Public administrations have been very much concerned since the 80’s about the need of avoiding vendor lock-in when procuring themselves with Information Technology infrastructure. The boost of egovernment that has taken place in recent years has put this concern again in the agenda of public administrations. Interoperability has shown up as a principle in the conception and deployment of the eg...

This paper addresses new questions around media performance as a result of the rise of centralized content portals such as iTunes or MySpace. We first describe the rise of centralized content portals in different media industries, and discuss how these portals are creating a dominant position for themselves by using lock-in strategies. Then we describe the concept of media market performance, a...

The paper concerns the role of hardware in the evolution of the video game industry. The paper argues that it is necessary to understand the hardware side of the industry in several senses. Hardware has a key role with regard to innovation and industrial leadership. Fundamentally, the process can be understood as a function of Moore’s law. Because of the constantly evolving technological fronti...

This paper introduces the concept of modularity in financial services, discusses how new value chains are created and addresses emerging opportunities for innovative business models in the digital economy. We argue that innovation occurred in the banking sector despite the lagging adoption of new operational practices but due to technology drive for new ways to provide services. Banking innovat...

A customer experiences “lock-in” when the extra value it might obtain from a new supplier’s products or services is exceeded by the cost of switching from its current vendor. Customers may regret this state of affairs if they would have been better off having secured the alternative product from the start, or more simply, if the switching costs are substantially lower than the incremental value...

Storing, querying, and updating XML documents in multi-user environments requires data processing guarded by a transactional context to assure the well-known ACID properties, particularly with regard to isolate concurrent transactions. In this paper, we introduce the taDOM tree, an extended data model which considers organization of both attribute nodes and node values in a new way and allows f...

the use of locks with different forms, mechanisms and applications has been common for a long time in iran. among these locks we can point out the pendant combinated lock, in which two mechanisms are used simultaneously in a single body. employing a descriptive – analytical method, this study searches the reasons of using two mechanisms in these locks. problems such as: the use of these locks, ...

the steger and warming flux vector splitting implicit scheme is used to numerically solve two dimensional reynolds averaged navier–stokes (rans) equations governing the vortex induced vibration of a flexible riser laterally supported by a spring and a damper. the k–ε model is used as turbulence model to simulate the turbulent flow in the wake of the riser. to update the new position of the rise...

Why have states legalised international norms promoting domestic democracy in some regions of the world? This issue poses a difficult puzzle because standard assumptions about state preferences for sovereignty make the creation of strong, binding international rules on democracy unlikely. We identify four possible answers: the interests of powerful states, common government interests in domesti...