With everything else going on here in Greece over the past few days (in case you've missed it), it's kind of hard to concentrate on other aspects of professional life. However, I've tried to come up today with a positive note of life here in Greece..

The European Commission recently released a report with data from most member countries (some did not gather this data). It was really good (and admittedly a little surprising) to see that Greece (EL) is relatively high in the list, compared to other EU countries. Mobile broadband is the medium for a number of mobile marketing services.

From the European Commission website:

Other figures published for the first time show that broadband based on mobile technologies such as 3G and data services via data cards seems to be taking off in a number of Member States. Denmark, Greece, Germany, Italy, Slovenia and Spain have reported a mobile broadband penetration rate above 10%. There were 34 million mobile broadband subscribers in the EU on 1 July 2008 (not including France, the Netherlands and the UK who have not provided information on this). The mobile penetration rate, which measures the proportion of the total population actively using mobile broadband, ranges from less than 1% (Belgium and Cyprus) to nearly 20% (Spain). The EU average is 6.9%. The number of mobile broadband connections using only dedicated data cards/modems/keys, typically allowing mobile internet via laptops, is significantly lower (around 2 to 3%).

I was already aware of the fact that mobile broadband is moving quickly here in Greece, as the operators have been pushing heavily towards that direction in the recent months / past year. However, what surprised me was the fact that other EU countries are still lagging behind.

Mobile broadband means near-ubiquitous access to a number of mobile services for everyone, and is thus a very important factor for the mobile marketing ecosystem.

Hopefully, more aspects of life in Greece will soon start looking brighter, like they do in the mobile technology sector...