Understanding the Effect of Tie Strength on Continuance Intention of Second-Generation Mobile Instant Messaging Services

Facilitated by the widespread adoption of smartphones, applications (apps) on smartphones such as WeChat and WhatsApp have seen rapid and explosive growth. These apps are generally referred to as second-generation mobile instant messaging (SMIM) services. Unlike first-generation mobile instant messaging (FMIM) services (e.g. Short Message Service), SMIM services typically support multimedia contents and are embedded within social networks, which may have a bearing on the post-adoption behaviour of users in particular. However, prior studies on the post-adoption usage of SMIM services have a limited understanding of the effects of social network. Network tie strength, as a configuration of social network, has an important impact on users in SMIM services. In order to explore the effects of social network on users’ continued usage intention in SMIM services, we propose and empirically test an integrated model by identifying the antecedents such as tie strength, satisfaction, and perceived critical mass. This study contributes to existing IS post-adoption literature by understanding and capturing the role of social network (i.e. tie strength) in SMIM services. Implications for theory and practice are discussed

SPS: an SMS-based Push Service for Energy Saving in Smartphone\u27s Idle State

Despite of all the advances in smartphone technology in recent years, smartphones still remain limited by their battery life. Unlike other power hungry components in the smartphone, the cellular data and Wi-Fi interfaces often continue to be used even while the phone is in the idle state to accommodate unnecessary data traffic produced by some applications. In addition, bad reception has been proven to greatly increase energy consumed by the radio, which happens quite often when smartphone users are inside buildings. In this paper, we present a Short message service Push based Service (SPS) to save unnecessary power consumption when smartphones are in idle state, especially in bad reception areas. First, SPS disables a smartphone\u27s data interfaces whenever the phone is in idle state. Second, to preserve the real-time notification functionality required by some apps, such as new email arrivals and social media updates, when a notification is needed, a wakeup text message will be received by the phone, and then SPS enables the phone\u27s data interfaces to connect to the corresponding server to retrieve notification data via the normal data network. Once the notification data has been retrieved, SPS will disable the data interfaces again if the phone is still in idle state. We have developed a complete prototype for Android smartphones. Our experiments show that SPS consumes less energy than the current approach. In areas with bad reception, the SPS prototype can double the battery life of a smartphone