Still Watching Other People’s Programmes?

In this paper, the authors adapt a value chain analysis framework used in the music industry and apply it to the television industry, in order to probe the television value creation and distribution mechanisms and examine how they were affected by technology. More specifically, they examine how viewers can effectively become producers by repositioning themselves in the value chain and the implications of such a shift. Their discussion takes place in the context of a case study, that of Current TV, in order to illustrate in practice the opportunities and implications for the content producers, the broadcasters, and the viewers themselves.

Study on E-Business Adoption from Stakeholders’ Perspectives in Indian Firms

E-business adoption towards creating better stakeholders’ values in any business organization should begin with corporate home pages, which is equivalent of the online identity of the physical firm. This paper, by taking two snapshot pictures of corporate homepages, one in 2005 and another in 2007, analyses e-business adoption levels in fifteen publicly-listed Indian firms of three different sizes and five sectors from four external stakeholders (Customers, Suppliers/Alliances, Shareholders and Society/Community) perspectives. We also measure overall e-business readiness levels from four stakeholders’ perspectives in 2005 and 2007, and analyze the adoption as per Stages of Growth model. The measurement is based on presence of various categories of interactions, as commonly perceived, between the firm and respective stakeholder group.

Product Choice and Channel Strategy for Multi-Channel Retailers

With the explosive growth of online sales, multi-channel retailers are increasingly focused on finding ways of integrating the online channel with traditional retail stores. The need for the development of effective multi-channel strategies is strongly felt by the retailers. The present research normatively addresses this issue and using a game theoretic approach, derives optimal strategies that maximize profits under different competitive market structures. Managerial implications are discussed and probable paths of future research are identified.

Consumer Responses to the Introduction of Privacy Protection Measures

Information privacy is at the center of discussion and controversy among multiple stakeholders including business leaders, privacy activists, and government regulators. However, conceptualizations of information privacy have been somewhat patchy in current privacy literature. In this paper, we review the conceptualizations of information privacy through three different lenses (information exchange, social contract and information control), and then try to build upon previous literature from multiple theoretical lenses to create a common understanding of the organization-consumer information interaction in the context of Business-to-Consumer electronic commerce (B2C e-commence). We argue that consumers’ privacy beliefs are influenced by the situational and environmental cues that signal the level of privacy protections in a particular environment. The framework developed in this research should be of interest to academic researchers, e-commerce vendors, legislators, industry self-regulators, and designers of privacy enhancing technologies.

Training, Competence, and Business Performance

This article examines the relationship between training, competence and performance of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the context of e-business. Literature review combined with a triangulation of qualitative and quantitative methods were used to investigate these relationships. Data about e-business competences and performance in 339 SMEs in three European countries was combined with data about training supply from 116 providers of e-business related training. The empirical findings document a positive relationship between training, competence and performance and show that training explains variances in e-business competences and performance in terms of efficiency, complementarities, lock-in and novelty. The research has both theoretical and practical implications. It contributes to theoretical development by lending support to the idea that methodological issues are an important reason behind the lack of empirical support frequently reported in the literature. The study has practical implications for public policy makers, training suppliers and SME managers.

Tana and the Handbag

Research into the determinants of online auction prices has tended to group them into buyer factors, seller factors and site factors. A case is presented which recounts how a $30 handbag was sold for $ 22,750 in an online auction shortly after a national sport event. Analysis of the case indicates that, in addition to the three groups of factors already identified, other factors can exert a considerable influence on the final auction price. A model is proposed which depicts five groups of factors impacting the final price: buyer factors, seller factors, site factors which are expanded to include timing of the auction, and site brand strength; product factors which include product features, brand strength, and brand extension/association; and promotion, which includes media publicity. While not all factors will impact on every auction, due consideration should be accorded each of them by both buyers and sellers.

Web Services Communities

This chapter discusses the structure and management of communities of Web services from two perspectives. The first perspective, called coopetition, shows the simultaneous cooperative and competitive behaviors that Web services exhibit when they reside in the same community. These Web services offer similar functionalities, and hence are competitive, but they can also cooperate as they share the same savoir-faire. The second perspective, called competition, shows the competition that occurs not between Web services but between their communities, which are associated with similar functionalities. To differentiate such communities, a competition model based on a set of metrics is discussed in this chapter.

AGATHE-2

Due to Web size and diversity of information, relevant information gathering on the Web turns out to be a highly complex task. The main problem with most information retrieval approaches is neglecting pages’ context, given their inner deficiency: search engines are based on keyword indexing, which cannot capture context. Considering restricted domains, taking into account contexts, with the use of domain ontology, may lead to more relevant and accurate information gathering. In the last years, we have conducted research with this hypothesis, and proposed an agent- and ontology-based restricted-domain cooperative information gathering approach accordingly, that can be instantiated in information gathering systems for specific domains, such as academia, tourism, etc. In this chapter, the authors present this approach, a generic software architecture, named AGATHE-2, which is a full-fledged scalable multi-agent system. Besides offering an in-depth treatment for these domains due to the use of domain ontology, this new version uses machine learning techniques over linguistic information in order to accelerate the knowledge acquisition necessary for the task of information extraction over the Web pages. AGATHE-2 is an agent and ontology-based system that collects and classifies relevant Web pages about a restricted domain, using the BWI (Boosted Wrapper Induction), a machine-learning algorithm, to perform adaptive information extraction.

Privacy Compliance Checking using a Model-Based Approach

Organisations are under pressure to be compliant to a range of privacy legislation, policies and best practice. At the same time many firms are using privacy as a key differentiator. There is a clear need for high-level management and administrators to be able to assess in a dynamic, customisable way the degree to which their enterprise complies with these. We outline a solution to this problem in the form of a model-driven automated privacy process analysis and configuration checking system. This system models privacy compliance constraints, automates the assessment of the extent to which a particular computing environment is compliant and generates dashboard-style reports that highlight policy failures. We have developed a prototype that provides this functionality in the context of governance audit; this includes the development of software agents to gather information on-the-fly regarding selected privacy enhancing technologies and other aspects of enterprise system configuration. This approach may also be tailored to enhance the assurance provided by existing governance tools, and to provide increased feedback to end users about the degree of privacy and security compliance that service providers are actually providing.

Privacy Factors for Successful Ubiquitous Computing

Certain privacy principles have been established by industry, e.g. the U.S. Public Policy Committee of the Association for Computing Machinery (USACM). Over the past two years, we have been trying to understand whether such principles reflect the concerns of the ordinary citizen. We have developed a method of enquiry which displays a rich context to the user in order to elicit more detailed information about those privacy factors that underpin our acceptance of ubiquitous computing. To investigate use and acceptance, Videotaped Activity Scenarios specifically related to the exchange of health, financial, shopping and e-voting information and a large scale survey were used. We present a detailed analysis of user concerns, firstly in terms of a modified Hertzberg model that identifies a set of constructs that might reflect user-generated privacy principles, secondly those factors likely to play a key role in an individuals cost-benefit analysis, and thirdly, longer-term concerns of the citizen in terms of the impact of new technologies on social engagement and human values.