Innovation, Openness, and Platform Control

We explore innovation, openness, and the duration of intellectual property protection in markets characterized by platforms and their ecosystems of complementary applications. We find that competition among application developers can reduce innovation while competition among platforms can increase innovation. Developers can be better off submitting to platform control as opposed to producing for an unsponsored platform. Although a social planner would open a platform sooner and to a greater degree than would a private platform sponsor, a platform sponsor’s ability to control downstream innovation gives it reason to behave more like a social planner. However, if platforms are to perform this role, platform sponsors need longer duration rights than application developers. Results can inform antitrust and intellectual property regulation, technological innovation, competition policy, and intellectual property strategy.The National Science Foundation, Cisco Systems Inc, and The Microsoft Corporatio

Mimicking news: how the credibility of an established tabloid is used when disseminating racism

This article explores the mimicking of tabloid news as a form of covert racism, relying on the credibility of an established tabloid newspaper. The qualitative case study focuses on a digital platform for letters to the editor, operated without editorial curation pre-publication from 2010 to 2018 by one of Denmark's largest newspapers, Ekstra Bladet. A discourse analysis of the 50 most shared letters to the editor on Facebook shows that nativist, far-right actors used the platform to disseminate fear-mongering discourses and xenophobic conspiracy theories, disguised as professional news and referred to as articles. These processes took place at the borderline of true and false as well as racist and civil discourse. At this borderline, a lack of supervision and moderation coupled with the openness and visual design of the platform facilitated new forms of covert racism between journalism and user-generated content

A Study on Platform's New Strategy in Media 2.0 Era - Based on “Keystone” concept & Google case

The purpose of this paper is to suggest a new strategy of the platform in Media 2.0 era. This goal is approached by firstly examining conceptual change of the platform strategy from mass media world (Media 1.0) to micro media world (Media 2.0). Then, it will discuss "Keystone" strategy by Iansiti & Levien (2004) who introduced four different types of platform and will give an example, Google. The data shows, how Google's keystone strategy could be successfully accomplished with three sources for value creation, revelation, aggregation and plasticity, and how healthy it is in terms of productivity, robustness, and niche creation. Finally, an applicable framework to Media 2.0 will be constructed on the basis sources for value creation and "Keystone" capabilities of ecosystem management. Three main parts of the keystone strategy are the openness, synchronization, and mass customization focus. --Media platform,Keystone,ecosystem

Online Scientific Volunteering: the technological immersion for the co-construction of knowledge, employability, entrepreneurship and innovation in a logic of inclusion

“We all have something to learn and something to share” is the motto of this project, through which we aim to assess the impact of a multilingual platform which combines and makes the most of the potentials of digital environments and favours inclusion, in the co-construction of knowledge in learning/practice, in employability, entrepreneurism and innovation. In this article we will introduce an ongoing project which is founded on the principle of openness to the research community. Its philosophy is Online Scientific Volunteering for the co-construction of knowledge about learning best practices. The platform that will emerge from the project will be open access. The academic community, whether national or international, can contribute with content and knowledge to the platform, through interaction and discussions around relevant and emerging topics. The community may also exploit, without encumbrance, the contents of the platform for their own benefit. This way students and scientific expertise can share in a common knowledge space, and together build a comprehensive knowledge base.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Ghera: A Repository of Android App Vulnerability Benchmarks

Security of mobile apps affects the security of their users. This has fueled the development of techniques to automatically detect vulnerabilities in mobile apps and help developers secure their apps; specifically, in the context of Android platform due to openness and ubiquitousness of the platform. Despite a slew of research efforts in this space, there is no comprehensive repository of up-to-date and lean benchmarks that contain most of the known Android app vulnerabilities and, consequently, can be used to rigorously evaluate both existing and new vulnerability detection techniques and help developers learn about Android app vulnerabilities. In this paper, we describe Ghera, an open source repository of benchmarks that capture 25 known vulnerabilities in Android apps (as pairs of exploited/benign and exploiting/malicious apps). We also present desirable characteristics of vulnerability benchmarks and repositories that we uncovered while creating Ghera.Comment: 10 pages. Accepted at PROMISE'1

Towards Secure and Safe Appified Automated Vehicles

The advancement in Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) has created an enormous market for the development of self-driving functionalities,raising the question of how it will transform the traditional vehicle development process. One adventurous proposal is to open the AV platform to third-party developers, so that AV functionalities can be developed in a crowd-sourcing way, which could provide tangible benefits to both automakers and end users. Some pioneering companies in the automotive industry have made the move to open the platform so that developers are allowed to test their code on the road. Such openness, however, brings serious security and safety issues by allowing untrusted code to run on the vehicle. In this paper, we introduce the concept of an Appified AV platform that opens the development framework to third-party developers. To further address the safety challenges, we propose an enhanced appified AV design schema called AVGuard, which focuses primarily on mitigating the threats brought about by untrusted code, leveraging theory in the vehicle evaluation field, and conducting program analysis techniques in the cybersecurity area. Our study provides guidelines and suggested practice for the future design of open AV platforms

Perceived Software Platform Openness: The Scale and its Impact on Developer Satisfaction

Application developers are of growing importance to ensure that software platforms (e.g. Facebook, Android) gain or maintain a competitive edge. However, despite calls for research to investigate developers’ perspective on platform-centric ecosystems, no research study has been dedicated to identifying the facets that constitute developers’ perception of platform openness. In this paper, we develop a scale of platform openness as perceived by third-party application developers. Using both qualitative and quantitative methods, we conceptualize perceived platform openness as a second-order construct. Empirical evidence from a survey of Android application developers (N=254) support this construct’s validity. Furthermore, we identify perceived platform openness as a major driver of complementors’ overall satisfaction with the platform. Our study thus contributes to a better understanding of platform openness in particular and the management of platform-centric ecosystems in general

ANANAS - A Framework For Analyzing Android Applications

Android is an open software platform for mobile devices with a large market share in the smartphone sector. The openness of the system as well as its wide adoption lead to an increasing amount of malware developed for this platform. ANANAS is an expandable and modular framework for analyzing Android applications. It takes care of common needs for dynamic malware analysis and provides an interface for the development of plugins. Adaptability and expandability have been main design goals during the development process. An abstraction layer for simple user interaction and phone event simulation is also part of the framework. It allows an analyst to script the required user simulation or phone events on demand or adjust the simulation to his needs. Six plugins have been developed for ANANAS. They represent well known techniques for malware analysis, such as system call hooking and network traffic analysis. The focus clearly lies on dynamic analysis, as five of the six plugins are dynamic analysis methods.Comment: Paper accepted at First Int. Workshop on Emerging Cyberthreats and Countermeasures ECTCM 201

More Than One Way to Solve the Healthcare Innovation Crisis With Digital Platforms. Various Forms of Platform Openness Impacting Primary Healthcare

Whereas open digital platforms drive innovation in industries, platforms in primary healthcare are mostly closed. Policy-makers have been looking for ways to open up primary healthcare platforms to stimulate collaboration and innovation and need to do so even more due to the ongoing COVID-19 crisis. Yet, there is not one way of opening up platforms in primary healthcare, just as it is unclear how different ways of openness can lead to more innovation. This paper analyzes the opportunities and challenges in realizing platform openness while examining alternative forms of openness. To answer this, we (1) conceptualize different forms of platform openness (sponsor-provider-platform-user openness), (2) examine how these forms of openness can resolve barriers to innovation, and (3) examine what challenges need to be overcome to realize that form of openness in practice, such as complexity in roles, regulations, and ICT infrastructure. The findings are relevant to structure further research on how platform openness leads to more innovations in healthcare

Hacking the university: Lincoln’s approach to openness

The University of Lincoln has made Student as Producer central to its teaching and learning strategy in an attempt to improve the relationship between teaching and research, the core activities of the university. By engaging students and academics as collaborators, Student as Producer refashions and reasserts the very idea of the university