Leveraging Pervasive and Ubiquitous Service Computing

The advancement of technologies to connect people and objects anywhere has provided many opportunities for enterprises. This chapter will review the different wireless networking technologies and mobile devices that have been developed, and discuss how they can help organizations better bridge the gap between their employees or customers and the information they need. The chapter will also discuss the promising application areas and human-computer interaction modes in the pervasive computing world, and propose a service-oriented architecture to better support such applications and interactions.

Data Quality on the Internet

This chapter will review the studies on the data quality on the Internet and will propose some suggestions to improve existing Internet resources. The layout of this chapter is as follows. First, the definitions of data quality will be visited. Next, the author would like to review the reasons of poor data quality. Framework and assessment based on the past literature will be reviewed and finally some recommendations are highlighted.

U-Commerce in the Financial Marketspace

The mission of this chapter is to investigate (1) how u-commerce is made available by online brokerage agents and the different interfaces they provide via mobile phone transactions, computer transactions, and/or land-line telephone transactions (either thru broker assisted transactions or interactive voiceresponse phone systems), (2) how the anytime anywhere demand and supply of financial knowledge and availability or non-availability of ubiquitous trading tools and systems affect the behavior of traders and investors in the financial market, and (3) to what extent ubiquity of information and systems tools are regulated in relation to stock trading, stock manipulation, and global volatility of financial markets.

Planning for the Introduction of Mobile Applications to Support the Sales Force

Performance gains from SFA investments have often been obstructed by the sales force’s unwillingness to accept and use available systems. Studies show that a strong reason for resistance by the sales force to the technology is the failure to convince salespeople of the advantages and benefits of the new technology. Consequently firms face the challenge of selecting SFA technologies that their sales force will perceive as valuable and accept to use to enhance its performance. This issue becomes more challenging when it comes to introducing emerging technologies such as mobile technologies, where there is a risk of falling into the trap of overestimating/underestimating their potential value. The present study proposes a value-based approach for planning the introduction of Mobile applications to support the sales force. The approach suggested provides guidelines on how to determine whether or not mobile technologies would add value to the sales force before those technologies actually get selected and implemented. Good planning of SFA investment would help firms avoid resistance of the sales force towards the implemented systems, rather than having to treat it at the post-implementation stage.

Constructing a Model of the Adoption of New Technologies of U-Commerce

The rapid growth of u-commerce, the new generation of e-commerce, together with the need for the adoption of new technologies, has necessitated the need for effective organizational changes to this challenging and eminent trend. The authors posit that firms should explore the consumers’ perception of u-commerce and further exploit the strategic advantages of u-commerce with reference to their adoption of new u-commerce technologies. They propose a conceptual reference framework for helping organizations deal with this dynamic situation.

Evolving Information Ecologies

This chapter examines how people in organizations appropriate new computer-based media, that is, how they adopt, reconfigure, and integrate advanced communication technologies such as groupware or desktop conferencing systems into their work practice. The chapter presents and analyzes findings from an in-depth field study of the adoption and use of a Web-based groupware application—a “virtual workspace”—in a large multinational firm. The analysis focuses, in particular, on the fact that people in modern organizations have plenty of media at their disposal and often combine old and new media to accomplish their work tasks. Furthermore, it highlights the crucial role of organizational communication genres in shaping how people adopt and use new media. The authors argue that understanding and facilitating the process of appropriation is the key to the successful introduction of new media in organizations.

Don't Thing but Look

Over the past decade, electronic commerce has expanded and has provided new ways of conducting businesses in a brand new environment. Lately u-commerce seems to be pioneering the field of electronic transactions. Where ‘u’ stands for ubiquitous, unison, unique and universal, u-commerce offers the opportunity to users to conduct business everywhere and at any given moment in time. The simplicity of u-commerce transactions makes the issue of domain names more relevant than ever before. This chapter examines the procedural unfairness of the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP) in an effort to demonstrate that the ‘regulatory’ framework surrounding domain names does not respect their technological necessity.

Framework for Proximity Aware Mobile Services

This chapter discusses a service oriented framework to realize proximity aware services for mobile devices. It describes the architecture at both client and server ends. Using the proposed framework we develop a prototype to realize a real world application. The chapter ends with a discussion on the framework and possible future enhancements.

Developing a Software Agent for Establishing a Convenient Customer-Driven Group-Buying Mechanism

Group-buying (or volume discount) is a promising field in electronic commerce for applying software agent technologies. In a traditional group-buying mechanism, either a customer or the supplier calls up a sufficient number of buyers for a target item, and then coordinates the actions of all participants during the whole process. Most participants involved in a group-buying project are passive. Studies in this field were therefore focused on developing an effective mechanism so as to enhance the utility of every participant in a fair way. However, the utility of a customer can only be maximized if the customer can buy the item he/she personally needs at a possibly lowest price, not just an item recommended by another customer or the supplier that he/she is supposed to like. In other words, it would be more flexible if every customer can initiate a group-buying project of his/her own for the item he/she personally needs in a convenient way. As a result, there will be multiple group-buying projects for multiple target items at the same time. To this end, a software agent is developed in this study to make every customer easily reach the web page he/she browses for a target item for group-buying. The data of the item will be automatically extracted and uploaded onto a website which then informs every registered user of the group-buying project of this item. Requests for the same item will be combined, and there are always multiple target items on the website for group-buying at the same time. As a result, cross group-buying becomes possible. An experimental system is constructed in this study to demonstrate the applicability of the software agent. Its advantages and/or disadvantages are also discussed.

Service-Level Roaming

We will discuss on new methods and tools for building high personalized, virtual e-business services. A new service provisioning architecture based on web services has been conceived, taking into account issues related to end-user mobility. The following pages deal with a proposal for creating real localized, personalized virtual environments using web services and domain ontologies. In particular, to overcome interoperability issues that could arise from a lack of uniformity in service descriptions, we propose a way for controlling and enforcing annotation policies based on a service registration authority. It allows services to be advertised according to guidelines and domain rules. Furthermore, this solution enables enhanced service/component discovery and validation, helping software engineers to build services by composing building blocks and provision/deliver a set of personalized services.