Introduction to special issue: mobile business and information systems

Abstract

The articles in this special issue are major extensions and revisions of some of the best conference papers that were presented at the Sixth International Conference on Mobile Business, organized by the McMaster University eBusiness Research Centre and held in Toronto, Canada in July 2007. These papers cover a number of highly relevant aspects of mobile business and related applications. The first paper in this issue, by Goetz Botterweck, J. Felix Hampe, Stefan Stein, and Andreas Rosendahl addresses mobile home automation, involving the integration of mobile application platforms and home automation technologies. Through a two-dimensional mobility model, the authors review home automation services from the user perspective and tie this into a general system architecture for design decisions. Their proposed design is implemented and demonstrated through a research prototype. In the next paper, Harry Bouwman, Christer Carlsson, Pirkko Walden, and Francisco J Molina-Castillo use the experience of Finland, which has arguably the highest penetration of mobile handset use in the world, to examine trends in service adoption over a 3-year period. They tested models in which innovativeness, flexibility, status, and entertainment value were related to applications of mobile services, concluding that characteristics and user values of mobile services must be considered in order to understand current use and to predict future use. Hakon Ursin Steen’s paper examines the complex world of standards wars as different standards compete for dominance as radio carriers during the development of mobile digital broadcasting. This study draws on insights from multi-sided market theory and structural constraints that influence the selection and stabilization