Impact of Mobile the Wireless Technologies on Developing Countries

This chapter discusses the impact of mobile and wireless technologies on developing countries. The new technological advances and capabilities allow developing countries the opportunity to “leapfrog” years of wired technology and infrastructure development. Based on this study, it appears that mobile and wireless technologies will not be enough to truly advance developing countries. In order to truly “leapfrog” and make up for years of technological advancements, developing countries must consider dealing with government corruption, violation of human rights and extremely low literacy rates. All those factors will derail the effort to “leapfrog” and gain economic benefits from technological advancements. The Village Cell Phone Program is an example where mobile technology created a business opportunity while at the same time changing the role of women in society. Any implementation of mobile and wireless technology must be complemented with social and political reform in order to be successful.

Benefits and Difficulties of Internet Use in Hotels and Its Effects According to the Facilities Rank, Property Size, Manager's Age and Experience

This study aims to analyze the perception of managers on the benefits and difficulties of Internet use in hotels and its effects according to the facilities rank and property size plus managers’ age and experience time. It used a questionnaire to collect data from the managers of 35 hotels in the city of Natal, RN, Brazil. By using analysis of variance (ANOVA) and Tukey test, results showed that there is no significant difference in the perception of managers on the impact of Internet use in hotels. Hence, the managers of these hotels had similar opinions about the benefits and difficulties of the Internet use in their hotels.

Presenting Large and Complex Information Sets on Mobile Handhelds

The opportunity to access information at any time and any place caused a boom in the development of small mobile devices in recent years. Due to their application, these handhelds become smaller and handier, which leads to new challenges in human-computer interaction. Due to limited resources of these devices new paradigms for information presentation and interaction facilities are needed. We take this into account by applying concepts for interaction and display of information from the field of information visualization to mobile pocket-sized devices. We focus on concrete problems caused by presenting huge images and large hierarchies in such environments. Moreover, we introduce an effective technique for browsing the World Wide Web via mobile handhelds. The presented techniques offer an improved support in navigation, orientation and interaction that enables the user to browse, interpret and handle presented information much more easily.

A Reverse Auction Case Study

The reverse auction tool has evolved to take advantage of Internet technology and has been identified by many large organisations as a tool to achieve substantial procurement savings. As companies adopt this technology it is important for them to understand the implications of this type of procurement. This chapter re-visits a reverse auction event and discusses the impacts the reverse auction format had upon all participants involved in the auction. In late 2001 a small Australian supplier of transport and logistics services was asked to participate in a reverse auction for services they had provided for five years to a multi-national organisation. They were not successful in retaining their contract position and this chapter looks at the reverse auction and its business impacts two years after the initial auction. The case study is viewed through the eyes of the winning supplier, losing supplier, auction vendor, and buyer. The main outcomes show that the reverse auction struggles to adapt to fluid business conditions and is limited if it is used as only a price fixing mechanism. It did not engender co-operative supply chains or win-win situations between the auction players.

Loyalty Differences in the Effect of Negative Critical Incidents and Quality Attributes Satisfaction

This chapter introduces the effect of negative critical incidents and quality attributes satisfaction to heed the call for theoretically based empirical work in terms of loyalty difference on Internet shopping. There are some findings and recommendations. First, FNCIs would affect overall satisfaction indirectly by QASAT. Second, either highly loyal customers or less loyal customers, although the important order of relationship between four latent factors of QASAT and FNCIs are not equal, have causal relationships that were all significant. Third, the slow response that affected overall satisfaction indirectly by QASAT seems to be more important to customers who have less purchase frequency or purchase amount than higher ones. Finally, online bookstores with incomplete content that have untrustworthy transactions would affect overall satisfaction indirectly to customers with high loyalty by QASAT; this seems to be more important than it is to less loyal customers. It is hoped that the results of this chapter could provide a valuable strategy for marketers to rethink how they can find out and reduce the FNCIs that customers may encounter.

Integrated Domain Model for Digital Rights Management

Digital Rights Management (DRM) is an issue of controlling and managing digital rights over intellectual property. It has recently broadened its scope from being merely a content protection concern to description, identification, trading, protection, monitoring and tracking of rights over tangible or intangible assets. In our study we found out an essential problem of the domain: lack of models on an appropriate level of abstraction needed to support research and system development. Modelling, identifying and describing the core entities enable the rights management functionalities. This chapter contributes in recognizing the principal entities and providing detailed description on current identification and description matters and solutions. Our analysis results in the remark of distinguishing the evolution stages of digital content and separating the different offers and agreements through which the rights are traded between the value chain participants. Based on the depiction of the domain model, this chapter additionally gives insight into the future trends and issues on the DRM domain.

Motivations and Barriers to the Adoption of 3G Mobile Multimedia Services

This chapter provides an end-user perspective on mobile multimedia services that are likely to emerge with the roll out of Third Generation Mobile Services (3G). More specifically, the objectives of the study are: to provide an insight into current behavior in terms of attitudes towards, access and usage of multimedia mobile services by current end users; to establish main clusters of mobile users; to investigate the possible motivations and barriers of usage of new mobile multimedia services as viewed by current users. The remainder of this chapter is organized into the following four sections. The first section provides a brief review of the literature on the technology acceptance model. Next we present our research model based on a qualitative exploratory survey conducted in six markets. Then we test the proposed model on the Italian market and present the analysis and results of our study. Finally we make conclusions by discussing the implications of our study, followed by presenting future research directions.

Customer Relationship Management on Internet and Mobile Channels

The Internet has served as an effective channel for companies to build and manage relationships with customers. The mobile channel, emerging from the convergence of wireless communications and the mobile Web, promises to deliver additional support to meet consumer needs. This chapter examines features of customer relationship management (CRM) as implemented on the Internet (eCRM) and the mobile channel (mCRM) from the customer’s perspective. It further explores how companies can better coordinate their CRM strategies between these two channels to support e-commerce customers. We propose an analytical framework to examine the current eCRM and mCRM practice in terms of customer loyalty, branding, customer satisfaction, customization, and trust. These five factors affect customer acquisition, sales and services, and customer retention. A checklist was developed to guide the evaluation of CRM practice for e-commerce sites. Several examples and research directions are discussed in the chapter.

Mobile Payments (M-Payments)- An Exploratory Study of Emerging Issues and Future Trends

The opportunity to access information at any time and any place caused a boom in the development of small mobile devices in recent years. Due to their application, these handhelds become smaller and handier, which leads to new challenges in human-computer interaction. Due to limited resources of these devices new paradigms for information presentation and interaction facilities are needed. We take this into account by applying concepts for interaction and display of information from the field of information visualization to mobile pocket-sized devices. We focus on concrete problems caused by presenting huge images and large hierarchies in such environments. Moreover, we introduce an effective technique for browsing the World Wide Web via mobile handhelds. The presented techniques offer an improved support in navigation, orientation and interaction that enables the user to browse, interpret and handle presented information much more easily.

Rates of Change in Ad hoc Networks

Ad hoc networks are inherently dynamic, with nodes entering, moving around, and leaving the network, often for short duration membership. This property of dynamic restructuring limits functionality and greatly complicates security. Here, we establish a foundation for analyzing ad hoc network functionality or security properties relative to their dynamic nature. The essential structure in any network is the links between nodes. Thus, our approach turns on measures of link availability to define network properties that govern functionality. In this chapter, we systematically address issues associated with changes that occur in ad hoc networks. We consider the functionality impact of change and address bounds on optimization that exist when change rates are high and provide definitions that allow reasoning about limits on functionality resulting from increasingly dynamic link activity.