Update November 2000: Slovenia

1. Communication Activities

Because of the large number of IT related conferences and activities, performed in the spring, summer is usually the most inactive time of the year for communication activities aimed at promoting the Information Society in Slovenia. Indeed, during last three months there were only two IT events in Slovenia.

First event in these months was IBM Forum 2000 in Portorož organized by IBM Slovenia. 250 users and vendors attended the forum. The main theme of this forum was new e-economy. "Digital economy is most important in business," said Iztok Klancnik, general manager IBM Slovenia. Also present at the forum was Carlos Da Silva, operating manager, IBM CEMA. The speaker of honor of the conference was Mrs.Nancy Ely Raphael, ambassador of the United States of America. With his presence at the conference made a good impression at the attendees also the futurist Patrick Dixon.

Beautiful seaside resort Portorož hosted also the ORACLE Users Conference- SIOUG (Portorož, 17. – 20. September), organized by Slovene Society of ORACLE users. They came from business, government, information and communications technology and universities. Although several presentations were dedicated to new technologies, they were also exchanging their knowledge and experience of the software and developed business solutions.

Slovenian association of Information science and Association of Slovenian Researcher signed the letter of understanding to establish the forum for information society, which will include the presenters from industry, government, science and presenters from the general public. There will be about 60 people, which are very much interested in improving the information science in Slovenia. The people in this forum will have three main goals. The first one is the promotion of the development of the information technology in Slovenia. The second one is to reestablish the communication between the forum and the government, and the last one is to guidance the development of the information technology in Slovenia. All the activities of the forum are founded on the blue book, which has a title: Slovenia as the information society.

2. Publications

The monthly new magazine SPLETKA, that was established by the newspaper DELO REVIJE has already the 150.000 editions. In this new magazine readers get very useful information about the internet, interesting sites to visit, how to make your own web site and lots of other information about the internet.

The weekly D.NET, successor of the SLONET, which was the supplement of the Slovenian well known newspaper Dnevnik, was established. At the moment it has about 70.000 editions. D.NET takes into a closer look all the new technologies, events, promotions, communication activities from Slovenian IT companies and also what is new around the world in IT spheres.

3. Mobile communication

In the last three months we made a big improvement in the WAP technology. The number of the mobile subscriptions is still increasing. All three mobile providers, MOBITEL, DEBITEL and SIMOBIL did a lot for promotion WAP protocol and for the services that WAP supports (including the mobile phones, that support WAP). Mobile provider SIMOBIL had a special promotion for WAP users – till the end of October there is a free access to the Internet.

4. Electronic Commerce

As the number of Internet users in Slovenia is still growing, lot of promotion activities for e-banking, e-business and e-commerce was made with intention to build a solid and reliable e-market environment. Indeed, companies have made a lot of progress in the area of Internet shopping in the past three months with a special interest in safety transactions. Not only the few biggest banks in Slovenia (NLB, SKB, KBM) but also smaller ones are moving their business to the internet, thus providing customers with around the clock service and accessibility.