The paper reports on the Cellmusic system: a real-time, wireless distributed composition and performance system designed for domestic mobile devices. During a performance, each mobile device communicates with others, and may create sonic events in a passive (non interactive) mode or may influence the output of other devices. Cellmusic distinguishes itself from other mobile phone performance env...

Mobile phones promote financial inclusion in developing nations by enabling access to credit savings, and transfer services. These payment systems rarely achieve nationwide usage that is sufficient for network effects, a problem that existing literature attributed to exogenous factors such as regulations, poverty, and infrastructure costs. This paper argues that banks, telecoms, and governments...

Individual mobility plays a crucial role in our everyday life. Since people spend a lot of time being mobile, making mobility more efficient is a demand of most of them. Due to the latest developments in the fields of computer technology and wireless communication, computer applications became possible to meet the needs of mobile individuals. Since also positioning techniques have reached an ac...

Information and communication technologies (ICT) continuously create new types of markets and new patterns of industry dynamics. The continuous advancement of mobile technologies offers an opportunity for mobile carriers and banks to offer mobile banking services. However, such convergence of services from mobile carriers and banks raises some issues that are not necessarily easy to resolve sin...

How do banks react to increased interbank competition? Recent banking theory offers conflicting predictions about the impact of interbank competition on bank orientation i.e., the choice of relationship based versus transactional banking and bank industry specialization. We empirically investigate the impact of interbank competition on bank orientation and specialization. We employ a data set c...

Studies on lexicon acquisition systems are gaining attention in the search for a natural human–robot interface and a test environment to model the infant lexicon acquisition process. Although various lexicon acquisition systems that ground words to sensory experience have been developed, existing systems have clear limitations on the ability to autonomously associate words to objects. This limi...

The banking industry is under pressure. In order to compete, banks should adapt to concentrating on the specific customer needs, following an outside-in perspective. This paper presents the design of a business model for banks that considers this development by providing flexible and comprehensive support for retail banking clients. It is demonstrated that the identification of customer process...

Law plays a different role in China’s financial system than in most developed economies. China’s financial system is dominated by a large banking sector. The role of the stock market in allocating resources in the economy has been limited and ineffective. The most successful part of the financial system, in terms of supporting the growth of the overall economy, is a shadow banking sector that c...

Mobile agents can optimize their communication patterns to reduce bandwidth and latency and can adapt to changes in network service. We report on use of the Knowbot Operating Environment to support mobile agents in a wide-area network. Experiments with an application that monitors Web pages for changes show that a mobile program can outperform its stationary counterpart. The performance benefit...

Much development of information technology has been about reducing the importance of distances and user location. Still, many important activities and events are of local nature, for instance serendipitous face-to-face communication. In order to support such communication, as well as other examples of local interaction, we have developed three prototypes all based on wireless short-range commun...