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SMS Tickets Receive the Czech At Award

During the evening program of the gala commencement of the international ISSS 2008 conference on Sunday, 6 April 2008 in Hradec Králové in the Klicper Theatre, the results of the Czech At (@) Contest were announced. This year the prestigious award went to the SMS Ticket, a new service from the Prague Public Transit Co. Inc., launched in November 2007

"This year the jury judged several interesting projects, making the decision more difficult than usual", says RNDr. Tomáš Renčín, ISSS conference director and a jury member for the Czech At Association. "But in the end we agreed that this new service from the Prague Public Transit Co. – though it is not directly from the civil service environment – represents an absolutely concrete case of how modern technologies can make life easier in a simple fashion for practically everyone."

Besides these arguments, the decision of the Czech At jury as to who will be this year's winner was also supported by the fact that the solution, originated by the Prague Public Transit Co., attracted significant interest from many other towns and cities in the Czech Republic, and also inspired a number of projects where similar principles could be used, like for example health care fees or in other areas.

The service is available wherever and whenever. According to statistics, there are 1.5 mobile phones for every inhabitant of the Czech Republic, which confirms the high penetration rate of mobile phone use and associated services. According to the ticketing system, from January already an average of 19,000 people a day are using this service. A survey performed for the Public Transit Co. by the independent agency Westminster showed that 60% of SMS ticket users are newly paying customers, who were recruited from amongst „involuntary" illegal passengers. The survey also shows that thanks to the implementation of SMS tickets, the number of chronic illegal passengers declined by 1%, the number of involuntary or occasional illegal passengers declined by 16%, while the number of paying passengers increased by 17%.

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