A typical shopping scenario nowadays is that shoppers browse and try the products offline and then buy them online from a competing retailer. This phenomenon commonly described as “showrooming” occurs because of the ubiquity of mobile devices and the ease of switching between multiple retail channels. The presence of these mobile-assisted shoppers in a multichannel retailing environment is a se...

Complaints from dissatisfied users of information systems (IS) help service and product providers decrease user churn and switching, prevent negative word-of-mouth, and improve their services and products. However, many dissatisfied individuals do not complain at all; rather, they remain silent, switch, or quit usage. The dilemma is particularly relevant in the context of mobile services and ap...

Currently, wireless data broadcasting is a very popular data dissemination method for broadcasting public information to a large number of mobile devices at the same time. Access Latency and Tuning Time are the two main parameters to evaluate the performance of a indexing technique of data broadcasting system. Indexing can significantly reduce tuning time by switching clients to turn into doze ...

Mobile computing presents a huge new opportunity and huge challenges for the Semantic Web and logic reasoning in general. Mobile phones contain many different types of information that are very important for our life, from addresses and telephone numbers, to calendars. In some cases, our mobiles contain parking, train and bus tickets, they notify us when it is time to go to take plane or of a c...

A restricted domain text-to-speech system oriented to a weather forecast application is presented. This TTS system is embedded in a multimedia interactive service accessible from different media, such as TV, Internet and mobile devices. The requirements of this application give rise to several particularities in the design and implementation of the TTS system, which are discussed throughout thi...

Wireless phone companies, especially with number portability, sell a product that is less and less different, that is to say, a commodity. That is the reason scale economies play a very important role in this market. Given that it is not possible to make a large margin on the service that they offer, companies must focus their strategies on saving costs. Moreover, the more clients a company has...

Two Swedish epidemiological studies have shown an association between the use of mobile telephones, mainly of the analogue type, and brain tumours. These findings have been corroborated in a Finnish study. Supportive evidence has also come from studies in USA, but these investigations, as well as a Danish study, are inconclusive due to e.g., few exposed subjects, short latency periods and metho...

This chapter investigates the influence of mobile phone penetration on economic growth in developing economies. It is widely agreed that telecommunications infrastructure has a positive effect on GDP growth. The empirical evidence concerns mainly fixed line telephony and is mostly conducted with samples from developed countries. Mobile telephony, on the other hand, may be particularly important...