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The purpose of this paper is to empirically assess the payoffs of a corporate portal in an academic institution in Oman and its impacts on business processes and employees.

The study included 100 employees, mostly instructors, in an academic institution. The questionnaire included indicators related to the portal usage, employees’ benefits (learning, adaptability and job satisfaction) and business processes’ benefits (effectiveness, efficiency and innovativeness) constructs. Data were analyzed by PLS‐Graph 3.0, a variance‐based structural equation modeling software.

Results revealed that corporate portal has significant returns on employees’ learning, adaptability and job satisfaction, and business processes’ effectiveness, efficiency and innovation. All six hypotheses in this study were supported.

The paper provides empirical evidence for practitioners and researchers on the benefits of a corporate portal in an academic institution in Oman.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the factors affecting students’ satisfaction with university portals in developing countries. The factors examined are educational services availability, user ability, system quality and information quality.

A self completion questionnaire was developed and distributed to a sample of 550 students in several universities. Correlation and regression analysis were used to identify relationships and explore which of the factors had the strongest explanatory power.

The results showed that educational services availability, system quality and information quality influence students’ satisfaction, with service availability being the major determinant. The cultural perspective was employed to explain these results.

Understanding what students expect from a university portal should increase their satisfaction and consequently have a positive impact on universities’ performance. The results of this study also contribute to the current literature, which is very limited in developing countries. The paper concludes by discussing implications for both research and practitioners.

Horizontal web portals fill an important place in the operation of the internet and this paper seeks to look at how these portals may become profitable. A portal is simply a gateway, and a web portal can thus be seen as a gateway to content and services on the internet, or on a corporate intranet. This paper aims to compare several different views of what constitutes a portal, and to offer a specific definition. The main focus of the paper is on general horizontal (or public) portals and the relationship between their business‐revenue models and the content they provide. This paper aims to briefly review the relevant literature before describing a revenue model consisting of players, strategies and content. This is then examined and synthesised to match various revenue models and content.

After proposing the model, the paper tests how the matches proposed between revenue and content in the model compare with two currently operating popular horizontal portals.

An examination of two popular portals (one world‐wide and one based in Australia) has provided typical examples of how the advertising/revenue can be employed by horizontal portals and shown that they appear to match fairly closely with the proposed revenue/content model. After having examined the content of these two well‐known portals, it appears at this early stage that the revenue‐content model may show some promise.

While the paper cannot claim complete generalisability of a model based on a comparison of only two horizontal portals, the results are promising and should be useful for horizontal portal managers looking for how to balance the revenue of their portal with the content that they generate and the services they offer.

When fully tested, the model will provide horizontal portal operators assistance with the process of determining suitable content for their portals to match their chosen revenue strategies.

It is believed that this model is one of the few revenue/content matching models developed for horizontal portals.

With the rise of alternate discovery services, such as Google Scholar, in conjunction with the increase in open access content, researchers have the option to bypass academic libraries when they search for and retrieve scholarly information. This state of affairs implies that academic libraries exist in competition with these alternate services and with the patrons who use them, and as a result, may be disintermediated from the scholarly information seeking and retrieval process. Drawing from decision and game theory, bounded rationality, information seeking theory, citation theory, and social computing theory, this study investigates how academic librarians are responding as competitors to changing scholarly information seeking and collecting practices. Bibliographic data was collected in 2010 from a systematic random sample of references on CiteULike.org and analyzed with three years of bibliometric data collected from Google Scholar. Findings suggest that although scholars may choose to bypass libraries when they seek scholarly information, academic libraries continue to provide a majority of scholarly documentation needs through open access and institutional repositories. Overall, the results indicate that academic librarians are playing the scholarly communication game competitively.

Explores what the domination of commercial interests online means for the visibility of non‐profit content on the Web. Makes specific recommendations to site owners on ways of achieving greater popularity. Concludes with an old phrase by online media experts – If content is king, then distribution is King Kong!

The purpose of this paper is to look into the impact of important social motives on knowledge‐sharing behavior in a collaborative environment and how people might react to each of these motives.

The applied methodology used in this paper is based on an online survey and statistical hypothesis developed for each of the motives with different comparison means under two circumstances.

The paper exhibits the different impact of each of the motives over the sharing behaviour in collaborative platforms. Despite general beliefs, although many motives might not have a very significant impact under normal behavioral circumstances that is based on either an agreement or disagreement level, all of those tested motives show a positive tendency when tested on the neutral (Dilemma) position.

This study has examined a small and generalized group of people for social networking analysis with a limited number of motivational factors tested. Future research can extend the findings on a greater scale and/or examination of more diverse motives.

This study tries to change the presumptions about the collaboration‐sharing behaviours and motives and how social environment can behave differently under the same circumstances on a business‐oriented platform. The study also suggests how the findings can be applied to leverage social collaboration more efficiently to enhance knowledge sharing for business purposes.

Since May 2016, small firms have been able to issue debt and equity securities in accordance with the Securities and Exchange Commission's “Regulation Crowdfunding”. This regulation provides unsophisticated investors a chance to participate in the securities markets, and it gives small businesses an opportunity to raise funds. This paper investigates the determinants of crowdfunding success, security design in a crowdfunding setting, the amount of crowdfunding campaign proceeds and campaign duration.

The sample used in this study is based on 750 completed securities crowdfunding offerings that were launched between May 2016 and May 2018. The data on crowdfunding issues were webscraped from Form C filings available through SEC EDGAR filing system. Additional data were hand-collected from a variety of platforms that list and aggregate crowdfunding offerings.

We show that relatively larger and more profitable companies have a better chance to achieve crowdfunding success. We find that the issuance of equity results in a lower probability of success compared to issuing debt. In addition, the issuance of equity is negatively correlated with the amount of proceeds from a crowdfunding campaign. A novel finding is that a choice of a funding instrument has a negligible impact on the amount of proceeds. This finding, combined with reduced probability of success for equity issuers, can be interpreted as a signal to rely more on debt and convertibles when designing crowdfunding campaigns.

Organized under “Regulation Crowdfunding,” the US securities-based crowdfunding market has been operating for several years. Relative to other securities markets it is still considered to be in its infancy. Given a relatively small data sample, the results have to be interpreted with caution.

The paper shows that small businesses and unsophisticated investors can benefit from securities-based crowdfunding, which is subject to oversight of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Although the mission of the regulator is to protect investors, the SEC took on a rather relaxed approach in regulating types of instruments used in crowdfunding. Our paper shows that equities, including “Simple Agreements For Future Equity” (SAFEs) might not be the best choice for crowdfunding success. This sentiment is mirrored in law literature which considers securities known as SAFEs more suitable for venture capital campaigns rather than for crowdfunding.

The paper adds value to the novel field of securities-based crowdfunding by testing several hypotheses on the crowdfunding success, the amount of proceeds and campaign duration.

The purpose of this paper is to illustrate the use of a multi‐factor competitive real option model.

The model is described, context of Google‐Yahoo! is developed, market share and other parameter values are estimated, sensitivities and alternative model specifications are shown, and model results are compared with accounting and also stock market valuations and conclusion emphasizes the need for further empirical and theoretical research.

It was found that applications are feasible, but estimated parameter values are likely to be very approximate compared with internal company information. Hence it points to use as managerial decision tool. Research limitations/implications – Some limitations are the assumed duopoly model, and that historical data are adequate proxies for expected revenue, investment cost, volatilities and market share. The basic model assumes geometric Brownian motion, but the possible consequences of other stochastic processes are illustrated.

Internal market share information should be compared with public data in making strategic investment decisions.

Model adaptation and empirical application are unique, and of value to future empirical researchers, including stock market analysts as well as corporate decision makers.

Because mobile phones offer a new, affordable and easy-to-use portal to reading material, mobile reading is emerging as the most ultra-modern reading approach. From the perspective of mobile reading service providers, knowledge of customer purchase, and consumption behaviour is critical for their survival and success. This paper aims to provide insights into the factors that influence the purchase e-books.

Following means-end chain theory, the prospect theory and elaboration likelihood model, a structural equation model is proposed to investigate and identify key factors that drive the purchase intention of experienced mobile readers. In the theoretical model, utilitarian value (UV) and hedonic value (HV) are supposed as formative second-order constructs formed by related payoff.

Both UV and HV are positively associated with readers’ purchase intention. However, there are no big differences between these two path coefficients. People seem to perceive relatively low payment risk although perceived risk could still negatively affect purchase intention. As a predictor of purchase intention, UV is less important when risk perception increases or when involvement (IV) decreases. Furthermore, this study illustrates that uniqueness and convenience (CV) are significant components of UV, whereas curiosity and flow are components of HV.

Mobile reading providers should highlight the professional and specificity of app such as beautiful cover, page setup that similar to real books and so on. Readers should be allowed to post real-time reviews and communicate with others to improve their sense of satisfaction, participation and belonging. The payment process should be concise and simple through which readers can save their purchase time and effort. Mobile reading service providers should provide trustworthy payment approaches, especially third-party platform and guarantee the CV and safety of payment activity.

By focusing on the impacts of relationships among UV, HV, perceived risk and IV to purchase intention, this paper not only provides a theoretical understanding of mobile reading purchase behaviour but also offers practical insights to reading material manufactures and app developers for promoting such a process.

Understanding how value is actually generated in e‐government projects is one of the most challenging, and relevant, issues in e‐government research. This paper aims to investigate the contribution of service‐based information technology (IT) integration for generating value in the public sector, proposing a theoretical framework based on the theory of IT conversion effectiveness.

The paper illustrates this novel approach to electronic government evaluation with an exploratory case study of a service‐based IT integration project developed by the City of Genoa, showing how and why IT integration can substantially contribute to value generation in the public sector.

Contrarily to what one would expect according to the original theory of IT conversion effectiveness, value generation may happen even with no substantial growth in the pre‐existing IT asset portfolio. In fact, what is truly important is not only the availability of IT assets (policy output), but also their proper use (policy outcome) and their final effects on policy takers (policy impact). The case study shows how a low‐cost and small IT integration project based on agile information system development practices can significantly leverage the legacy systems, enhancing the overall degree of IT conversion effectiveness (first stage), with expected positive effects on policy outcomes (second stage) and policy impacts (third stage). The enabling effect of the web services technology has a central role in the overall value generation process.

While addressing a literature void in the context of public sector, this theoretical approach is substantial as it can be used to evaluate and maximize the value generated by e‐government projects, with a special focus on service‐based IT integration projects.