold medals send an SMS to 1066109833 and write X TXT PHELPS YES
* If you think that Michael Phelps won’t win 8 gold medals send an SMS to 1066109833 and write X TXT PHELPS NO
(The cost of one SMS is 1 RMB)

Did you know that you can also create such campaigns? Fortumo.cn can help you