Cell me the money: unlocking the value in the mobile payment ecosystem

This report examines the challenges and benefits of mobile commerce in the United States. The report is based on a survey of senior executives from the mobile payment value chain. Survey results shed light on the key barriers that have traditionally challenged the mobile payment market in the United States, including the lack of revenue-sharing agreements, a dearth of consumer knowledge, low levels of demand and competing platforms in a fragmented market. Getting ahead of the curve will require companies to develop mutually beneficial business models and take advantage of further innovations made on the mobile platform. Ultimately, mobile carriers and financial institutions must come to the table and sacrifice in the short-term to create an opportunity to win big down the road

An adaptive architecture for presenting interactive media onto distributed interfaces

This paper introduces an adaptive architecture for presenting interactive timed media onto distributed networked devices. The architecture is put into the test in a storytelling application for children. The interactive story is documented in StoryML, an XML-based language, and presented to multiple interface devices organized in an agent-based architecture. This allows the separation of the content from concrete physical devices, the definition of abstract media objects and the automatic adaptation of the same content to different environments of physical devices. Since both the content and the interaction are timed, issues of streaming and synchronization in this architecture are also addressed.</p

Symmetric Synchronous Collaborative Navigation

Synchronous collaborative navigation is a form of social navigation where users virtually share a web browser. In this paper, we present a symmetric, proxy-based architecture where each user can take the lead and guide others in visiting web sites, without the need for a special browser or other software. We show how we have applied this scheme to a problem-solving-oriented e-learning system

The apparatus of digital archaeology

Digital Archaeology is predicated upon an ever-changing set of apparatuses – technological, methodological, software, hardware, material, immaterial – which in their own ways and to varying degrees shape the nature of Digital Archaeology. Our attention, however, is perhaps inevitably more closely focussed on research questions, choice of data, and the kinds of analyses and outputs. In the process we tend to overlook the effects the tools themselves have on the archaeology we do beyond the immediate consequences of the digital. This paper introduces cognitive artefacts as a means of addressing the apparatus more directly within the context of the developing archaeological digital ecosystem. It argues that a critical appreciation of our computational cognitive artefacts is key to understanding their effects on both our own cognition and on the creation of archaeological knowledge. In the process, it defines a form of cognitive digital archaeology in terms of four distinct methods for extracting cognition from the digital apparatus layer by layer

Internet Predictions

More than a dozen leading experts give their opinions on where the Internet is headed and where it will be in the next decade in terms of technology, policy, and applications. They cover topics ranging from the Internet of Things to climate change to the digital storage of the future. A summary of the articles is available in the Web extras section

A real-time networked camera system:a scheduled distributed camera system reduces the latency

This report presents the results of a Real-time Networked Camera System, com-missioned by the SAN Group in TU/e. Distributed Systems are motivated by two reasons, the first reason is the physical environment as a requirement and the second reason is to provide a better Quality of Service (QoS). This project describes the distributed system with a video processing application. The aim is to deal with the distributed system as one system thus minimizing delays while keeping the predictability in a real-time context. Time is the most crucial ingredient for the real-time systems in the sense that the tasks within the application should meet with the task deadline. With respect to the distributed system we need to consider a couple of issues. The first one is to have a distributed system and a modular application that is mapped to multiple system nodes. The second issue is to schedule the modules collectively and the third is to propose a solution when shared resource(s) (such as the network) are required by several nodes at the same time. In order to provide a distributed system, we connect 2 cameras with 1 PC via a network switch. Video processing has two parts; the first part consists of creating a frame, encoding the frame, and streaming it to the network and the second part deals with receiving the frame, decoding the frame, and displaying the frame. The first part is running on the cameras and the second part is running on the PC. In order to give real-time behavior to the system, the system components should provide the real-time behavior. The camera is installed with the µC/OS-II (Open Source Real-time Kernel). We investigated the Real-time Operating System and its installation on the PC. In order to provide resource management to the shared resources, we designed and implemented Admission control which controls access to the required con-nection to the PC. We designed and implemented a component to delay the start of any of the cameras in order to synchronize the network utilization. We also designed an enforcement component to allow the tasks to run as much as they should and monitor the frames streamed to the network. The results show that with the Admission Control, cameras only send as many frames as the network can transport. The given start delay to the system shows that overlap can be prevented, but we could not evaluate it because of the semi-tested/unreleased code which is provided by the camera providers. The source code we used is the test source code which was not mature