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Social media, especially microblog, has become one of the most popular platforms for public opinion dissemination. However, so far few studies have been conducted to explore information dissemination under the mobile environment. This paper aims to introduce the approach to analyze the public opinion information dissemination in mobile social networks.

This paper chooses “network attack” as the research topic and extracts 23,567 relevant messages from Sina Microblogs to study the structure of nodes for public opinion dissemination and the characteristics of propagation paths on mobile internet. Public opinion dissemination is compared on both mobile and non-mobile terminals.

The results reveal the characteristics of public opinion dissemination in mobile environment and identify three patterns of information propagation path. This study concludes that public opinion on mobile internet propagates more widely and efficiently and generates more impact than that on the non-mobile internet.

The methods used in this study can be useful for the government and other organizations to analyze and identify problems in online information dissemination.

This paper explores the mechanism of public opinion dissemination on mobile internet in China and further investigates how to improve public opinion management through a case study related to “network attack.”

This paper aims to investigate the properties and attributes of networked services and to propose a general categorization scheme for such services.

Two separate studies were conducted to test the validity and applicability of the categorization scheme. First, industry experts categorized a set of pre‐selected mobile services based on the services' dominant source of value. Second, a large‐scale end‐user study of the same services was conducted for testing cross‐service differences between the proposed service categories in terms of what drives perceived customer value. It is argued that services can be categorized on the basis of whether their dominant source of value stems from intrinsic, user network, or complement network attributes.

The study results largely support the proposed categorization scheme. The two studies suggest that categorizing networked services as driven by either intrinsic, user network, or complement network attributes is fruitful and helps pinpoint fundamentally different drivers of perceived customer value. The drivers investigated in the end‐user study explain 60 percent of the variance in customer value.

The current categorization scheme will have stronger and clearer implications when the full array of antecedents and consequences of intrinsic, user network, and complement network attributes have been investigated.

The categorization scheme may provide managers with important guidelines regarding the kinds of business models and marketing means that will work best for the three different categories of networked services.

The paper contributes with a conceptual framework for understanding and categorizing both extrinsic and intrinsic drivers of service value. It extends and integrates previous work on network effects and adoption research and also offers empirical insight into an under‐researched topic.

This chapter aims to investigate the uses and appropriations of mobile digital technologies and networks through an examination of their popular manifestations in Brazil. We take a phenomenologically informed hermeneutics approach to understand the nature of social interactions vis-à-vis mobile digital technologies in daily life. The multimodal strategy explores based on documents and quantitative data published by Brazilian research institutes and the press. In addition, using an autoethnographic approach, the authors’ direct observations also provide a contextual framework. Findings suggest that mobile devices and networks were employed as protest tools for individuals and social groups. This finding suggests the emergence of new forms of social organizations and the appropriation of mobile technology as a tool for citizen empowerment and cyber-activism that takes place both in virtual and physical environments in Brazil. These appropriations had direct implications for political protests and changed how they have been organized in Brazil since then. Mobile technologies have enhanced and multiplied possibilities for social interaction, information sharing, and media broadcasting, allowing for the questioning of traditional media and the content provided by them. This research provides a foundation for future analysis about the appropriation of digital technologies specifically related to their use as civic media that is applicable beyond Brazil, given that these technologies are spread in different contexts and countries.

The purpose of the paper is to define the best deployment alternatives for a public protection and disaster relief (PPDR) mobile network service – the implementation alternatives being either a dedicated network, a commercial network or a hybrid of the two network types. The selection criteria are based on the social benefits that the PPDR mobile service is expected to bring to society. The critical parameters are population density and service availability, which both directly relate to the socioeconomic benefits achieved by providing broadband (BB) mobile services in various demographic areas.

A causal loop model has been developed to define the socioeconomic benefits of the PPDR network, the parameters being population density, service availability, socioeconomic value of the service and the costs of the network. The network solution alternatives are studied using the Finnish PPDR network as a reference – analysing various areas of the country with differing population densities from remote, rural and more densely populated suburban and urban areas.

Socioeconomic value is a common measure for assessing the value of governmental investments; population density has a strong impact on the optimum deployment alternatives as the socioeconomic value is directly proportional to this variable. The flat nationwide fee of the mobile users means that the users are subsidised in sparsely populated areas – and overcharged in densely populated areas. This is the main reason why the commercial network seems to be most feasible in rural areas, whereas the dedicated network works best in urban areas. Based on the case study, the commercial network is most preferable up to the point when the population density reaches 50-125 persons/km². After that point, the dedicated network becomes more appropriate. Proposals are being made to improve the availability of the commercial networks enabling them to serve as a PPDR network: ensuring priority functionality and a protected power supply; allowing PPDR subscribers the exclusive use of one of the 700 MHz spectrum bands in restricted, critical areas; and extending use of the existing narrowband PPDR network in areas where communication availability is crucial.

On the one hand, the financing of BB PPDR mobile networks is an unresolved issue in many countries. On the other hand, the ability of commercial BB networks to provide better quality of service is improving, making viable the alternative to subscribe for radio service from a commercial operator. Therefore, the feasibility study on how to provide an optimum mobile BB service for PPDR organisations is of real value at this time.

Multimedia applications such as digital audio and video have stringent quality of service (QoS) requirement in mobile ad hoc network. To support wide range of QoS, complex routing protocols with multiple QoS constraints are necessary. In QoS routing, the basic problem is to find a path that satisfies multiple QoS constraints. Moreover, mobility, congestion and packet loss in dynamic topology of network also leads to QoS performance degradation of protocol.

In this paper, the authors proposed a multi-path selection scheme for QoS aware routing in mobile ad hoc network based on fractional cuckoo search algorithm (FCS-MQARP). Here, multiple QoS constraints energy, link life time, distance and delay are considered for path selection.

The experimentation of proposed FCS-MQARP is performed over existing QoS aware routing protocols AOMDV, MMQARP, CS-MQARP using measures such as normalized delay, energy and throughput. The extensive simulation study of the proposed FCS-based multipath selection shows that the proposed QoS aware routing protocol performs better than the existing routing protocol with maximal energy of 99.1501 and minimal delay of 0.0554.

This paper presents a hybrid optimization algorithm called the FCS algorithm for the multi-path selection. Also, a new fitness function is developed by considering the QoS constraints such as energy, link life time, distance and delay.

So far fourth generation (4G) has not been well defined technically, functionally or commercially despite conceptual research having been quietly under way since 1998. But as we have not fully rolled out and digested 2.5G, let alone 3G, why on earth should we be interested in a still further mobile technology? And how will WiFi, WiMAX and existing networks figure in all of this? The answer is that 4G will fundamentally advance the way we use mobile and existing networks and repair the problems of 3G. If allowed to, 4G can take us from radio technologies and concepts of the 1920s into the next era of radio communications using “open spectrum”. And 4G may be able to answer many cost and technical problems of the earlier mobile systems. Once its technical blueprint is worked out, 4G faces enormous challenges, far more than the technical, in commercial/political battles with what it could replace. We examine its challenges here, also considering regulatory policy, which would require that the mobile element is seen as only one of at least six components. The different scenarios for its early development are also briefly reviewed.

Mobile peer‐to‐peer communications is an essential phase in the evolution of mobile communications technologies, motivating this research which aims to focus on how established industry stakeholders and new entrants can adapt themselves to the new situation.

Based on existing literature, the authors identified three distinctive evolution paths for mobile peer‐to‐peer communications and developed an analysis framework for their comparison. The authors validated the analysis by conducting a questionnaire study among domain experts, and analyzed its results using statistical analysis.

Internet‐driven evolution has high value proposition, is profitable and has subscription fees as an important revenue model. Telecom‐driven evolution creates value, leverages markets, leverages competence, is likely to encounter regulatory intervention and benefits all customer segments. Proprietary evolution has a successful revenue model, results in alliances of competitors and is competence‐enhancing to mobile device vendors.

Future work consists mainly of analyzing quantitatively the implications of the new technologies when they become readily available and evaluating the value analysis framework in other applicable cases.

Internet‐driven evolution enables new business opportunities to independent service operators and equipment vendors by enabling opportunities in profiting from sales of advanced devices and networks. Telecom‐driven evolution benefits mostly incumbent mobile network operators. Proprietary evolution enables limited competition against incumbent actors by independent service operators.

This study is one of the first journal publications on mobile peer‐to‐peer communications from a holistic techno‐economic point of view, beneficial to both academics and practitioners.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the effect of network externality on users’ continuance of mobile social network sites (SNS).

Based on the 230 valid responses collected from a survey, structural equation modeling was employed to examine the research model.

The results indicated that network externality, which includes referent network size and perceived complementarity, has a significant effect on perceived usefulness and flow. Privacy concern affects perceived usefulness, flow and privacy risk. These three factors determine continued use.

Previous research has focussed on the effects of motivations such as perceived value on user adoption of SNS. The effect of network externality on user continuance has seldom been examined. This research tries to fill the gap.

Web services are going mobile. A mobile enterprise can be established in a cellular network by participating mobile hosts, which act as web service providers, and their clients. Mobile hosts enable seamless integration of user‐specific services to the enterprise, by following web service standards, also on the radio link and via resource constrained smart phones. However, establishing such a mobile enterprise poses several technical challenges, such as the quality of service (QoS), discovery aspects and proper integration solutions, for the network as well as for the mobile phone users. The purpose of this paper is to summarize the challenges and research associated with this domain and with establishing the mobile enterprise.

The paper summarizes the challenges and research in the mobile web services domain, along with a detailed discussion of the developed mobile web service mediation framework (MWSMF). MWSMF is realized based on the enterprise service bus (ESB) technology, as an intermediary between mobile hosts and web service clients. Moreover, to scale the mobile enterprise to the loads possible in cellular networks, some of the components of MWSMF are shifted to the new utility computing paradigm, cloud computing.

From the study it was found that ESB provides a good integration solution for the mobile enterprise research challenges. The detailed analysis of the MWSMF concludes that the mediation framework and its components are horizontally scalable, thus allowing to utilize elasticity of cloud platform to meet load requirements of mobile enterprise in an easy and quick manner.

The study addresses the research with providing services from smart phones and establishing mobile enterprise. The QoS challenges are addressed and the study introduces an integration framework using ESB technology. The porting of MWSMF onto the cloud is also addressed. As an added value, the research serves as a case study for porting enterprise applications to the cloud.