Open-source Branding: How consumers develop a Corporate Brand Image through Instagram- An Exploratory Single-Case Study

Title: Open-source Branding: How consumers develop a Corporate Brand Image through Instagram- An Exploratory Single-Case Study. Research problem: The research problem originates from the shifted power balance through the rise of social media. Whereby, organizational control of the brand image is starting to fade. Thus, further research is needed, whether an open-source branding strategy truly affects consumers’ perceptions of a brand. Thesis purpose: The purpose of this research is to analyze how consumers experience a brand through social media and what implications the interaction between consumer-consumers and consumer-brands have on the company's brand image. By mediating and illuminating the importance of involving the consumers into the ‘open-source’ branding process on social media, through the concept of co-creation of value. Theoretical framework: The framework consists of three interrelated concepts, open-source branding, co-creation and brand image. Methodology: The research emphasizes an exploratory single-case study with a qualitative and multisided approach, consisting of semi-structured in-depth interviews with one IKEA representative as key informant and seven consumer interviews. In addition, a virtual observation on the focal channel of Instagram has been conducted. Findings: The main findings gathered underline the evolvement of IKEA’s brand image from a consumer perceptive. From a company perspective, the open-source paradigm has been enhanced, in greater extent.Title: Open-source Branding: How consumers develop a Corporate Brand Image through Instagram- An Exploratory Single-Case Study. Research problem: The research problem originates from the shifted power balance through the rise of social media. Whereby, organizational control of the brand image is starting to fade. Thus, further research is needed, whether an open-source branding strategy truly affects consumers’ perceptions of a brand. Thesis purpose: The purpose of this research is to analyze how consumers experience a brand through social media and what implications the interaction between consumer-consumers and consumer-brands have on the company's brand image. By mediating and illuminating the importance of involving the consumers into the ‘open-source’ branding process on social media, through the concept of co-creation of value. Theoretical framework: The framework consists of three interrelated concepts, open-source branding, co-creation and brand image. Methodology: The research emphasizes an exploratory single-case study with a qualitative and multisided approach, consisting of semi-structured in-depth interviews with one IKEA representative as key informant and seven consumer interviews. In addition, a virtual observation on the focal channel of Instagram has been conducted. Findings: The main findings gathered underline the evolvement of IKEA’s brand image from a consumer perceptive. From a company perspective, the open-source paradigm has been enhanced, in greater extent

A Dark Reflection of Society: Analyzing Cultural Representations of State Control in Black Mirror

Recognizing the importance of visual criminology and media studies in contemporary academic criminal justice studies, I attempt to contribute to the field by analyzing three themes found in Channel 4’s Black Mirror in relation to cultural fears of state control and the progression of technology. The themes, including state power and coercion, the spectacle of punishment, and panoptic surveillance, are placed in a popular criminological framework in order to examine the attitudes and beliefs of the culture in which they were produced and for whom they are intended. I conclude that Black Mirror provides a social commentary on the themes of state control, punishment, and surveillance, with respect to the role technology plays in extending the scope of the state’s power

Congestion Control for Network-Aware Telehaptic Communication

Telehaptic applications involve delay-sensitive multimedia communication between remote locations with distinct Quality of Service (QoS) requirements for different media components. These QoS constraints pose a variety of challenges, especially when the communication occurs over a shared network, with unknown and time-varying cross-traffic. In this work, we propose a transport layer congestion control protocol for telehaptic applications operating over shared networks, termed as dynamic packetization module (DPM). DPM is a lossless, network-aware protocol which tunes the telehaptic packetization rate based on the level of congestion in the network. To monitor the network congestion, we devise a novel network feedback module, which communicates the end-to-end delays encountered by the telehaptic packets to the respective transmitters with negligible overhead. Via extensive simulations, we show that DPM meets the QoS requirements of telehaptic applications over a wide range of network cross-traffic conditions. We also report qualitative results of a real-time telepottery experiment with several human subjects, which reveal that DPM preserves the quality of telehaptic activity even under heavily congested network scenarios. Finally, we compare the performance of DPM with several previously proposed telehaptic communication protocols and demonstrate that DPM outperforms these protocols.Comment: 25 pages, 19 figure

Multimedia delivery in the future internet

The term “Networked Media” implies that all kinds of media including text, image, 3D graphics, audio and video are produced, distributed, shared, managed and consumed on-line through various networks, like the Internet, Fiber, WiFi, WiMAX, GPRS, 3G and so on, in a convergent manner [1]. This white paper is the contribution of the Media Delivery Platform (MDP) cluster and aims to cover the Networked challenges of the Networked Media in the transition to the Future of the Internet. Internet has evolved and changed the way we work and live. End users of the Internet have been confronted with a bewildering range of media, services and applications and of technological innovations concerning media formats, wireless networks, terminal types and capabilities. And there is little evidence that the pace of this innovation is slowing. Today, over one billion of users access the Internet on regular basis, more than 100 million users have downloaded at least one (multi)media file and over 47 millions of them do so regularly, searching in more than 160 Exabytes1 of content. In the near future these numbers are expected to exponentially rise. It is expected that the Internet content will be increased by at least a factor of 6, rising to more than 990 Exabytes before 2012, fuelled mainly by the users themselves. Moreover, it is envisaged that in a near- to mid-term future, the Internet will provide the means to share and distribute (new) multimedia content and services with superior quality and striking flexibility, in a trusted and personalized way, improving citizens’ quality of life, working conditions, edutainment and safety. In this evolving environment, new transport protocols, new multimedia encoding schemes, cross-layer inthe network adaptation, machine-to-machine communication (including RFIDs), rich 3D content as well as community networks and the use of peer-to-peer (P2P) overlays are expected to generate new models of interaction and cooperation, and be able to support enhanced perceived quality-of-experience (PQoE) and innovative applications “on the move”, like virtual collaboration environments, personalised services/ media, virtual sport groups, on-line gaming, edutainment. In this context, the interaction with content combined with interactive/multimedia search capabilities across distributed repositories, opportunistic P2P networks and the dynamic adaptation to the characteristics of diverse mobile terminals are expected to contribute towards such a vision. Based on work that has taken place in a number of EC co-funded projects, in Framework Program 6 (FP6) and Framework Program 7 (FP7), a group of experts and technology visionaries have voluntarily contributed in this white paper aiming to describe the status, the state-of-the art, the challenges and the way ahead in the area of Content Aware media delivery platforms

Atrio – attribution model orchestrator

Project Work presented as the partial requirement for obtaining a Master's degree in Information Management, specialization in Information Systems and Technologies ManagementIn Digital Advertising, Attribution Modelling is used to assess the contribution of media touchpoints to the campaign outcome, by analyzing each person’s sequence of contacts and interactions with these touchpoints, designated as the Consumer Journey. The ability to acquire, model and analyze campaign data to derive meaningful insights, usually involves proprietary tools, provided by campaign delivery platforms. ATRIO is proposed as an open-sourced framework for Attribution Modelling, orchestrating the data pipeline through transformation, integration, and delivery, to provide Attribution Modelling capabilities for digital media agencies with proprietary data, who need control over the Attribution Modeling process. From a tabular dataset, ATRIO can produce simple heuristics such as last-click analysis, but also data-driven attribution models, based on Shapley’s Game Theory and Markov Chains. As opposed to the black-boxed tools offered by campaign delivery platforms, which are focused in their media channels performance, ATRIO empowers digital media agencies to customize and apply different Attribution Models for each campaign, providing an agnostic, open-source based, holistic and multi-channel analysis

Multimedia Teleservices Modelled with the OSI Application Layer Structure

This paper looks into the communications capabilities that are required by distributed multimedia applications to achieve relation preserving information exchange. These capabilities are derived by analyzing the notion of information exchange and are embodied in communications functionalities. To emphasize the importance of the users' view, a top-down approach is applied. The (revised) OSI Application Layer Structure (OSI-ALS) is used to model the communications functionalities and to develop an architecture for composition of multimedia services with these functionalities. This work may therefore be considered an exercise to evaluate the suitability of OSI-ALS for composition of multimedia teleservices