Mobile communities: How viable are their business models? An exemplary investigation of the leisure industry

Communities (especially Virtual Communities) of Interest have been the focus of substantial discussion in academic literature. This paper addresses Communities of Interest within the leisure industry and discusses possible business models for the parties operating the platform. The described community platform is an innovative value added service concept for a mobile coordination support for individuals—A Mobile Community Support System. In this paper we extend the discussion about mobile communities to hybrid communities. The communities are hybrid in two ways: they use two different access channels, the Web and mobile devices, and they are built on real-world leisure communities that constitute themselves in the form of buddy lists in the virtual world of an ICT supported platform. We briefly depict the state of the art of IT in the leisure industry and describe the empirical aspects of the project objectives of the MCOR (Mobile Community Online Reservation) system. We conclude with some final remarks about design considerations and a blueprint for future researc

Business Models for the Public WLAN Market

WLAN is a radical technology, enabling new ways to provide mobile access. A number of established and new companies have entered the mobile market with new business models. It is yet not clear how these new business models affect the mobile industry and which of them will really succeed. In our article, we introduce a new framework to support the development of new business models driven by new and radical technologies and apply it to the WLAN technology