<p>Market information and established communication between seller and buyer play an important role in business activities. This thesis investigates the Transkei area in the Eastern Cape&nbsp / Province, South Africa to find out how to empower rural farmers by providing them with less-expensive mobile technology enabling them to post and advertise their produce, access market&nbsp / information on a common database, and find and communicate with potential customers. The farmers&rsquo / requirements were identified using quantitative and qualitative methods and a prototype&nbsp / consisting of USSD and web applications was developed. It allows the farmer to follow a sequence of menu commands to send a request to the database and access market information, such&nbsp / as commodity prices, and post information about their own produce so as to attract more customers. The low cost of USSD and the ubiquity of mobile phones enable the system to be usable, affordable and effective. During the final stage of development, the system was tested successfully and addressed a major problem faced by farmers, i.e. lack of access to market information.</p>

Masters of Science / Using presentations in an m-Learning environment enables delivery of rich content to a mobile phone learner. This study investigated how to prepare and stream presentations from a desktop computer to a mobile phone in near-realtime. It also addressed communication between users using interactive text chat in the same environment. Our analysis of text/podcast-based m-Learning applications revealed limited interactivity and lack of diversity in content streamed. To address this, we developed a mobile-based application that uses a task-timer model to synchronize with a server every n units of time to enable near-real time streaming of presentation slides between mobile and desktop users. The application included text-based instant messenger. Laboratory experiments investigated the use Open Office and PowerPoint presentations and techniques used to convert these presentations into mobile phone compatible formats. Experiments were carried out with smart mobile phones running on a third generation cellular network. We employed transaction-logging techniques in addition to automated image analysis techniques to observe and record data. Analysis of the results revealed using presentations enabled more rich content than text-based models such as short message service-based frameworks and podcasts. Although m-Learning is not yet widely adopted, applications such as the one developed in the study offer high hopes for m-Learning because of the use of rich content and interactivity between users. / South Africa

The concept 'mess-understanding' has circulated in online media and is so prevalent that it is now included in the Urban Dictionary. The folk concept of mess-understandings is a pun for misunderstandings arising in an online media context. Posting one's own or others' miscommunication and/or typographical errors has grown to be a popular way of sharing humor via cross-platform sharing on the Internet. The aim of this paper is to analyze short message service (SMS) dialogues shared in social media, with a special emphasis on those with the highest degree of 'shareability' and/or popularity. The study specifically focuses on understanding linguistic and communicative reasons behind these dialogues being treated as humorous by users. As such, the study aims to shed light upon current cultural conceptions of communication and humor. Data was collected from the photo sharing website Pinterest from users who had posted or reposted 'screen shots' from their own or others' SMS conversations. In order to collect as much valuable data as possible, a manual search strategy was developed with three different word strings which resulted in a corpus of 160 dialogues. Content analysis of the data revealed certain recurrent humor themes, such as allusions to sexual conduct or bodily functions, generation gaps, technology difficulties, and lexical ambiguity. / Begreppet ‘mess-förstånd’ har på senare tid cirkulerat på Internet och är nu så allmänt förekommande att det är inkluderat i Urban Dictionary. Mess-förstånd är en ordvits för missförstånd som förekommer på Internet. Att lägga upp sina egna eller andras misslyckade konversationer och/eller typografiska fel har utvecklats till ett populärt sätt att dela humor via olika plattformar på Internet. Syftet med den här uppsatsen är att analysera vilka lingvistiska mönster av SMS-missförstånd som finns, med speciell betoning på sådana som har den högsta graden av ‘delbarhet’ och/eller popularitet och vad det säger oss om rådande föreställningar om kommunikation och humor. Det empiriska materialet insamlades från fotodelningshemsidan Pinterest från användare som hade lagt upp eller återbrukat ‘skärmavbilder’ från sina egna eller andras SMS-konversationer. För att samla in så mycket värdefull data som möjligt användes en manuell sökstrategi med tre olika ordsträngar som resulterade i en korpus med 160 dialoger. Analyser av dialogerna visade på återkommande humorteman, exempelvis anspelningar på sexualitet eller kroppsliga funktioner, generationsklyftor, teknologiska svårigheter och lexikala tvetydligheter.

Magister Scientiae - MSc / Market information and established communication between seller and buyer play an important role in business activities. This thesis investigates the Transkei area in the Eastern Cape Province, South Africa to find out how to empower rural farmers by providing them with less-expensive mobile technology enabling them to post and advertise their produce, access market information on a common database, and find and communicate with potential customers. The farmers’ requirements were identified using quantitative and qualitative methods and a prototype consisting of USSD and web applications was developed. It allows the farmer to follow a sequence of menu commands to send a request to the database and access market information, such as commodity prices, and post information about their own produce so as to attract more customers. The low cost of USSD and the ubiquity of mobile phones enable the system to be usable, affordable and effective. During the final stage of development, the system was tested successfully and addressed a major problem faced by farmers, i.e. lack of access to market information. / South Africa

Philosophiae Doctor - PhD / Short Message Service (SMS) is one of the most popularly used services for communication between mobile phone users. In recent times it has also been proposed as a means for information access. However, there are several challenges to be overcome in order to process an SMS, especially when it is used as a query in an information retrieval system.SMS users often tend deliberately to use compacted and grammatically incorrect writing that makes the message difficult to process with conventional information retrieval systems. To overcome this, a pre-processing step known as normalization is required. In this thesis an investigation of SMS normalization algorithms is carried out. To this end,studies have been conducted into the design of algorithms for translating and normalizing SMS text. Character-based, unsupervised and rule-based techniques are presented. An investigation was also undertaken into the design and development of a system for information access via SMS. A specific system was designed to access information related to a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) database in healthcare, using a case study. This study secures SMS communication, especially for healthcare information systems. The proposed technique is to encipher the messages using the secure shell (SSH) protocol.

Magister Scientiae - MSc / In South Africa, Deaf people communicate with one another and the broader community by means of South African Sign Language. The majority of Deaf people who have access to a mobile phone (cell phone) use Short Message Service (SMS) to communicate and share information with hearing people, but seldom use it among themselves. It is assumed that video messaging will be more accessible to Deaf people, since their level of literacy may prevent them from making effective use of information that is disseminated via texting/SMS. The principal objective of the esearch was to explore a cost-effective and efficient mass multimedia messaging system. The intention was to adapt a successful text-based mass notification system, developed by a local nongovernmental organization (NGO), to accommodate efficient and affordable video mass messaging for Deaf people. The questions that underpin this research are: How should video- streaming mass-messaging methods be compared and evaluated to find the most suitable method to deliver an affordable and acceptable service to Deaf people? What transport vehicles should be considered: Multimedia Message Service (MMS), the web, electronic mail, or a cell phone resident push/pullapplication? Which is the most cost effective? And, finally: How does the video quality of the various transport vehicles differ in terms of the clarity of the sign language as perceived by the Deaf? The soft-systems methodology and a mixed-methods methodology were used to address the research questions. The soft-systems methodology was followed to manage the research process and the mixed-methods research methodology was followed to collect data. Data was collected by means of experiments and semi-structured interviews. A prototype for mobile phone usage was developed and evaluated with Deaf members the NGO Deaf Community of Cape Town. The technology and internet usage of the Deaf participants provided background information. The Statistical Package for Social Science (SPSS) was used to analyse the quantitative data, and content analysis was used to analyse the documents and interviews. All of the Deaf participants used their mobile phones for SMS and the majority (81.25%) used English to type messages; however, all indicated that they would have preferred to use South Africa sign language on their mobile phones if it were available. And they were quite willing to pay between 75c and 80c per message for using such a video-messaging service.Of the transport vehicles demonstrated, most Deaf people indic indicated that they preferred to use the SMS prototype (with a web link to the video) rather than the MMS prototype with the video attached. They were, however, very concerned about the cost of using the system, as well as the quality of the sign language videos. / South Africa

Marketing and advertisement activities are transforming as new digital media streams emerge. It is believed that the first major digital transition took place when broadcast media such as television and cinema, also called first screen, to the PC Internet, referred to as the second screen, entered the media industry. The last couple of years saw an expanding transition into the third screen, which is the mobile handset, commonly known as cellphones in South Africa. The rapid explosion of mobile phones and other mobile devices has created a new marketing channel. The use of Short Messaging Service, Multimedia Message Service, Graphic WAP Banners, and Video Clips to communicate with customers through their mobile devices / cellphones has gained popularity, making the mobile phone the ultimate medium for one–to–one or one–to–many marketing. And the more mobile handsets penetrate the mass market, the greater are the opportunities for advertising experiences. This exploratory study investigates the impact / effectiveness of mobile advertising to consumers in the short–term insurance industry. The study briefly focuses on whether marketers are reaping the benefits of using this medium to communicate and market their products and services to the identified target market. The findings indicate that mobile advertising has an impact on consumers in the short–term insurance industry. It was also envisaged that where mobile advertising seems to have no effect, the root of the problem lies in the mass marketing approach. Customers are looking for full customisation of mobile marketing messages, based on their individual requirements, tastes, preferences, location, time, and it should also add value to consumers. For maximum impact, it is also recommended that marketers should build measurements, targeting and optimisation into their campaign processes. / Thesis (M.B.A.)--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2011.

Marketing and advertisement activities are transforming as new digital media streams emerge. It is believed that the first major digital transition took place when broadcast media such as television and cinema, also called first screen, to the PC Internet, referred to as the second screen, entered the media industry. The last couple of years saw an expanding transition into the third screen, which is the mobile handset, commonly known as cellphones in South Africa. The rapid explosion of mobile phones and other mobile devices has created a new marketing channel. The use of Short Messaging Service, Multimedia Message Service, Graphic WAP Banners, and Video Clips to communicate with customers through their mobile devices / cellphones has gained popularity, making the mobile phone the ultimate medium for one–to–one or one–to–many marketing. And the more mobile handsets penetrate the mass market, the greater are the opportunities for advertising experiences. This exploratory study investigates the impact / effectiveness of mobile advertising to consumers in the short–term insurance industry. The study briefly focuses on whether marketers are reaping the benefits of using this medium to communicate and market their products and services to the identified target market. The findings indicate that mobile advertising has an impact on consumers in the short–term insurance industry. It was also envisaged that where mobile advertising seems to have no effect, the root of the problem lies in the mass marketing approach. Customers are looking for full customisation of mobile marketing messages, based on their individual requirements, tastes, preferences, location, time, and it should also add value to consumers. For maximum impact, it is also recommended that marketers should build measurements, targeting and optimisation into their campaign processes. / Thesis (M.B.A.)--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2011.

The aim of this diploma thesis is to study the potential of Java ME platform for receiving and sending of SMS and to utilize obtained information subsequently in implementation of an application for this platform. The first part of the diploma thesis aims at explaining general terms of the Java language and its basic features. The next part deals with specific properties of the Java ME platform and properties of devices that support this platform. A design of the Java ME application based on theoretical knowledge is created then. This application has to be able to receive, process, store and send SMS and communicate with the server application based on the Java SE platform. The created Java ME application serves as an automated SMS voting server, which can be used in mobile devices that support the Java ME platform and can be remote-controlled via Internet from the Java SE platform application. The final chapter presents the results and conclusions of testing of the created application on real mobile devices.

This Graduation Theses dissertate about a creation of a drawing documentation at the professional CAE EPLAN Electric P8 system. One original solution of a remote control and of motor-generator monitoring with a mobile phone, short SMS-aided in this case, was used as an example of the drawing documentation. As has allready been noted in previous Bachelor Thesis, this application can be use not only for a remote control of a motor-generator, but this solution is suitable for other electric devices too, which are out of reach of an attendance for example. In our case a generator with 6kVA power is concerned with rated output voltage 230Vac and rated current 25A. The system of a remote control has the advantage that it is created from standard components (electric instruments, a PLC – programmable automat, a GSM modem, an operating panel and the respective program in the PLC).