Alternative news on social media in Norway

Alternative news media in Norway have become visible in public debates. Partly because of news sharing on social media. Social media has become an arena for news, information, and public debate, and has also become a place to fight for the news agenda. The present study examines news sharing in social media in Norway and how right-wing alternative news outlets use social media to impact the news agenda. These are small organizations with only a handful of employees, but they have very proactive readers and feature a considerable amount of user-generated content. They are critical of immigration, particularly from Muslim countries, and of the political elite. They mimic traditional media in the way they organize and label their content, but their reporting is more subjective. The present study uses quantitative content analysis to reveal which topics are the most shared on social media, and from which news type of news organizations they come. It also looks at how news sharing differed in the days following a series of terrorist attacks and how the pattern changed during the course of a normal day. This leads to a discussion on participatory journalism and how news sharing can be seen as a part of the public debate.

Analysis and Outcome Prediction of Crowdfunding Campaigns

Humongous volumes of data are being generated every minute by individual users as well as organizations. This data can be turned into a valuable asset only if it is analyzed, interpreted and used for improving processes or for benefiting users. One such source that is contributing huge data every year is a large number of web-based crowd-funding projects. These projects and related campaigns help ventures to raise money by acquiring small amounts of funding from different small organizations and people. The funds raised for crowdfunded projects and hence, their success depends on multiple elements of the project. The current work predicts the success of a new venture by analysis and visualization of the existing data and determining the parameters on which success of a project depends. The prediction of a project’s outcome is performed by application of machine learning algorithms on crowd-funding data stored in the NoSQL database, MongoDB. The results of this work can prove beneficial for the investors to have an estimate about the success of a project before investing in it.

Financial Data Processing in Big Data Platforms

Today’s digital society generates more and more data on a daily basis in all areas of human activities, especially in the financial sector. Such data can be collected, stored, processed, and analyzed, providing serious analytical opportunities for the end users. A lot of such systems are implemented and work using cloud technologies, which have a number of advantages, but they use a pay-per-use model and thus are not very suitable for medium and small organizations, non-profit and academic institutions. In this paper, a system, capable of fetching, storing, and processing big data is proposed and tested with financial data. It uses an open-source component-based approach and can be custom-built and implemented in national universities or centers of competence/excellence. That can present unique opportunities to researchers and developers to use and work with Big data on economic and financial problems, to investigate dependencies, use large simulation and forecast models and analyze results, using the new technologies and Big data provided by them.

Characteristics of the ERP Systems Designed for Managing Small Businesses

This article mainly aims to introduce the particular charactersitics of the ERP systems, used for managing small businesses, by answering several basic questions related to this topic: What do we generally understand by ERP systems? What is the essence of ERP for small business? What is the role of ERP for small business? What do we understand by small business? What are the characteristics of small business? What is the role of small business in society? What are the basic problems of small business? What is today’s business environment? In this respect, the report introduces the essence and the role of the ERP systems used for managing small business organizations in a structured and summarized way. It shows how the specific characteristics of small business and today’s business environment affect the ERP configurations, compared to those used in large organizations. At the end of the paper, a summary is provided of the characteristics of the ERP systems used for managing small organizations.

Resilience in Vulnerable Small and New Social Enterprises

The use of financial ratios in predicting financial vulnerability has a large body of literature, but few studies address resilience and the recovery from financial distress. Further, no vulnerability studies specifically address the needs of small and young social enterprises. This study uses over twenty years of panel data to predict which factors signal the future recovery of small and young social enterprises. There is mixed support for hypotheses found in the literature, and though additional equity and revenue diversification is shown to be beneficial, increased surplus ratios carry implications which vary between financial stressors. Even in a sample of small organizations, we find evidence for the liability of smallness. Implications for practitioners, researchers, and policymakers are discussed.

Development of Digital Libraries with Software Product Line Engineering

Digital Libraries have become popular nowadays since important libraries all over the world started distributing their collections online, properly classified, and, in many cases, with access to the digital version of the resource. These programs have been beneficial to the general population as well as research groups in fields such as language and literature. Nonetheless, since their creation is a time-consuming and costly process, small organizations are forced to rely on obsolete or poorly designed software. However, most of the features, including the data model, are shared by this type of system, with minor variations depending on the type of resources to be handled. This article presents a Software Product Line (SPL) for the semi-automatic generation of Digital Libraries (DL). Our SPL allows developers to specify which DL features are required, which will define the data model variationand the generated source code. The specification is then transformed into a fully functional DL application with the specified features that is ready for deployment. We present the feature model, the SPL implementation, and acase study on three sample projects that enabled us to evaluate the resulting software, with a focus on development effort savings.

Organizational issues in embracing Agile methods: an empirical assessment

This study provides empirical evidence to the body of knowledge in Agile methods adoption in small, medium and large organizations in international context. This research explores the factors involved in the adoption of Agile methods in software development organizations. A survey was conducted among Agile professionals to gather survey data from 52 software organizations in seven countries across the world. Statistical techniques are applied towards empirical assessment. Organizational culture, team structure and management support are found to be crucial success factors whereas lack of management support, a large organization size and traditional organizational culture are found to be detrimental for the adoption of Agile approach in an organization. The selection of an appropriate Agile method depends on the project size and, for each size, there are specific methods preferred by different enterprises. Providing better control over the work is viewed as the primary advantage of the Agile methods within large and small organizations, while for the medium-size organizations, the priority is switched to coping with changing user requirements. Majority of the respondents did not consider embracing agile methods as a reason for project failure which indicates that Agile methods are, indeed, beneficial.

Adoption of Online Resources to Improve the Marketing Performance of SMEs

With the increase in the pace of globalization, SMEs are facing stiff competition from multinational firms. The entrepreneurs owning SMEs have fewer funds, but they need to improve the output of their organizations. Technology adoption can help owners of SMEs to match up with the pace of multinational firms because it can increase their reach and improve overall performance. In this paper, the authors will discuss whether online resource adoption (social media, e-commerce, technology 4.0) will enhance the marketing standard of small and medium enterprises or not. SMEs can achieve economies of scale because of the prominent usage of technology. The findings of this paper will help owners/managers of Indian SMEs to understand the use of online resources in improving marketing within a limited budget. COVID-19 has also pushed all the organizations towards the usage of technology. Either big or small organizations, none of them can ignore the use of technical sources for marketing in this digital era.