Internet on the move: will your mobile experience be worth the wait?

Citation

Schwartz, D.G. (2005), "Internet on the move: will your mobile experience be worth the wait?", Internet Research, Vol. 15 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/intr.2005.17215baa.001

Internet on the move: will your mobile experience be worth the wait?

Korea and Hong Kong represent two of the most technologically advanced societies in the world. In many respects they serve as harbingers of new technology adoption and “early warning devices” for market failure. In this issue of Internet Research we begin with two glimpses into those markets. Cheong and Park present a model and study of “Mobile internet acceptance in Korea” and Gunasakaran and Ngai provide insights of “E-commerce in Hong Kong: an empirical perspective and analysis”.

The analysis of mobile internet acceptance in Korea – from a consumer perspective – begs the question “what mobile content are these users being fed?”. A partial answer to that question can be found in Okazaki’s article “Mobile advertising adoption by multinationals: senior executives’ initial responses”. In it he highlights the distinctions found between MNC’s in Japan, Europe, and the USA, identifying some key cultural determinants along the way.

Where advertising leads, search is soon to follow. While mobile advertising has many hurdles to pass, mobile search is clearly an up and coming target, identified as a key consumer service by Yahoo!, Google and others. Given the interface limitations of mobile search, managing search sequences will become all the more important. Ylikoski gives us a number of insights into the domain of search sequence analysis in “A sequence analysis of consumers’ online searches”. His efforts in studying deskbound search sequences, comparing the analytical with the heuristic approaches, should prove invaluable in improving mobile search technologies as well.

Moving back to the deskbound world, we complete this issue with Evans and Mathur’s extensive survey of “The value of online surveys”. In it they cover a broad spectrum of survey approaches and techniques, synthesizing the lessons learned while taking into account the relative strengths and weaknesses of each situation. Finally, Ryan and Valverde tackle one of the most frustrating yet least understood issues in the online world – “Waiting for service on the internet”. Their study helps define the problem in its various incarnations and should set the stage for some interesting follow-up research that not only helps crystallize the issues involved, but provide real solutions to an increasingly troublesome problem. But you’ll have to wait for that.

David G. Schwartz