Bored on the bus or weary of waiting for friends? A small Scottish technology company could have a big future in helping lift your ennui.
Digital Bridges, a two-year-old Dunfermline firm, has developed communications software which lets people play interactive games on their mobile phones to fill such idle moments.
The online games already on offer to people with five minutes to spare are traditional favourites like Hangman - hardly the cutting edge of toys.
But research by analyst Datamonitor suggests the global market for wireless entertainment could be worth $6 billion per annum to service providers like Digital Bridges by 2005.
Digital Bridges recently won £10 million of first-round venture capital funding from GSM Capital and Apax Partners, who are ultimately hoping for huge revenues from the mobile phone networks who sign up Digital Bridge's "Unity" communications software.
Digital Bridges has already signed up 10 phone network operators from the Philippines to France - more than any competitor, it says. More importantly it has hooked up with giants like Vodafone Group and believes it can expand this total to 24 by the end of the year.
:quality(70)/cloudfront-eu-central-1.images.arcpublishing.com/irishtimes/VR3765MFOBH2NMV2QNICYDF67M.png)