Leisure e-Service Innovation: A Bottom-up Collaborative Approach

This paper explores the future opportunities for combine ambient e-service with leisure industry. Contrast to traditional leisure service delivery method, our proposed service innovation focus on the bottom-up collaborative solutions which enable leisure activity participants to cooperate with nearby users and encourage information sharing and experience co-creation. We introduce a collaborative trustworthy estimation application for leisure activity participants that guarantee the quality of heterogeneous information sources in dynamic leisure environment. Simulation outcomes for trust decision quality enhancement show significant improvement in all kinds of environment settings. The collaborative leisure e-service applications may gather these nearby participants’ power to diminish the potential risks within the unfamiliar leisure activity environment. Keyword: Leisure e-service, Service innovation, Bottom-up collaboration 1. New Era of Leisure e-Service Leisure activities become more popular since people put emphasis on their increased leisure time and wider choices. With advanced information technologies (such as GPS and mobile devices), the development of leisure industry may changes rapidly. The Internet has introduced a significant wave of change in communication patterns around the world. People interact with friends through email; connect to others through their web site. E-services are capable of intelligent interaction and are able to discover and negotiate with each other, mediate on behalf of their users and reconfigure themselves into more complex services. These new configurations may be static or dynamic, which brings new opportunities for leisure e-service application. The leisure events can be divided into activities that happen in homes and those which do not. For out-of-home leisure activities, participants are located in a dynamic environment. Leisure service is provided based on traditional service delivery model. That is, the traditional leisure service were grounded in the client/server architecture where the only interactions involved are between a services provider and the user, and did not including possible interactions between the user and the environment or other nearby users. Collaborative interactions between leisure activities participants create a new paradigm for mobile telecommunications as well as the leisure industry. In this paper, we would like to build up a collaborative leisure e-service application that facilitates users to join leisure activities. We will introduce a bottom-up collaborative trustworthy estimation application for leisure activity participants that guarantee the quality of heterogeneous information sources in dynamic leisure environment. Wireless technology and mobile networks make it possible for mobile users to connect to the Internet, and mobile-service applications have become popular. The term “ubiquitous commerce” is used to denote ubiquitous networks created to support personalized and uninterrupted communications and transactions between a firm and its various stakeholders to provide a level of value over, above, and beyond traditional commerce (Watson, Pitt, Berthon, & Zinkhan, 2002). Combine with the ubiquitous technologies, leisure service becomes more interactive and useful. The innovative leisure applications, its dynamic environments, and the collective efforts of mobile users, are deserving of investigation. 2. Related Researches of Leisure e-Service Innovation 2.1. Leisure service innovation with mobile commerce There are some related studies for integrating mobile commerce with the leisure industry. Some prototype applications are also proposed for experiment. However, these applications are based on the client/server design concept. Their proposed applications are mainly treat the mobile device as an Internet environment extension. For example, Counts (2007) argue that communication on mobile devices plays an important role in people’s use of technology for leisure, but to date this communication has largely been one-to-one. Mobile internet connectivity can support a variety of group-based messaging and media sharing scenarios. Schubert and Hampe (2006) treat mobile technology as the extension of communication for communities. They address the communities of Interest within the leisure industry and discuss possible business models for the parties operating the platform. The described community platform is an innovative value added service concept for a mobile coordination support for individuals. Brown etc, (2005) utilize the collaborative filtering algorithm for recommendation the photograph sharing. Their study is a fixed internet application that did not focus the mobility of participants. However, the authors claim sharing events with others is an important part of many enjoyable experiences. The collective effort of leisure activity participants are not emphasized in those studies. 2.2. Ambient e-service for leisure activity support The notion of ambient e-services is defined to identify a new scope of mobile e-services by Hwang & Yuan. The notable features of ambient e-services are the exhilarated linkage based on social context and significantly rapid growth of connections. Ambient e-services make a mobile user not only connect to dynamic ambient environments but also cooperate with other mobile users in the nearby surrounding environment, capitalizing dynamic environmental values as well as dynamic social values (Hwang & Yuan, 2005. 2007a, 2007b). Since the nature of out-door leisure activity are similar to the ambient e-service environment, we try to explore the collective efforts of leisure activity participants within the ambient e-service environment, and deliver the moment of value for leisure activity participants. Since the dynamic out-door leisure environment is different from a traditional static environment. It presents significant challenges for users in determining which users are trustworthy, since users do not know each other in the environment. The reliable information is seldom available for users to determine who is trustworthy. There is no centralized or trusted 3rd party/agency to manage that task, and guarantee the trustworthiness of each identity. These new challenges complicate trust determination. 3. Collaborative Leisure e-Service