Smart Cell Phones Research Articles

User requirements of mobile technology: A summary of research results

As advanced mobile technology becomes more widespread, the impacts on professional environments and on the personal lives of individual users continue to increase. Devices, such as smart cell phone...

The emerging markets century: how a new breed of world-class companies is overtaking the world

In this vital book, visionary international investment manager Antoine van Agtmael -- the pioneer who coined the term -- pulls back the curtain on the new powerhouses of the world economy. Picking up where Thomas Friedman's The World Is Flat left off, he persuasively demonstrates that the world's center of gravity is already tipping decisively in favor of the emerging economies. With this seismic shift, competitive challenges and investment risks are also being dramatically transformed, while new opportunities are arising for those who are alert to them. A new breed of world-leading companies are catching their Western competitors off guard. Household names of today -- IBM, Ford, Sony, and Shell -- are in danger of becoming has-beens as these more innovative new superstars in the emerging markets claim dominance. Understanding how they have become world-class market leaders, and where they are taking the world economy, is crucial to understanding not only the future of globalization, but the future of Western competitiveness. Each year we are buying more planes from Brazil's Embraer, refrigerators from China's Haier appliance maker, smart cell phones from Taiwan's HTC, and gas from Russia's Gazprom. How have these relative unknowns come so far in the world markets so fast? What are they doing right that their Western competitors are doing wrong, and how can Western companies face the intensifying challenges and survive? With in-depth, inside knowledge of these emerging powerhouses that's based on his thirty years of working, traveling, and investing in emerging markets and his extraordinary access to the leading companies, van Agtmael trains his experienced analyst's eye on twenty-five of the top emerging giants, taking readers into the executive suites and labs where they are outmaneuvering their Western rivals. Profiling these major players, such as Korea's Samsung Electronics, China's computer maker Lenovo, Brazil's iron ore giant CVRD, and India's Infosys, van Agtmael divulges their strategies for growth, and analyzes how their rise to dominance will change our lives. His unique insights point the way to how we in the West can capitalize on the opportunities these companies represent while also mobilizing a powerful response to the challenges they present. The Emerging Markets Century is a compelling and necessary read for anyone who wants to understand the true magnitude of change under way in the global economy today.

User requirements of mobile technology: results from a content analysis of user reviews

Advanced mobile technology continues to shape professional environments. Smart cell phones, pocket computers and laptop computers reduce the need of users to remain close to a wired information system infrastructure and allow for task performance in many different contexts. Among the consequences are changes in technology requirements, such as the need to limit weight and size of the devices. In the current paper, we focus on the factors that users find important in mobile devices. Based on a content analysis of online user reviews that was followed by structural equation modeling, we found four factors to be significantly related with overall user evaluation, namely functionality, portability, performance, and usability. Besides the practical relevance for technology developers and managers, our research results contribute to the discussion about the extent to which previously established theories of technology adoption and use are applicable to mobile technology. We also discuss the methodological suitability of online user reviews for the assessment of user requirements, and the complementarity of automated and non-automated forms of content analysis.

A Supermodel Framework Supporting Validated Upgrading of Reactive Systems

A software product is typically “upgraded” many times over its lifetime. Reactive systems are no exception, undergoing evolutionary version changes to add features and fix bugs. Evolving these stateful systems, such as email clients, software agents, smart cell phones, and personal digital assistants, is complicated by the fact that new versions of the software must deal correctly with legacy instances. Users of earlier versions have invested significant resources in creating the state of the legacy instance, and usually require that this state be upgraded appropriately when the new system version is activated. However, validating the correctness of this upgrading behavior is particularly difficult, whether through testing or automated reasoning techniques like theorem proving or model checking, because legacy states are typically unreachable to the new version of the software. This paper explores this problem and requirements for its solution. It then presents a simple and widely applicable upgrade framework, based upon the idea of a supermodel that allows upgrade behavior to be validated using mainstream approaches. Finally, it also gives techniques for simplifying the validation problem.