Search results

The metaphors of “wiring” and “growing” are used to describe the infusion of technology into international services marketing. An example of wiring and growing the technology of international services marketing is examined. The wiring metaphor for services technology is a mechanistic metaphor for the need to build a technological infrastructure to support the international services organization, employees and customers. The growing metaphor for services technology is an organic metaphor for the need to create international service systems that are responsive to the human needs of organizations, employees and customers. Future challenges for the application of technology to international services marketing problems are explored.

The purpose of this research is to test for price threshold effects in the demand for high-involvement services for small businesses.

The authors use a stated preference choice-based conjoint study of small business telecommunications demand. Using survey data, individual-level parameter estimates for a demand model are achieved via the Hierarchical Bayes method of estimation.

For demand for small business telecommunications services, the authors find very strong positive impacts of nine-ending and zero-ending prices on the demand for a common bundle of telecommunications services (wired telephone service, broadband internet, and cellular telephone service), even at prices so high a shift in the left-most digit does not occur.

The advertising, brand, or product manager or statistician who assumes threshold effects are not extant in high-involvement service demand may find conventional demand estimation methods lead to erroneous conclusions and less effective pricing strategies.

In the statistical literature on price-ending effects on product demand, most products for which demand is modelled are low-involvement consumer products priced at less than ten monetary units per unit of product. There is a lacuna in this price-ending effects literature regarding small businesses and high-involvement services offered at three-digit prices via monthly subscription. This research indicates that testing for threshold effects should be de rigeur in the methodology of demand estimation for telecommunications or other high-involvement services.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the concept of fixed‐mobile convergence (FMC) with a view to assessing when, and in what form, it is likely to make an appearance.

Various aspects of FMC are investigated including strategic aspects, the technology and the progress of trials. The overall concept is then subjected to analysis and conclusions are drawn.

It is concluded that there is both a demand for FMC and a willingness to provide it. However, there are several hurdles to overcome before its precise form(s) will become clear.

This is one of the many topics in telecommunications that are simultaneously difficult to pin down and technologically fairly complicated. This paper is an original attempt to analyse this topic in a manner that makes it comprehensible to the readers of this journal.

Pervasive computing enhances the environment by embedding many computers that are gracefully integrated with human users. The purpose of this paper is to describe the creation of a smart context‐aware environment in which computation follows people and serves them everywhere. Building such smart environments is still difficult and complex due to lacking a uniform infrastructure that can adapt to diverse smart domains.

To address this problem, the paper proposes an agent‐based pluggable infrastructure which integrates a mobile agent system named pvMogent, establishes an ontology‐based context model and introduces a workflow‐based application model with the open services gateway initiative (OSGi) framework. By plugging corresponding domain context in ontology model and different applications, the infrastructure can be customized to various domains.

Through the implementation of several context‐aware applications, it was found that the infrastructure can largely reduce the development complexity as well as keep the domain extensibility by plugging corresponding domain context in ontology model.

In this paper, a number of key techniques are explored which are suitable for building context‐awareness. The experiences and lessons learned from the system development could further facilitate and inspire the research in this direction.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce Commercial Mobile Video Service Trial (TOEST) of Korea Telecom (KT), relaying experience related to the implementation of mobile video service for portable devices to libraries and information management organizations that are interested in this service.

Research data used were collected from internal materials such as unpublished project reports, RFI, RFP, etc. written throughout the process of implementing projects. The information also draws on the author's experience and involvement in TOEST trial between 2005 and 2007.

From the technical perspective, it was confirmed that technical advancements and environments that enable the implementation of mobile video service for portable devices have been fully established. The technical areas that need to be further improved are the advancements of battery capacity, low‐power consumption technology, and functional improvement of the I/O slot in portable devices.

TOEST provides only download type service for portable devices such as PDAs and PMPs. Streaming type service for mobile phones has been performed only for the purpose of internal tests.

For information management organizations and libraries, mobile video service for portable devices is cutting‐edge technical service that can provide new customer value to users. Also, it is possible to apply profit models from the commercial point of view.

The paper introduces various technical and environmental elements as specifically as possible, including practical things that we have experienced during the course of implementing mobile video service systems for portable devices. Experience in TOEST development would be helpful to information management organizations and libraries planning to provide mobile video service for portable devices.

In the past few months a new breed of online search facility has made its début, accessible through the World Wide Web using any standard browser such as Netscape. Here is an introduction to three such newcomers: NlightN, NewsPage and Infoseek. We used Netscape to run a test search on each of these, choosing both a current topic (the HotJava browser: see our last issue's News Roundup, p. 174) and one slightly more obscure (the 1994 film Shadowlands, about the romance between C.S. Lewis and Joy Gresham). We will show the results of these searches elsewhere in this article but first, here is more about the services themselves.

The results of a study carried out to identify the problems and issues arising in the electric distribution system of the Karachi Electric Supply Corporation are presented. The authors are particularly concerned with failures of supply and the principle reasons for those failures are discussed, particularly the domestic overloading problem. Recommendations are made with a view to increasing the reliability, efficiency and effectiveness of the system. It is estimated that the implementation of the recommendations could reduce the number of fault complaints by half and also result in savings in fuel costs of the order of Rs. 1.25 million (approx. £55,000) per annum in the operation of the maintenance teams.

First Australian Online Information Conference. ‘Information Online 86’, the First Australian Online Information Conference and Exhibition, to be held at the Hilton International Sydney from 20–22 January 1986, will present the professional and business market with two opportunities. The first, an Exhibition, will comprise a display of publiclyavailable databases from around the world providing financial, business, educational, news, management, marketing, legal and medical information online. The second, a full Conference programme, including product reviews, will run concurrently with the Exhibition. This will enable the business or professional person to find out how online information improves business productivity, and how to select the appropriate online information systems to suit their particular needs.

In the spring of 1979, Mead Data Central, which is best known for its legal information service (LEXIS), announced that it would soon make available an online retrieval service in the general news field. This brought to four the number of online services providing access to newspaper and other news media:

The purpose of this paper is to identify the structure of strategic investments and the effect of each investment category on business performance in two leading information and communication technology (ICT) countries, the USA and South Korea.

This is a longitudinal comparative study of the relationship between strategic investments and organizational performance of major telecommunication service providers (TSPs) in the two leading ICT countries, the USA and South Korea.

The study found that a sufficient amount of strategic investments in technological innovations is the driving force for TSPs’ business performance. However, strategic investment structures differ among TSPs, depending on their market position, whether the first mover in the market or a follower, and on their country’s market characteristics. Moreover, even though both countries’ TSP markets are oligopolistic in nature, the market is more saturated in Korea and thus competition appears to be fiercer there than in the USA. The stronger oligopolistic market in Korea has lead TSPs to compete primarily on their marketing strategies, while TSPs in the USA do so based on technological innovation.

The findings of the study shed new insights that can help both TSPs in developing their competitive strategies and government policy makers in assuring healthy competitive telecommunication markets in their countries.