UK Millennials’’ purchase intentions: what factors are influencing their adoption of mobile Apps shopping

The purpose of this paper is to understand the factors that serve as motivation and deterrents for UK Millennials’ intention to purchase via mobile phones from retails’ Applications. A total of 213 completed and valid questionnaires were collected and data were analysed by Exploratory Factor Analysis and confirmatory factor analysis. Furthermore, Structural Equation Modelling of AMOS graphics was used to identify the effect and relationship of independent variables on their dependent variables in this study. The findings of this research indicated that discomfort, insecurity, optimism, perceived ease of use determine UK Millennials’ use of Mobile applications shopping. Moreover, the outcome showed a significant influence of discomfort and optimism on perceived ease of use of M-shopping and a negative causal relationship between insecurity and use of mobile phones for online shopping. The study also confirmed that perceived ease of use mobile application impacts the purchase intention of young consumers. A limited number of studies have discussed the factors influencing the adoption process of Mobile applications shopping and purchase intention focusing on Millennials in the United Kingdom. Therefore, this research fills in the research gap and explores the factors that influence Millennials to use mobile applications to purchase products online, and to understand how the change in new technology has changed their buying behaviour

Factors that influence the successful adoption of m-Commerce via SIM-enabled devices in Nigeria

This research sought to identify the factors that influence m-Commerce adoption by micro and small businesses in Nigeria. However, considering that different categories of these businesses are likely to be influenced by different set of factors, depending on their level of exposure and adoption of m-Commerce, a stage model was designed. This stage model provided a prototype of the progression of m-Commerce adoption by micro and small businesses in Nigeria. Through the analysis of data collected from semi-structured interviews and questionnaires, the stage model was confirmed. Also, unique factors that influence m-Commerce adoption by micro and small businesses in Nigeria were identified such as: Nigeria’s mobile phone culture, the Central Bank of Nigeria’s regulatory cashless policy, Nigeria’s ostentatious culture, and cultural emphasis on physical contact in the conduct of business activities. Within the thesis, recommendations for leveraging the presence of the identified factors were discussed. These recommendations include creating awareness of security features among customers and introduction of regulatory policies that can support increased adoption of m-Commerce such as money back guarantee. Theoretical implications of the research include contributing to the debate on the divide between m-Commerce and e-Commerce, providing an update to existing literature on m-Commerce adoption factors and presenting a stage model that can guide business adoption of m-Commerce. Practical implications of the research include highlighting opportunities to create additional sources of revenue for businesses, strategies towards optimising business processes, increasing brand or business awareness and inspiring customer loyalty. Practical steps towards leveraging Nigeria’s unique socio-cultural factors were highlighted including the use of Pay on Delivery service. Although this study focused on micro and small businesses in Nigeria, findings from the study may be generalised to countries that have similar socio-cultural contexts such as Pakistan and India

A unified approach to the development and usage of mobile agents

Mobile agents are an interesting approach to the development of distributed systems. By moving freely accross the network, they allow for the distribution of computation as well as gathering and filtering of information in an autonomous way. Over the last decade, the agent research community has decidedly achieved tremendous results. However, the community was not able to provide easy to use toolkits to make this paradigm available to a broader audience. By embracing simplicity during the creation of a formal model and a reference implementation to create and execute instances of that model, our aim is to enable a wide audience – even non-experts – to create, adapt and use mobile agents. The proposed model allows for the creation of agents by combining atomic, self-contained building blocks and we provide an approachable, easy to use graphical editor for the creation of model instances. In two evaluations, we could reinforce our believes that, with the achieved results, we could reach our aims

Design and Optimization of Mobile Cloud Computing Systems with Networked Virtual Platforms

A Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC) system is a cloud-based system that is accessed by the users through their own mobile devices. MCC systems are emerging as the product of two technology trends: 1) the migration of personal computing from desktop to mobile devices and 2) the growing integration of large-scale computing environments into cloud systems. Designers are developing a variety of new mobile cloud computing systems. Each of these systems is developed with different goals and under the influence of different design constraints, such as high network latency or limited energy supply. The current MCC systems rely heavily on Computation Offloading, which however incurs new problems such as scalability of the cloud, privacy concerns due to storing personal information on the cloud, and high energy consumption on the cloud data centers. In this dissertation, I address these problems by exploring different options in the distribution of computation across different computing nodes in MCC systems. My thesis is that "the use of design and simulation tools optimized for design space exploration of the MCC systems is the key to optimize the distribution of computation in MCC." For a quantitative analysis of mobile cloud computing systems through design space exploration, I have developed netShip, the first generation of an innovative design and simulation tool, that offers large scalability and heterogeneity support. With this tool system designers and software programmers can efficiently develop, optimize, and validate large-scale, heterogeneous MCC systems. I have enhanced netShip to support the development of ever-evolving MCC applications with a variety of emerging needs including the fast simulation of new devices, e.g., Internet-of-Things devices, and accelerators, e.g., mobile GPUs. Leveraging netShip, I developed three new MCC systems where I applied three variations of a new computation distributing technique, called Reverse Offloading. By more actively leveraging the computational power on mobile devices, the MCC systems can reduce the total execution times, the burden of concentrated computations on the cloud, and the privacy concerns about storing personal information available in the cloud. This approach also creates opportunities for new services by utilizing the information available on the mobile device instead of accessing the cloud. Throughout my research I have enabled the design optimization of mobile applications and cloud-computing platforms. In particular, my design tool for MCC systems becomes a vehicle to optimize not only the performance but also the energy dissipation, an aspect of critical importance for any computing system