The Revolution of Mobile Phone-Enabled Services for Agricultural Development (m-Agri Services) in Africa: The Challenges for Sustainability

The provision of information through mobile phone-enabled agricultural information services (m-Agri services) has the potential to revolutionise agriculture and significantly improve smallholder farmers’ livelihoods in Africa. Globally, the benefits of m-Agri services include facilitating farmers’ access to financial services and sourcing agricultural information about input use, practices, and market prices. There are very few published literature sources that focus on the potential benefits of m-Agri services in Africa and none of which explore their sustainability. This study, therefore, explores the evolution, provision, and sustainability of these m-Agri services in Africa. An overview of the current landscape of m-Agri services in Africa is provided and this illustrates how varied these services are in design, content, and quality. Key findings from the exploratory literature review reveal that services are highly likely to fail to achieve their intended purpose or be abandoned when implementers ignore the literacy, skills, culture, and demands of the target users. This study recommends that, to enhance the sustainability of m-Agri services, the implementers need to design the services with the users involved, carefully analyse, and understand the target environment, and design for scale and a long-term purpose. While privacy and security of users need to be ensured, the reuse or improvement of existing initiatives should be explored, and projects need to be data-driven and maintained as open source. Thus, the study concludes that policymakers can support the long-term benefit of m-Agri services by ensuring favourable policies for both users and implementers

Addressing the cyber safety challenge: from risk to resilience

Addressing the cyber safety challenge: from risk to resilience describes the cyber safety issues emerging from a range of technology trends, how different populations are using technologies and the risks they face, and how we can effectively respond to each group’s unique cyber safety needs. Written by the University of Western Sydney for Telstra Corporation Ltd, the report advocates for continuing to move cyber safety from a ‘risk and protection’ framework to one that focuses on building digital resilience, as well as fostering trust and confidence in the online environment. To do this we need to: Address the needs of populations often neglected by current policies and programs – including adults, seniors, parents, and small to medium enterprises Continue to build the digital literacy skills of all populations, because digital literacy strongly influences users’ ability to engage safely online – this is best achieved by a hands-on learning approach Keep risk in perspective – the risks and benefits of digital participation go hand in hand Broaden the focus from awareness-raising to long-term behaviour change. As digital technologies become further integrated into the everyday lives of Australians, users are potentially exposed to greater risks. However, the risks and benefits of digital participation go hand in hand. The challenge, therefore, is to support users to minimise the risks without limiting their digital participation and their capacity to derive the full benefits of connectivity. If Australians are to benefit as either consumers or providers of online services and products in the e-commerce environment, consumer safety and trust need to be improved. Cyber safety needs to be considered against a transforming backdrop of technology trends, products and practices. While the rise of social media has tended to dominate recent debate and developments in cyber safety, particularly in relation to young people, a range of other trends is also shaping how users engage online, the risks they potentially face in the new media landscape, and the strategies used to address them. These trends include the rise of user generated content and content sharing platforms; the uptake of mobile technologies and, in particular, the adoption of smartphones; cloud computing; platform integration and single sign-on mechanisms; and the rise of GPS and location based services

Secure Vehicular Communication Systems: Implementation, Performance, and Research Challenges

Vehicular Communication (VC) systems are on the verge of practical deployment. Nonetheless, their security and privacy protection is one of the problems that have been addressed only recently. In order to show the feasibility of secure VC, certain implementations are required. In [1] we discuss the design of a VC security system that has emerged as a result of the European SeVeCom project. In this second paper, we discuss various issues related to the implementation and deployment aspects of secure VC systems. Moreover, we provide an outlook on open security research issues that will arise as VC systems develop from today's simple prototypes to full-fledged systems

The Next Paradigm Shift in the Mobile Ecosystem: Mobile Social Computing and the Increasing Relevance of Users

Social computing has become the paradigm for the increasingly relevant role of users in the Internet world. In this paper, it is argued that mobile social computing will eventually cause an even bigger impact in the mobile ecosystem. We are already at the beginning of the "transference" of a significant part of Internet social computing usage to the mobile domain, where users are no longer passive consumers of content andapplications, but co-creators and even innovators of them. However, mobile social computing will go one step further in the contribution to the development of the mobile ecosystem, since it will put the many situations of users' daily activities at the centre stage. To prove this case, this paper gathers available data and evidence on the patterns of mobile social computing usage and discusses user innovation and user empowerment in the framework of the current mobile ecosystem.Mobile social computing, user innovation, mobile ecosystem.