Whereas social networking has become an essential part of computing today, pervasive computing is seen as a key component for future systems. However, these two paradigms are complementary in many respects – the former responsible for communication and interaction between people, the latter focused on interaction with devices and services in the environment surrounding the user. By combining th...

In the last few years, using social media via mobile phone applications has become increasingly common. However, there are only few studies exploring people’s mobile application usage behavior. In order to understand users’ mobile social media practices in the context of everyday life, 30 owners of high-end smartphones were interviewed for this study. The context of their mobile SNS use cases w...

We have been witnessing an exponential growth in the amount of traffic carried through mobile networks. According to the Cisco visual networking index [1], mobile data traffic has doubled during 2010–2011; extrapolating this trend for the rest of the decade shows that global mobile traffic will increase 1000x from 2010 to 2020. The surge in mobile traffic is primarily driven by the proliferatio...

Wireless communication systems beyond the third generation will be diverse. It can be expected that several different radio technologies as well as several classes of mobile devices running a variety of applications will be deployed, while the Internet Protocol (IP) will play the role of the unifying architectural component. To cope with the described diversity, networking paradigms like progra...

A new generation of ‘behaviour-aware’ services are emerging, defining the future mobile social networks. It is important for current mobility models to capture mobile users’ behavioural characteristics and also reproduce their effects on the performance of networking protocols. Recent work in mobility modelling focused on replicating metrics of encounter statistics and spatio-temporal preferenc...

This paper presents a view of the future of consumer payments. Specifically, I opine on two questions. First, will the broad trends of consumers’ increasingly being connected via mobile access devices and engaging in social networking be likely to revolutionize consumer payments? Second, if so, what roles will be played by the various payment participants (e.g., consumers, merchants, banks, mob...

Social networking has recently gained widespread of use, both across the youth and adults. Its popularity is especially found among the youths, being a means of communication that is simple to use with the advent of internet enabled mobile phones. This study evaluates the impact of social networking on the academic performance of students using Federal Polytechnic, Ilaro as a case study. The as...

Social networking platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter, foster new social interactions. Following this vision, we introduce SocioNet, a context-aware and rule-based system for mobile devices that finds best matching persons in proximity and therefore establishes contacts. The system architecture is a hybrid central server and P2P architecture supporting matchmaking. As concerns for social pl...