Urban Travel Information and Wireless Technologies in Helsinki, Finland

This paper examines technology networks and their use in travel information distribution. The selected cases demonstrate the variations among different models in organizing the provision of services. The role and intensiveness of the public sectormainly through the work of city administrationstogether with the private sector and universities, vary considerably in their efforts to generate wireless urban networks and contents. The execution of these technologies is analyzed with respect to infrastructure (hardware), implementation (collaboration), and content interfaces (software). The results have implications for the marketing strategies and their designs. The results show that tourism information provision is fragmented and includes a mix of public-private relations. The online contents of service locations are limited and are dependent on the status of the service. The results suggest that innovative solutions are still needed to create and distribute the services and their information.