Search results

Purpose — The chapter presents the practical applications of web search statistics analysis. The process description highlights the potential use of search queries and statistical data and how they could be used in various forecasting situations. The presented case is an example of applied computational intelligence and the main focus is oriented towards the decision support offered by the software mechanism and its capabilities to automatically gather, process and analyse data.

Methodology/approach — The statistics of the search queries as a source of prognostic information are analysed in a step-by-step process, starting from their content and scope, their processing and applications, and concluding with usage in a software-based intelligent framework.

Research implications — The analysis of search engine trends offers a great opportunity for many areas of research. Into the future, deploying this information in the prognosis will further develop intelligent data processing.

Practical implications — This functionality offers a unique possibility, impossible until now, to observe, estimate and predict various processes using wide, precise and accurate behaviour observations. The scope and quality of data allow practitioners to successfully use it in various prognostic problems (i.e. political, medical, or economic).

Originality/value of paper — The chapter presents practical implications of technology. The chapter then highlights potential areas that would benefit from the analysis of queries statistics. Moreover, it introduces ‘WebPerceiver’, an intelligent platform, built to make the analysis and usage of search trends easier and more generally available to a wide audience, including non-skilled users.

This paper describes a series of three evaluations of electronic textbooks on the Web, which focused on assessing how appearance and design can affect users’ sense of engagement and directness with the material. The EBONI Project's methodology for evaluating electronic textbooks is outlined and each experiment is described, together with an analysis of results. Finally, some recommendations for successful design are suggested, based on an analysis of all experimental data. These recommendations underline the main findings of the evaluations: that users want some features of paper books to be preserved in the electronic medium, while also preferring electronic text to be written in a scannable style.

What happens when users encounter breakdown situations when browsing the Web? Reports a study in which 35 participants were asked to think aloud whilst following a trail through a series of Web pages. Some of the pages were designed to cause error messages to be displayed by the browser when users tried to interact with them. The results from the study showed that the error messages did not help users to diagnose the cause of the problems, or develop their understanding of the Internet. Error messages do provide a vocabulary for describing problems, but fail to provide a model to pin the terminology on. We suggest that an underlying model of Web browsing should be available for users to learn from the error messages, rather than just seeing them as a sign of “something being wrong”.

Lecture recordings can be a powerful addition to traditional lectures and they can even serve as a main content source in a number of didactic scenarios. If users can quickly locate relevant passages in a recording, the recording combines the ease of search that comes with electronic text based media with the authenticity and wealth of information that is delivered in a live lecture. Locating relevant passages in a time based media such as a recorded lecture is, however, not as easy as searching an electronic text document. This article presents the virtPresenter lecture recording system that tackles navigation in web lectures with a hypermedia navigation concept that is improved with interactive content overviews. Apart from navigation in web lectures the article also addresses didactic scenarios for web lectures and issues related to the workflow of recording lectures.

The case ties together a number of marketing concepts and theories within the context of a startup which might be addressed in an entrepreneurship or marketing course. The case focuses on niche, digital, and social media marketing and utilizes fundamental marketing concepts such as target market, value proposition, brand positioning, the marketing communications mix and the adopter categories of the diffusion of innovation theory.

The case is based on interviews from 2014 to 2017 with the founder of Lammily, Nickolay Lamm, supplemented by internet research.

Lammily is a startup company in its second year of existence which produces toys that embody realism: a fashion doll with proportions based on an average 19-year-old American woman, a sticker set of common body markings such as booboos and cellulite to make dolls look realistically, and doll outfits. After the company’s initial success in 2014, fueled by positive publicity from online media eager to share information about the average doll project, sales were flat. Nickolay Lamm, the founder of Lammily, started to feel the heat to acquire new customers in ways that did not rely solely on digital word-of mouth. In response, Lammily commissioned a direct response TV commercial in the Summer of 2015, but it failed to lead to significant new customer growth. This case describes how Nickolay struggles to move beyond the launch phase of his entrepreneurial venture and turn his startup into a business with a sustainable customer base. Facing stagnating growth and established competitors with deep pockets, Nickolay needs to figure out why the TV commercial did not work for Lammily and what his new plan to acquire new customers will be.

This case would be well-positioned in an undergraduate or graduate-level entrepreneurship course that exposes students to the challenges of promoting a new brand and marketing a new line of products in a competitive market with established competitors. It is also good a good fit for a general marketing or entrepreneurial marketing course. The case focuses on how a startup can optimize its advertising strategy for a niche market to stimulate growth with a limited budget by using digital marketing techniques.

The chapter discusses the characteristics of audiovisual (AV) media sectors in the Baltic Sea region. Therein it focuses on the specifics of media industries in small countries in the region as they are challenged in ways notably different from large countries with large domestic markets for media content. It discusses the differences between the AV media industries in the Nordic and Baltic countries and suggests that while in the first case long-term welfare society policies and conscious policy-driven system building have conditioned growth and international success then also in the second case innovation policy rationales have facilitated recent growth and dynamics. It then discusses the specific challenges, especially platformisation to small media industries in contemporary globalising media markets, and suggests that opportunities to resist these challenges may be in local inter-sectoral cooperation, that is, in building cross-innovation systems.

Climate change poses serious challenges to existing ecosystem governance systems due to the emerging issues that it presents. The chapter discusses two main characteristics of ecosystem governance (i.e., adaptive and collaborative) in the context of a changing climate. It examines the issues to be addressed in the review of governance systems such as ecosystem degradation, adaptation to climate change, and institutionalization of governance structures. It reiterates the importance of considering the consequences of climate change to the ecosystem, economy, and human well-being toward better ecosystem governance.