This thesis focuses primary on the actors of the collaborative movement and their motivations and reasons for participating in it. The notion of the collaborative movement was developed during our process as well as the notion of self-empowerment. Two series of interviews have been led with founders of organizations acting within the collaborative movement and users of one of these platforms. From the analysis of the collected data we tried to answer our two research questions: what does lead the actors of the collaborative movement to be part of it? To what extent do they empower themselves? The results indicate that the actors of this movement do empower themselves through their participation. However the level of self-empowerment would depend on the degree of involvement. Moreover, it appeared that self-empowerment is not only an effect of their participation but also the motivation for it.

This research proposed the integration of wireless sensor networks, a mobile platform and a fixed station for the development of a test bed system to conduct research on localization, tracking, navigation and network mapping. The overall integrated system acts as a basis for future research on localization of wireless nodes in an indoor environment. The system enables the transfer of information from the sensor node on the platform to a distant computer through wireless communication. In addition, a robotic platform is proposed that uses the developed integrated system as well as other potential applications. The user interface to the system was developed using MATLAB and provides for tracking of the mobile platform. The application also possessed an option to simulate the output of Trilateration when using a setup similar to the one implemented for this research.

The digitalization of products has become an important driver for service innovation in manufacturing firms. The embedding of digital technology in previously non-digital products creates digitalized product platforms that enable digital service innovation. Digital service innovation offers new business opportunities for manufacturing industries, as well as challenges established premises for value creation.  While digital service innovation can be found in many manufacturing industries, this thesis studies service logic in digitalized product platforms in the vehicle industry. Existing Information Systems (IS) literature presents challenges in digital service innovation relating to value, architecture, and generativity. The design of the architecture of digitalized product platforms requires the identification and combination of digital and non-digital assets. Understanding the architectural aspects is useful in digital service innovation. Moreover, with growing instances of generative digital technologies, it is challenging to develop strategies to leverage generativity for service design in digitalized product platforms. While digital technologies are embedded in products, the role of technology-embeddedness in value creation of digital services is relatively unexplored. Drawing on these challenges, this thesis describes and conceptualizes the underlying premises brought by the architecture and generativity to the value creation of services in digitalized product platforms. The research question addressed in this thesis is: What are the underlying premises for services in digitalized product platforms? To address the question, an interpretive qualitative research approach was adopted in a collaborative research project concerning services enabled by digitalization of vehicles. Drawing on digital innovation and service literature, this thesis presents a theoretical perspective on the role of the architecture and generativity of digitalized product platforms for value creation of digital services. This perspective is conceptualized as underlying premises for this specific class of services. The premises frame the service logic in digitalized product platforms and provide a ground for understanding services in digitalized product platforms in relation to value dimensions, architecture and generativity. The premises are based on five concepts: value-in-architecture, value-in-connectivity, fundamental asset for value creation, mutual dependence of modular and layered modular assets, and re-evaluation of value propositions. The proposed premises offer a basis for understanding value creation of this class of services, and guidance for manufacturing firms designing digitalized product platforms.

The three essays of this thesis cover two sets of topics: search in auction platforms in the first two papers, and political campaigning in the last. In platform settings, search cost reductions are often regarded as beneficial because they improve match quality. But is this in fact true? And if it is true in an aggregate sense, what are the consequences to individual platform participants? Do individual buyers and sellers win or lose? The first paper develops a novel model of search in platforms and applies it to auction platforms to test the popular hypothesis that lower search costs are always beneficial to sellers. Under certain assumptions, we find that while lower search costs is welfare improving, its distributional consequences are less predictable. In general, lower search costs intesify buyer-side competition. On the one hand, this tends to improve seller revenues due to better matches; on the other hand, this may also thin out markets for certain sellers, since lower search costs make it easier for buyers to search out of certain markets. Generally, some sellers gain and some lose; most surprisingly, however, we find that overall seller revenue can decrease with lower search costs. Our second paper extends the model to endogenize buyer participation - so some buyers may leave the platform completely - and considers optimal platform search policy in such settings. Under stricter assumptions, we find that a platform that taxes the seller side generally benefits from lower search costs; a platform that charges buyers, however, may maximize search costs, since the gains from easier search are unevenly distributed among buyers, and may be inefficiently extracted with a fee. The final essay provides a novel model of political campaigning as argumentation, which brings together two different strands of the campaign spending literature: spending has direct effects on electoral outcomes, but also provide a "signal" of candidate quality. The model parsimoniously resolves many pre-existing campaign spending "paradoxes" while delivering new results on the effects and desirability of spending caps. / Economics

The evolution of cloud technologies which allows the provisioning of IT resources over the Internet promises many benefits for the individuals and enterprises alike. However, this new resource provisioning model comes with the security challenges which did not exist in the traditional resource procurement mechanisms. We focus on the possible security concerns of a cloud user (e.g. an organization, government department, etc.) to lease cloud services such as resources in the form of Virtual Machines (VM) from a public Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) provider. There are many security critical areas in the cloud systems, such as data confidentiality, resource integrity, service compliance, security audits etc. In this thesis, we focus on the security aspects which result in the trust deficit among the cloud stakeholders and hence hinder a security sensitive user to benefit from the opportunities offered by the cloud computing. Based upon our findings from the security requirements analysis,we propose solutions that enable user trust in the public IaaS clouds. Our solutions mainly deal with the secure life cycle management of the user VM which include mechanisms for VM launch and migration. The VM launch and migration solutions ensure that the user VM is always protected in the cloud by only allowing it to run on the user trusted platforms. This is done by using trusted computing techniques that allow the users to remotely attest and hence rate the cloud platforms trusted or untrusted. We also provide a prototype implementation to prove the implementation feasibility of the proposed trust enabling principles used in the VM launch and migration solutions.

The southern Campos Basin comprises syn- and post-rift strata characterised by thick and extensive units of non-marine limestones. These carbonate platforms are scientifically significant due to their unusual palaeoenvironmental setting, and the complexity of the factors controlling their accumulation. They are of economic importance due to discoveries of giant hydrocarbon accumulations in these non-marine carbonate rocks. 3D seismic interpretations show an oblique extensional rifting system that formed a series of graben, half-graben, accommodation zones and horsts oriented NESW to NNE-SSW. The area is subdivided into three tectonic domains based on structural style, stretching factors and subsidence rates. The structural template of the syn-rift exerts a strong influence on depositional patterns. Core logging and thin-section work together with FMI and sidewall core data indicate proximal to more distal lacustrine carbonate deposits with fluvio-deltaic clastics in marginal areas. The dominant carbonate facies are molluscan rudstones and floatstones and a taphonomic analysis (taphofacies) of the cored intervals and exposure surfaces indicate accumulation in shallowing-upward cycles in response to changes in lake level. Microbialite facies, Aptian in age, appear to occur in the most distal locations in restricted palaeoenvironmental conditions. Facies models are presented for the skeletal, mollusc-rich deposits of the Barremian Coqueiros Formation and the overlying microbialite-rich Aptian Macabu Formation. The deposits are stacked in a hierarchical arrangement of four levels of cyclicity ranging from the entire rift basin fill to metre-scale cycles. Controls on formation of these cycles include structural setting, climate and lacustrine margin progradation. Different types of carbonate platform form in the different basinal settings and include footwall areas of fault-blocks, accommodation zones and buried horst blocks. The southern Campos Basin evolves from an initial alkali lake (Barremian) to a main phase of syn-rift, brackish lake conditions. The post-rift succession (Aptian) is characterised by both brackish and hypersaline conditions.

In mobile computing, there is variety of approaches to develop applications. One challenge is the diversity of mobile devices in the market and targeting more than one mobile device to develop applications. One approach to handle this is traditional, in which for every device there is a project carried out to develop application. Another method is the cross-platform application development which has been introduced in recent years. The purpose of this thesis is to explore if existing cross-platform frameworks can aid startup companies to develop cross-platform mobile apps. The research questions are 1) How can cross-platform frameworks be a viable approach for start-up companies in this respect? 2) What challenges and benefits do cross-platform approaches bring to developers? In order to answer the research questions, respondents from five small-sized and two large companies developing mobile apps are being interviewed. The results shows that cross-platform frameworks are good tools when developing mobile apps for multiple platforms, but are applicable to different degrees depending on the actual case. Challenges and benefits identified by the respondents mainly touched upon decreasing development time, and less coding effort, but also the uniqueness of Apple and Android products and difficulties in making developers switch to new languages.

Gamification is a novel method to improve engagement, motivation, or participation in non-game contexts using game mechanics. To a large extent, gamification is a psychological- and design-oriented discipline, i.e., a lot of effort has to be spent already in the design phase of a gamification project. Subsequently, the design is implemented in information systems such as portals or enterprise resource planning applications. These systems act as mediators to transport a gameful design to its users. However, the efforts for the subsequent development and integration process are often underestimated. In fact, most conceptual gamification designs are never implemented due to the high development costs that arise from building the gamification solution from scratch, imprecise design or technical requirements, and communication conflicts between different stakeholders in the project. This thesis addresses these problems by systematically defining the phases and stakeholders of the overall gamification process. Furthermore, the thesis rigorously defines the conceptual requirements of gamification based on a broad literature review. The identified conceptual requirements are mapped to a domain-specific language, called the Gamification Modeling Language. Moreover, this thesis analyzes 29 existing gamification solutions that aim to decrease the implementation efforts of gamification. However, using the different language elements, it is shown that none of the existing solutions suffices all requirements. Therefore, a generic and reusable platform as runtime environment for gamification is proposed which fulfills all presented functional and non-functional requirements. As another benefit, it is shown how the Gamification Modeling Language can be automatically compiled into code for the gamification runtime environment and, thus, further reduces development efforts. Based on the developed artifacts and five real gamified applications from industry, it is shown that the efforts for the implementation of the gamification can be significantly reduced from several months or weeks to a few days. Since the technology is designed as a reusable service, future projects benefit continuously with regards to time and efforts.

The complexity among embedded systems has increased dramatically in recent years. During the same time has the capacity of the hardware grown to astonishing levels. These factors have contributed to that software has taken a leading role and time-consuming role in embedded system development.Compared with regular software development, embedded development is often more restrained by factors such as hardware performance and testing capability. A solution to some of these problem has been proposed and that is a concept called virtual platforms. By emulating the hardware in a software environment, it is possible to avoid some of the problems associated with embedded software development. For example is it possible to execute a system faster than in reality and to provide a more controllable testing environment. This thesis presents a case study of an application specific virtual platform. The platform is based on already existing embedded system that is located in an industrial control system.  The virtual platform is able to execute unmodified application code at a speed twice of the real system, without causing any software faults. The simulation can also be simulated at even higher speed if some accuracy losses are regarded as acceptable.The thesis presents some tools and methods that can be used to model hardware on a functional level in an software environment. The thesis also investigates the accuracy of the virtual platform by comparing it with measurements from the physical system. In this case are the measurements mainly focused of the data transactions in a controller area network bus (CAN).

The product platform strategy is well known for its several positive effects. However, these effects differ under different market situations. Several product platform projects related decisions can influence these effects. This research work will show how these effects are influenced by decisions under different market situations, findings will help academics in enriching product platform theories and, it will help managers to take proper decisions to enhance the possibility of product platform project success.