The purpose of this research is to explore the business strategies of a firm seeking to develop and profitably market a mobile smartphone application to understand how small, digital entrepreneurships may build sustainable business models given substantial market barriers. Through a detailed examination of one firm’s process to try to commercialize their mobile app, we identify various business model decisions and marketing strategy approaches that hindered the company’s efforts. The case study describes two distinctly different business models adopted in succession, as well as the various adjustments the firm makes to its target market, distribution and pricing approach that led to their current strategy. This research looks closely at business-to-business-to-consumer distribution arrangement for mobile apps and in doing so challenges the rising positive bias that exists for the app store as the dominant actor in the mobile value chain. For practice, this paper suggests unanticipated hurdles small digital entrepreneurs may face if they rely heavily on mobile advertising and the app store to launch and sustain their business.

The study is concerned with how the hane effects on matching on mobile terminal antennas.

With the advances of technology and the popularization of mobile devices, the need of researching and discussing subjects related to mobile devices has raised. One of the subjects that needs to be further analyzed is data replication. This study investigates data replication on mobile devices focusing on power consumption. It presents four different scenarios that propose, describe, apply and evaluate data replication mechanisms, with the purpose of finding the best scenario that presents less energy consumption. In order to make the experiments, Sun SPOT was chosen as a mobile device. This device is fully programmed in a java environment. A different software was created in each scenario in order to verify the performance of the mobile devices regarding energy saving. The results found did not meet the expectations. While trying to find the best scenario a hardware limitation was found. Although software can be easily changed to fix errors, hardware cannot be changed as easily. The implications for the hardware limitation found in this study prevented the results to be optimal. The results found also imply that new hardware should be used in further experimentation. As this study proved to be limited, it suggests that additional studies should be carried out applying the new version of the hardware used in this study.

As the globalization process in our society grows the awareness about social responsibility of an organization increases. As the 21st century proceeds, the profit creation and an organizations work with sustainability will become increasingly inseparable leading to an intensified influence of Corporate Social Responsibility on stakeholder perception and social legitimacy affecting the economic outcome. The increased influence on stakeholders highlights the importance of communication. Since CSR is a relative question of what constitutes good business practice in the eye of the emerging societal demands that shapes tomorrow’s expectations new ways of communication need to be investigated. The mobility and the novel form of interaction make mobiles and mobile applications suitable for a wide range of different contexts and its suitability for communicating a company’s sustainability initiatives is investigated in this thesis. The empirical findings, based upon a case study on the telecommunication sector, a user survey, mobile technologies, and present sustainability solutions show that mobile applications can be an alternative to existing communication channels used today. However, there are some limitations that come with this medium. The limitations are the usage area of application, the low interest and awareness of CSR communication, the susceptibility among commonalty and what responsibility areas that are suitable to communicate through applications. However, with the limitations of mobile applications as a means to communicate are a few identified solutions and recommendations. The most prominent ones are related to application usage and the ways to adapt sustainability measures to the chosen technology. More specific gamification, visualization, manipulation are identified as vital aspects as well as a focus on application functionalities and providing sustainability as a value add-on.

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As mobile network infrastructures continuously improve, they are becoming popular clients to consume any Web resources, especially Web Services (WS). However, there are problems in connecting mobile devices to existing WS. This thesis focuses on three of the following challenge: loss of connection, bandwidth/latency, and limited resources. This research implements and develops a cross-platform architecture for connecting mobile devices to the WS. The architecture includes a platform independent design of mobile service client and a middleware for enhancing the interaction between mobile clients and WS. The middleware also provides a personal service mashup platform for the mobile client. Finally, the middleware can be deployed on Cloud Platforms, like Google App Engine and Amazon EC2, to enhance the scalability and reliability. The experiments evaluate the optimization/adaptation, overhead of the middleware, middleware pushing via email, and performance of Cloud Platforms.

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The advance of mobile phone devices and wireless communication have dramatically change the way individuals do for their personal lives and businesses. Nowadays, people can not only talk with their peers located at different places, they can also get the desired information ubiquitously. Business strategies that are based on simple mobile phones have to be adapted to a complex mobile business ecosystem. The mobile phone market in Guatemala has almost saturated, and the mobile operators have to come up with creative ideas to increase their revenues. This thesis explores what the user¡¦s intentions toward mobile services in Guatemala. Understanding users¡¦ intension will allow entrepreneurs to create new business strategies that would fill an existing void that exists on the Guatemalan mobile market.

This thesis presents the results from a modification of a previously existing research project titled the Intelligent Pothole Repair Vehicle (IPRV). The direction of the research in this thesis was changed toward the development of an industrially based mobile robot. The principal goal of this work was the demonstration of the Precision Mechatronics Lab (PML) robot. This robot should be capable of traversing any known distance while maintaining a minimal position error. An optical correction capability has been added with the addition of a webcam and the appropriate image processing software. The primary development goal was the ability to maintain the accuracy and performance of the robot with inexpensive and low-resolution hardware. Combining the two abilities of dead-reckoning and optical correction on a single platform will yield a robot with the ability to accurately travel any distance. As shown in this thesis, the additional capability of off-loading its visual processing tasks to a remote computer allows the PML robot to be developed with less expensive hardware. The majority of the literature research presented in this paper is in the area of visual processing. Various methods used in industry to accomplish robotic mobility, optical processing, image enhancement, and target interception have been presented. This background material is important in understanding the complexity of this field of research and the potential application of the work conducted in this thesis. The methods shown in this research can be extended to other small robotic vehicles, with two separate drive wheels. An empirical method based upon system identification was used to develop the motion controllers. This research demonstrates a successful combination of a dead-reckoning capability, an optical correction method, and a simplified controller methodology capable of accurate path following. Implementation of this procedure could be extended to multiple and inexpensive robots used in a manufacturing setting.

With the popularity of diverse mobile devices, integrating existing systems or softwares of personal computers with different devices is an active research. Transcoding plays an important role in this issue. In the thesis, we develop a transcoding system that converts frames based on the device profile and user¡¦s preferences to present retrieved results of existing systems into image format. The proposed system allows a variety of mobile devices to efficiently display the retrieved results from existing systems. To overcome the weakness of the lack for interaction of existing transcoding systems, our proposed system supports interaction between clients and server.