Afterword

ThimphuTech was the first technology blog in Bhutan. We started writing it in 2009, just as broadband and mobile internet started to take off. (Although internet in Bhutan was launched in 1999, it was either super-slow or super-expensive, and was only used by a selected few).

In the blog, we wrote about technology and food, but also about plenty of other stuff. The blog became popular and influential in Bhutan. A companion bi-weekly column -- Ask Boaz -- was published for many years in the Kuensel, Bhutan's national newspaper. (The complete Kuensel columns are available as an ebook, Blogging with Dragons).

We stopped updating the blog when we left Bhutan in 2014, but the information within the posts can still prove useful, and thus we decided to keep it online.

We thank all our readers.
Tashi Delek,
Boaz & Galit.

Tuesday, February 1, 2011

Will we change our SMS habits?

The average teenager in the United States sends more than 100 (!) text messages a day. Voice calls in the U.S. are on the decline. Apparently, many Americans prefer texting to talking. Some sociologists assume different types of people prefer different types of communication, so the trend might reflect changes in the U.S. culture. Anyway, In Bhutan SMSing never really took off. In an effort to make text messages more attractive, Bhutan Telecom is reducing the price of a single SMS from Nu 1 to Nu 0.45 (B-Mobile to B-Mobile) and Nu 0.70 (B-Mobile to TashiCell). TashiCell is offering 50 free SMSs for Losar.

Will these promotions jump-start SMS in Bhutan (one of the more profitable streams of revenue for all telecom operators), or will Bhutanese keep refraining from SMS in favor of voice? Time will tell.
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