Two decades of technological advances in internet, security, wireless, social media and networking technologies have introduced the most promising NFP systems - donor management systems (DMS). The number of DMSs available in the marketplace as well as the breadth of their feature and functionality offerings has grown tremendously to overcome NFP challenges which include program and service performance accountabil.ity, financial and operational transparency, and declines in funding sources. These systems enable NFP organizations to perform more intelligent campaigning and achieve a higher level of donor interactions resulting in greater monetary and voluntary contributions in addition to increases in donor and constituent advocacy and public support. Research indicates that NFP have experienced reduced operational and program costs, increased staff productivity, increased monetary contributions, when leveraging DMSs as part of a comprehensive fundraising program. While NFP adoption of the systems is increasing, adoption rates are much lower when compared to the for-profit sectors adoption cycle for newer technologies. Adopting the technology acceptance model (TAM), this study examined the factors that determine health and human service NFP employees' behavioral intentions to use DMSs. The proposed models included the original TAM factors of perceived usefulness and ease of use and incorporated the additional factors of user experience and organizational support, which have been found to influence an individual's intention to use technology. The model's predictive capability was measured using multiple regression techniques against data captured via an electronic survey sent to 100 health and human service organizations in the Mississippi Delta region of the US. Results from the 173 participant responses indicated that perceived ease of use and DMS experience directly influenced user perceptions toward DMSs and their subsequent intention to use the systems. The findings further indicated that the factors of perceived usefulness, NFP experience, and Organizational support did not significantly extend the model in predicting behavioral intention. The research was not able to replicate typical predictive capabilities of the core TAM in the context of health and human services NFP organizations.

Context: The advent of the Information and Communication Technologies mostly referred to “digitalization”; offers a new paradigm. Information technology is now perceived as a disruptive innovation capable of shaking up the traditional financial industry. On one side and as a result of the former trend, a new taxonomy emerged under the name of “FinTech” corresponding to the embracement of “digitalization”. FinTech is implicated in the process of disintermediation through innovation. On the other hand and due to the recent incidents at the macroeconomic level such as the 2008 financial crisis or even more recently the Snowden case; the regulatory environment is undergoing drastic changes. Even though the changing regulatory environment firstly acted as a catalyst by promoting the FinTech phenomenon into the spotlight, it inherently touched upon one of the prominent challenges of “FinTech”: to the extent Information Security. Along the line, the FinTech ecosystem which is symbolized by the “Always Available” expression conveys an explicit statement which is yet challenged by the threat of cyberattacks and emphasized by the duality between availability and security. The existing paradox reasserts the growing need for trust from a customer perspective.   Purpose: In this thesis, the authors aimed to investigate the information security and consumer trust challenges within the FinTech ecosystem by empirically testing the customer’s perceptions on the variables that are likely to affect technological adoption   Design/Methodology/approach: A cross sectional quantitative study was conducted with the distribution of a self-completion questionnaire to FinTech customers in Sweden. The designed conceptual model was built on the previous work of Stewart & Jürjens (2018). Stewart and Jürjens (2018) extended the TAM model by considering: Data Security, Customer Trust, Value Added, User Design Interface and FinTech Promotion. In this thesis, the authors adapted Stewart and Jürjens model (2018) by redefining “Data Security” and “Customer Trust”. Three regressions have been performed: one binary logistic regression and two multiple regressions.   Findings: We first ran a principal component analysis in order to reduce dimensionality within our questionnaire. We performed a PCA with an oblique rotation which helped us to produce factor scores. Based on the binary logistic regression, we found out that only Perceived Usefulness and Device security was significantly affecting our respondent’s payment intention. The multiple regression intending to predict the respondent’s intention to use based the on the factor scores from the PCA, revealed that Perceived Usefulness, Usability & ergonomics, Device security and Organizational trust were significant. Lastly, the final regression suggested that Overall trust and security were significantly affecting the respondent’s intention to use. In essence, it appeared that both dimensions are affecting the technological acceptance of users of mobile payment applications.   Research Limitations/implications: There are multiple limitations to our study, the first one being the use of a convenience sampling. Therefore, our results lack of generalizations. Yet, the results of our study confirm what the antecedents of customer’s intention to use mobile payment applications are, to the extent that both security and trust matter.

The video game industry is a global multibillion dollar industry with millions of players. The process of developing video games is essential for the continued growth of the industry, and developers need to employ effective strategies that will help them to create successful games. The purpose of this explorative qualitative single case study was to investigate the design strategies of video game developers who have successfully created video games that are challenging, entertaining, and successful. The technology acceptance model served as a conceptual framework. The entire population for this study was members of a video game development team from a small successful video game development company in North Carolina. The data collection process included interviews with 7 video game developers and analysis of 7 organizational documents. Member checking was used to increase the validity of the findings from the participants. Through the use of triangulation, 4 major themes were identified in the study: the video game designer has a significant impact on the development process, the development process for successful video games follows iterative agile programming methods, programming to challenge cognition is not a target goal for developers, and receiving feedback is essential to the process. The findings in this study may benefit future video game developers and organizations to develop strategies for developing successful games that entertain and challenge players while ensuring the viability of the organization. Findings may influence society as they demonstrate where the points of interest should be directed concerning the impact of video games upon behavior of the players.

Background: The rapid growth and increased competition in today’s technology industry leads to a growth in consumers’ expectations on new presented products. One of the growing markets within the technology sector are wearable devices – especially smartwatches. Almost all major IT and electronic giants such as Apple, Samsung, Microsoft and Google offer smartwatches – competition is increasingly growing. Consumers benefit from the wide variety of choices while selecting a smartwatch – but what are the factors that influence them to purchase such a device?                                     Purpose: This thesis investigates the intention of German consumers to purchase smartwatches and examines the influencing factors.                  Method: In order to meet the purpose of this thesis, the authors conducted a quantitative study. The data was collected by means of an online questionnaire among German consumers and was distributed via the messenger application WhatsApp. To ensure the collection of enough responses the authors chose to apply a non-probability snowball sampling approach. Beside demographical questions and two introductory questions concerning the knowledge and the usage of smartwatches, the questionnaire consisted of eight question blocks that have been developed based on two well-established models to predict human behavior and technology adoption: Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) and Technology Acceptance Model (TAM).                     Conclusion:             The results of this study provide empirical evidence that the attitude towards using was the strongest predictor for the intention to purchase smartwatches. The outcomes further show that the attitude is influenced by the two hedonic factors perceived enjoyment and design aesthetics as well as by the utilitarian factor perceived usefulness. Out of those three factors perceived enjoyment was found to exert the strongest influence on attitude. Contrary to previous research, the results of this study could not reveal a significant influence of subjective norms on purchase intention. However, beside the attitude, perceived behavioral control was also found to influence purchase intention. The findings of this research allowed to draw a variety of theoretical and managerial implications as well as to develop possible research opportunities for future studies.

Since the explosion of the internet as a business medium, one of its primary uses has been marketing. The advantages of using the internet for business-to-consumer transactions are clear. The openness of the internet is creating opportunities for virtually all companies across various industries. The words 'internet', 'World Wide Web', 'www' or the 'web' refer to the same thing and are used interchangeably within this research study. The tourism industry is also experiencing a rapid adoption of the internet technology for marketing travel products and services. As a destination New Zealand is a small country comprising two main land masses and smaller outlying islands, with a population of about 4 million people (Statistics New Zealand 2004). Tourism is promoted as an essential part of the national economy, particularly to earn foreign exchange and generate employment. The number of international tourists visiting New Zealand is 2.2 million (Tourism New Zealand, 2006). In New Zealand almost all regional tourism organizations (RTOs) have a web presence, thereby exposing potential tourists to an array of destinations to visit. However, there are few New Zealand based studies that profile tourists based on their internet adoption and the differences between internet users and non-users. The question that baffles every business manager is what predisposes consumers to use a website? This is the fundamental question that motivated the study. While usability does play a major role in the adoption and use of a particular website, it is outside the scope of this project, otherwise the scope would have been too large and complicated to permit a useable questionnaire given the other concerns about respondents' past experiences and attitudes toward use of the net for the specific purposes of holiday purchases. The study draws upon innovation diffusion theory (IDT) and more recent conceptualizations of IT adoption behaviour to examine differences among Rogers' (1995) adoption categories. Within this context, 'adoption' refers to the stage in which a technology is selected for use by an individual. 'Diffusion' refers to the stage in which the technology spreads to general use and application. For this study an attempt is made to create a behavioural profile of visitors based on a sample of 517 overseas visitors to New Zealand. Visitors were asked to complete a questionnaire and provide information on their demographics, travel related behaviour, internet usage patterns, perceptions of the internet and online shopping in general. The thesis thus describes the initiation and evolution of an empirical research project, which investigates the adoption and diffusion of internet technologies amongst international visitors to New Zealand. The study was launched in an attempt to: 1) learn more about internet usage by visitors to New Zealand; 2) create a psychographic profile of visitors; 3) attempt to empirically validate the technology acceptance model (TAM); and 4) fill a noticeable void so that future researchers on IT and internet adoption by tourists in New Zealand have a foundation and starting point. Most of the previous research related to TAM has been in workplace related situations while studies in tourism have used students as subjects, rather than actual visitors to a particular destination (Shang et al., 2005, Moon and Kim, 2001, Klopping and McKinney, 2004). Specific market studies undertaken by destination marketing organisations or regional tourism organisations were considered only inasmuch as they aided generalization as place specificity hindered conceptual development pertaining to themes of adoption and general usage patterns. The study seeks to build on Rogers' (1995) seminal work on the diffusion of innovations and make a unique contribution to existing diffusion studies by its focus on the individual visitors as the unit of analysis and by its test of the TAM model. This study presents descriptive results via standard statistical analysis, a cluster analysis of users and a structural equation modelling of the TAM applied within a context of international visitors to New Zealand. The data were collected at major locations - the viaduct basin in Auckland and the international departure lounge at the Christchurch International Airport. The two locations were chosen to enable faster data collection. Initially the data was gathered at the viaduct basin in Auckland but the number of respondents was not many. Since the data collection was slow, decided to collect from Christchurch International airport where departing passengers could be approached. Individual passengers/tourists were approached and a screening question to ascertain if they were visitors or not was asked. If they were visiting, then they were asked to participate in the survey. No prior specific screening was undertaken to determine if they had used internet or not for their trip/travel to New Zealand. However, subsequent analysis shows that only 2.3% of the sample had not used the internet, and 31% of the sample had not bought tourism products or services over the internet. Therefore, overall, experience and internet usage was not uncommon for the majority of the sample, but a large proportion of non-users existed to permit comparative analysis. While there is a bias towards males in the sample, the 19-35 years age group was slightly more numerous for both genders, than were other age groups. The results indicate that mean internet usage is comparatively high, as is familiarity with many electronic consumer durables. The sample possesses a bias toward English speaking countries, younger people and educationally higher qualified people. Internet search engines seem to be the most popular source of search. The socio-demographic variables such as age, gender and educational attainment appeared to be but a moderate influence on general internet usage and thus on the use of the internet for booking holidays. Factor analysis of the attitudinal statements revealed six factors, which accounted for about 60 % of the total variance. The clear emergence of factors enabled the development of clusters. The clusters appear to have significance with reference to usage rates of internet. The home ownership of electronics shows a high percentage of respondents had mobile phones. This implies that New Zealand Tourism has to look at options or possible services it can introduce to market to these people who could be using mobile devices not only in their country but also while travelling in New Zealand. Wireless is another important development in the field of technology and many of the tourism DMO in other developed countries in Europe and US are adapting approaches based on these technologies to market to potential customers.

The complexity of electronic system is increasing rapidly and many of the electronic systems   are   embedded   systems   implemented   as   system-on-chip   (SoC).   This increasing  complexity  of  SoC  leads  to  longer  test  application  time  (TAT).  One approach  to  reduce  the  TAT  is  to  perform  tests  to  several  cores  in  parallel,  which requests transporting test data in parallel instead of sequentially. In IEEE Std. 1500, it supports parallel test mode by incorporating a user-defined, parallel   test   access   mechanism   (TAM)   to   speed   up   the   testing   process.   The user-defined  TAM  means  the  detail  of  TAM  design  is  excluded  from  standard  and decided by system integrator. Therefore, we propose a customized TAM structure and two approaches to guarantee full-spatial-parallelism under a bus width limit, and aim to  minimize  the  total  number  of  wire  connections.  In  order  to  know  how  close  to optimal  solution  our  solutions  are,  we  implement  a  Simulated  Annealing  (SA) algorithm to do the comparison. The  experimental  results  of  the  two  proposed  approaches  based  on  benchmark ISCAS’89  and  ITC’02  show  the  parallelism  can  be  guaranteed  by  our  approaches while using only a few wire connections per pin, and the execution times of them are shorter compared with the SA algorithm.

The beauty of group-buying is that the price will go down as the value of accumulated orders is increasing. However, the beauty cannot be realized if many customers are waiting have a lower price. Therefore, it may affect the performance of the group-buying. How to design different incentives to induce customers to join the group-buying as early as possible is the purpose of this study. In the light of inducing buyers to join the group-buying as early as possible, three incentive mechanisms, time-based, quantity-based, and sequence-based, are proposed. In order to verify the performance of the three proposed new group-buying models compared with that of the traditional group-buying model, an experiment was implemented. According to the results of the experiment, we found that the time-based model can reduce customers¡¦ decision time before joining the group-buying. While the sequence-based model also can push customers to join the group-buying in the very beginning. As for the quantity-based model, it is in our expectation that the customers buy more than their original plan in order to get more discounts. We also observe that buyers' satisfaction is higher if the group-buying model can effectively reduce the price. Furthermore, the earlier customers join the group-buying, more satisfactions they will get. Besides, the buyers also agree with that the group-buying model can effectively reduce the price. Furthermore, we discover that the perceived value, perceived usefulness, and perceived easy of use can positively affect the buyers' attitude, and consequently, buyers are willing to join the group-buying in the future.

Objective: Today, many healthcare organizations have implemented health care reporting systems in the hope of learning from experience to prevent or reduce adverse events, medical errors or accidents. However, most applications have failed or not been implemented as predicted. This study presents an extended technology acceptance model (TAM) that integrates subjective norm, trust, and management support into the TAM to investigate what determines healthcare professional reporting system acceptance. Design: The proposed model was empirically tested using data collected from a survey in the hospital environment. The structural equation modeling technique was used to evaluate the causal model and confirmatory factor analysis was performed to examine the reliability and validity of the measurement model. Measurements: Questionnaire administered items measuring the behavioral intention to use the reporting system and five hypothesized antecedents. Results: Our findings indicated that all variables significantly affected healthcare professionals¡¦ behavioral intention to use the reporting system. Among them, the subjective norm had the most significant influence. Conclusion: The proposed model provides a means to understand what factors determine healthcare professional¡¦s behavioral intention to use a reporting system and how this may affect future use. In addition, antecedents to the behavioral intent can be used to predict reporting system acceptance in advance of system development.

Abstract At present, the pervasion of cable television (CATV) is over 85% in Taiwan, so that the digitalization of CATV has brought an important influence to the Taiwan television industry. The purposes of this study are to explore the key factors of influencing digital cable television (CDTV) user¡¦s adoptive behavior by technology acceptance model (TAM). An extended TAM incorporating the notion of compatibility, trialability, observability, habits and network externality. Collecting data form one CDTV operators by convenience sampling. This study found that compatibility, trialability, observability, habites are directly positive to the perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use, whereas, the network externality was negative to perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use. In addition, network externality, perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use were directly positive to the behavioral intention to use. This study suggest that CATV operators could especially regard for providing ample and quality digital content and beta test of CDTV and making the CDTV simple to manipulate, while promote CDTV.

With the popularity and growth of blog users, blog is well-known in the world. Many domestic or international enterprises started to be aware of the influence power and have put in more resources and investments. To explore the motivation of blog users¡¦ attitudes as well as the behavioral intentions in blogging is an important issue of research. This research used technology acceptance model, also called TAM, sharing motivation and social influence to examine the relationships of user¡¦s attitudes and behavioral intentions. This study used questionnaires to collect data and implemented statistical analysis by SPSS. The result found blog female user is more than male, the main user is young groups under 25-age student. Most respondents spend less than one hour for every time using blog; 90% of the respondents to participate in the blog 1 ~ 3 days per week. 55% of the respondents have blog using experience less than 2 years. "Online Diary", "Expression of emotion" and "Information sharing" is the main purpose of the respondents participating in the blog. Wretch, blog-hosting service provider, has the most members of blog users, Yahoo is followed by the second, and MSN Space is third. The research results indicated that perceived of usefulness, perceived of enjoyment, reciprocity and reputation were positively related to attitude toward blogging. On the other hand, subjective norm and attitude toward blogging significantly influenced a blog participant¡¦s intention to continue to use. However trust and relationship can not predict the attitude toward blogging, primarily the Internet users in general do not believe the information quality. The factor of feedback in social influence also can not predict the user¡¦s intention in blogging mainly was because the current blog functions and services can not attract or satisfy users in blogging. Therefore, blog-hosting service providers should continue to improve the evaluation mechanisms to strengthen the information content and quality. In addition, they also need to create more entertaining interactive features to attract more users or encourage users¡¦ intention to continue in blogging.