<p>This thesis is concerned with measuring the extent to which the market of mobile telephone companies is influenced by their brand reputation in international marketing. The analysis investigates the relative importance of brand reputation in the marketing of products in the mobile telephone industry. </p><p>The work comprises a study within the context of a quantitative survey of marketing information analysis. A survey is carried out by administering questionnaires on a sample of mobile telephone users within the ages of 18 and above from an international student environment at Halmstad University. Watching over your brand reputation is rationally the ideal means of benefiting from a companies brand equity management. </p><p>The findings provided useful information that may serve mobile telephone companies to strategically position themselves in the competitive international market, thereby improving their overall sales as well as market share. It can equally serve as decision guidelines to brand managers while making meaningful contributions to their companies.</p>

This thesis is concerned with measuring the extent to which the market of mobile telephone companies is influenced by their brand reputation in international marketing. The analysis investigates the relative importance of brand reputation in the marketing of products in the mobile telephone industry. The work comprises a study within the context of a quantitative survey of marketing information analysis. A survey is carried out by administering questionnaires on a sample of mobile telephone users within the ages of 18 and above from an international student environment at Halmstad University. Watching over your brand reputation is rationally the ideal means of benefiting from a companies brand equity management. The findings provided useful information that may serve mobile telephone companies to strategically position themselves in the competitive international market, thereby improving their overall sales as well as market share. It can equally serve as decision guidelines to brand managers while making meaningful contributions to their companies.

<p>The visual design of twelve mobile telephones was studied and compared. Thirteen university students completed sorting tasks and were also interviewed. Significant correlations were found for most phones between ranks of beauty and desire to possess. Preferences varied among participants. Multi Dimensional Scaling of pile sorting data implied that phones were compared on the basis of prototypicality and trendiness. Four themes were found in the motivations of possession ranks: aesthetic judgements, symbolic perceptions and associations, conclusions of functions and practical conclusions. The results suggest that making sense of visual design determines aesthetic experiences and partly desire to possess, thus giving support to the applicability of appraisal theories of emotion to the study of design.</p>

The visual design of twelve mobile telephones was studied and compared. Thirteen university students completed sorting tasks and were also interviewed. Significant correlations were found for most phones between ranks of beauty and desire to possess. Preferences varied among participants. Multi Dimensional Scaling of pile sorting data implied that phones were compared on the basis of prototypicality and trendiness. Four themes were found in the motivations of possession ranks: aesthetic judgements, symbolic perceptions and associations, conclusions of functions and practical conclusions. The results suggest that making sense of visual design determines aesthetic experiences and partly desire to possess, thus giving support to the applicability of appraisal theories of emotion to the study of design.

In urban and rural Kenya, mobile money, the use of the mobile telephone for banking has become a part of everyday life. People use mobile money to accomplish a variety of functions such as transfer money, save, and pay bills, among other uses. At the national level, the government considers mobile money important for individual and national development. Safaricom’s M-Pesa, the most popular mobile money application has received praise for enabling people in the rural areas to access financial services. This research examines the role of mobile money in the everyday lives of people in rural Kenya, especially ordinary users of M-Pesa and M-Pesa agents that facilitate these services. The findings from this research are based on a three-month period of fieldwork on M-Pesa use and facilitation in Chepkoilel, a rural community in western Kenya. Three questions guided this research: how has M-Pesa fit into people’s existing financial cultures and practices? How do people perceive M-Pesa and the role of the service in facilitating their development or financial mobility? How do M-Pesa agents perceive their role in the mobile money ecosystem? Data were collected using interviewing and observation methods. In this research, I found that M-Pesa users and M-Pesa agents utilized M-Pesa for their individual development. Notably, the M-Pesa agency business model had provided new opportunities for entrepreneurship to rural dwellers. Equally important, the application was fundamental for facilitating local-local and global-local financial flows. The ease of making financial remittances through M-Pesa had saved people the cost of transport to the banking halls in town, and made it easy for participants to forward their chama, or self-help group contributions. However, despite the speed and convenience of transactions brought by M-Pesa, there were widespread perceptions that financial management had been made difficult by the fact that money was now so fluid on M-Pesa, a contrast to the time when people used cash. At the same time, Safaricom’s introduction of M-Shwari, the digital saving platform had provided people with an alternative avenue with which to save and borrow money. Though M-Shwari fostered the privacy of financial transactions, among other perceived advantages, the application was displacing long-held collectivist financial habits by introducing individualistic financial practices. This study has also examined the intermediary work of M-Pesa agents in the mobile money ecosystem. As nodes linking Safaricom and its customers, M-Pesa agents were important actors in the system of exchange and value. Their domestication practices were critical to the integration of M-Pesa within the population. Furthermore, as informediaries, they provided socio-technical information that Safaricom used to improve the service. However, their work was often impeded by increasing cases of digital insecurity, and agents found themselves thrust in the role of the management of safety of M-Pesa transactions despite their limited financial knowledge. Finally, in unexpected ways, M-Pesa agents were engaged in the shaping of M-Pesa to suit the local social, cultural and economic remittance practices of the community they served. In the end, these actions benefited their development, the development of their clients, and Safaricom’s business. However, contrary to the prevailing perception, the study found that M-Pesa’s contribution towards financial inclusion was felt more in the informal economy rather than in the formal economy. I conclude that though M-Pesa was important for people’s development, the low-income population faced digital divide challenges in their attempts to utilize M-Pesa for their development. For instance, the relative high cost of services led to non-adoption of M-Pesa by some demographics. Non-literacy and lack of digital skills were other problems users faced.

<p>With the development of wireless communication technology, second-, third-, fourth-generation transmission systems based on electromagnetic (EM) waves are widely used. At the same time, public concerns have been raised about whether the use of such systems will have an impact on health and safety standards. The heating effect is the most prominent and scientifically verifiable biological effect. So, the influence of EM waves on human body is addressed by studying the heating characteristics on head models.</p> <p>The objective of this thesis is to study the effects of radio frequency (RF) waves radiation from mobile phones on the human head under different transmission generations. The six-layer head model is used to evaluate the specific absorption rate (SAR) distribution and thermal effect. This model allows to study the effects of SAR and temperature rise without the need for high computational resources. In order to find the effect of temperature rise and exposure time, the finite difference time domain (FDTD) method was used to solve the biothermal equation with appropriate boundary conditions.</p> <p>Also, different age-dependent head models are used to study the differences of SAR for children at different ages.</p> <p>In general, the results show that with the increase in frequency, the influence of the EM wave is more pronounced, as demonstrated by the SAR and temperature rise distribution. In addition, SAR distribution of younger ages show a significant increase, which indicates that children exposed to EM waves are subject to more harmed. </p>

This thesis investigates drivers willingness to engage with a mobile phone while driving. Many studies have looked into the effects on driving performance that can result from phone usage, but few studies have directly considered what can encourage or inhibit phone engagement behaviours in the first place. An initial exploratory study (Study 1) was conducted, for which a photo elicitation interview (N=20) was designed and implemented. This aimed to find the extent to which factors influencing phone use transferred from out of the car to the driving environment. In particular, the study aimed to explore whether the driving environment could be considered unique. The results indicated that the high demands placed on the driver by the road environment clearly distinguished it from the other environments and the reported propensity to use a phone seemed to reflect this. Only factors which either changed the level of attention required by the task, such as a change in task demand as a result of changes in the traffic environment, had any substantial influence on willingness to engage. Driving may not be unique in terms of the overall factors influencing phone use but it is unique in the extent to which this particular factor seems to have such a strong bearing on interaction. Building on findings from Study 1, that the demand and attention required seemed to influence willingness to engage, it was noted that Fuller s (2005) Task Capability Interface model would serve as a useful framework for the remainder of the thesis. This model suggests that driver behaviour is dictated by the level of task difficulty perceived; an interaction between task demand and capability. Therefore, the effects these two elements might have on willingness to engage with mobile phones while driving were tested separately in the two remaining studies. Previous research suggested that task demand should comprise a combination of roadway demand and the intended phoning task. Study 2, therefore, experimentally tested the extent to which road demand and phone function intended to be used influenced drivers decisions to engage with their phone. Participants (N=20) viewed video clips of real road environments of varying demand. Rating scales were used by participants to rate their willingness to engage with various phone functions according to the scenario they had just viewed. It was found both roadway demand and phone functionality affected willingness to engage with a mobile phone whilst driving. There was a higher propensity to engage in phone use in road environments perceived to have a lower demand and lower propensity to engage in phone use in the highest demand scenarios. Answering a call was the most likely function to be engaged with by the participants and sending a text message was the least likely. The final study investigated how capability (comprising both phone and driving capability) influenced willingness to engage. Participants (N=40) were required to drive in a simulator under two conditions, simulated low and high road demand. Their willingness to interact with their phones, when faced with a number of phone tasks, was then observed. It was found that driving capability had an effect on willingness to engage in high demand scenarios with the less capable, novice, drivers having a higher propensity to engage with placing a call, sending a text message and reading a text message than the more experienced drivers. Novice drivers were willing to engage with some functions on their phone at possibly inappropriate times. It was further found that, in the simulated low demand road environment, phone capability influenced willingness to engage, with those who were more capable at placing a call and sending a text message found to be more willing to engage with these functions. The research reported in this thesis represents the first attempt in the literature to study, in depth, the factors which can influence phone engagement behaviour while driving. Novel contributions include investigating if factors influencing phone use transferred from out of the car to the driving environment. Further novel contributions included whether the phone function and road demand interact to influence willingness to engage and whether capability can affect phone engagement behaviour while driving. Extending the model developed by Fuller, the thesis offers an original model that describes the factors affecting phone engagement behaviour while driving. Suggestions are proposed for how the findings presented in this thesis can effectively be used and how future work should build on these initial foundations.

High power dissipation and on-chip temperature limit performance and affect reliability in modern microprocessors. For servers and data centers, they determine the cooling cost, whereas for handheld and mobile systems, they limit the continuous usage of these systems. For mobile systems, energy consumption affects the battery life. It can not be ignored for desktop and server systems as well, as the contribution of energy continues to go up in organizations’ budgets, influencing strategic decisions, and its implications on the environment are getting appreciated. Intelligent trade-offs involving these quantities are critical to meet the performance demands of many modern applications. Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling (DVFS) offers a huge potential for designing trade-offs involving energy, power, temperature and performance of computing systems. In our work, we propose and evaluate DVFS schemes that aim at minimizing energy consumption while meeting a performance constraint, for both sequential and parallel applications. We propose a Petri net based program performance model, parameterized by application properties, microarchitectural settings and system resource configuration, and use this model to find energy efficient DVFS settings. We first propose a DVFS scheme using this model for sequential programs running on single core multiple clock domain (MCD) processors, and evaluate this on a MCD processor simulator. We then extend this scheme for data parallel (Single Program Multiple Data style) applications, and then generalize it for stream applications as well, and evaluate these two schemes on a full system CMP simulator. Our experimental evaluation shows that the proposed schemes achieve significant energy savings for a small performance degradation.