Fujisawa Sustainable Smart Town: Panasonic’s Challenge in Building a Sustainable Society

Urban utility equipment and electronic goods manufacturers are experiencing profound challenges in this age of rapid technological change. Panasonic, Japan’s leading electronics company, has also recognized the limits of its traditional product manufacturing orientation and decided to enter IT-intensive town management in view of these challenges. It has advanced a new strategy for creating sustainable communities to encourage both stakeholders and local residents to get involved. Stressing sustainability, the strategy has adopted a long-term perspective (i.e., a 100-year timeframe). Significantly, it must provide values that foster community-based sustainability and adopt a business model that ensures the economic viability of both constructing the town and managing its ongoing services. As information systems play a big part in the provision of services in the new town, the strategy requires the linking of information with technology and social aspects, quite unlike traditional manufacturing, which is solely based on technology concerns. As part of its new strategy, Panasonic defined five prominent service areas (i.e., energy, security, mobility, wellness, and community). The company thought these areas would expand and generate new value and services throughout the strategy’s timeframe

From Self-interest To Commons: Distinct Aspect Of social Bookmarking Services

With web contents being generated and shared at an ever-increasing pace, a number of approaches to effectively control and retrieve contents have been developed. Social tagging is a widely implemented method for classifying contents resulting from the dispersed activities of users. Social bookmarking services (SBM) is a web service with the purpose of making information generally available on a shared basis. Accumulation of tags on SBM occurs mainly without inviting the collaboration of others, but on the basis of activities satisfying individual self-interest. SBM is in fact the optimal web platform utilizing the sum of such activities for the formation of commons

"Risk Reduction Systems of the Internet Shop---Based on the consumer survey in Japan---" (in Japanese)

Many Internet shops have appeared, and most of the shops worry about customer acquisition. We applied the focus to consumer's perceived risk as a key to the success of the Internet shop, and considered the strategy of the shop. That is, it is thought that the Internet shop adopts an appropriate risk reduction system, and the customer can be acquired. Especially, the questionnaire survey for the consumer was executed to clarify the relation between the consumer attribute and the risk reduction system. As a result of the investigation, the following two points have become clear. First, risk reduction systems are possible to divide roughly into the offer of evaluation information and the offer of detailed information, and the consumers also were recognizing the difference of these. Secondarily, the persons who had confidence in the Internet shopping had the tendency to value detailed information more than evaluation information, and were doing "Selection of the risk reduction system". They are the lowest the perceived risk, and shop at the Internet shops frequently. It was guessed that other consumers that the confidence degree was low did not relate to the repeat purchase because the perceived risk was high. It is thought that the Internet shop should adopt the risk reduction system that people with a high confidence degree chose, in order reduce the perceived risk effectively and to expand customer.

Preparing for creative responses to “beyond assumed level” disasters: Lessons from the ICT management in the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake crisis

A survey of municipal government ICT divisions during and after the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami crisis reveals the need for creative responses to “beyond assumed level” disasters. Complexity and diversity of the damage were simply too great for any plans to assume. Resident needs toward municipal governments affected were also diverse and changed quickly as time went by. Our research also indicates that there would be ways to strengthen the capacity for effective spontaneous responses. Creative solutions executed during the 3/11 crisis were enabled by the existence of open source software available on the Net and by skilled engineers capable of exploiting them. Frugal information systems will be useful to improve preparedness for creative responses in the future.</jats:p

The Role of Networked Narratives in Amplifying or Mitigating Intergroup Prejudice: A YouTube Case Study

This purpose of this research is to understand the role of networked narratives in social media in modulating viewer prejudice toward ethnic neighborhoods. We designed experimental videos on YouTube based on intergroup contact theory and narrative frameworks aimed at (1) gaining knowledge, (2) reducing anxiety, and (3) fostering empathy. Despite consistent storytelling across the videos, we observed significant variations in viewer emotions, especially in replies to comments. We hypothesized that these discrepancies could be explained by the influence of the surrounding digital network on the narrative&rsquo;s reception. Two-stage research was conducted to understand this phenomenon. First, automated emotion analysis on user comments was conducted to identify the varying emotions. Then, we explored contextual factors surrounding each video on YouTube, focusing on algorithmic curation inferred from traffic sources, region, and search keywords. Findings revealed that negative algorithmic curation and user interactivity result in overall negative viewer emotion, largely driven by video placement and recommendations. However, videos with higher traffic originating from viewers who had watched the storyteller&rsquo;s other videos result in more positive sentiments and longer visits. This suggests that consistent exposure within the channel can foster more positive acceptance of cultural outgroups by building trust and reducing anxiety. There is the need, then, for storytellers to curate discussions to mitigate prejudice in digital contexts