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The emergence of global electronic markets on the Internet has been seen as an opportunity for small and medium‐sized tourism enterprises to improve their competitive position. However, several barriers hinder small hospitality organizations from capitalizing on IT and the Internet. This paper reports on an action research program of introducing Internet technology in a small hotel located in a peripheral region of Finland. As part of a project funded by the European Union, a complete integrated Web booking and hotel management system was developed, denoting a re‐engineering of many business processes. The system, which features customer online (real‐time) reservation services was an inexpensive, user‐friendly solution specially designed for the purposes of small and medium‐sized hospitality organizations with little prior IT knowledge. In the field of online reservation systems, the hotel is a pioneer, as it is the first independent hotel in Finland to offer online reservation services through a non‐customized reservation system.

This paper argues that there are four different ways in which customer value can be created in electronic grocery shopping, but that the chosen business model will set limits to whether ± and to what extent ± the firm will be able to offer value-adding services for consumers. The relationship between business models and customer value in online grocery shopping is exemplified, and some practical problems and opportunities in e-grocering are highlighted by presenting the case of Nettimarket.com, a Finnish Internet grocery business that was founded by an entrepreneur with no previous experience of the industry. His company is a start-up virtual grocery shop with a business model unattainable by the big industry players. The paper reports on the experiences of the company and the outlook of the entrepreneur after two and three years in business, respectively.

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Mobile TV is described as a natural and evolutionary next step as mobile phones get more multimedia features. Mobile network operators expect mobile TV to support the adoption of 3G as they expect consumers to start shifting the use of mobile phones from simply communicating with each others to proactively searching for information. Here the logic is not very clear as TV basically is a broadcast medium for passive reception of content which is pre-selected, produced and transmitted and thus seems to be in contradiction with the aim at a proactive search for information. Then there is another question: do people want mobile TV and if so, when, where and what would they want to watch? We have conducted an empirical study among the participants in a pilot experiment with mobile TV in Finland in order to find out some reasons for a possible adoption and use of mobile TV..

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