A New Account of Personalization and Effective Communication

To contribute to understanding of information economies of daily life, this paper explores over the past millennium given names of a large number of persons. Analysts have long both condemned and praised mass media as a source of common culture, national unity, or shared symbolic experiences. Names, however, indicate a large decline in shared symbolic experience over the past two centuries, a decline that the growth of mass media does not appear to have affected significantly. Study of names also shows that action and personal relationships, along with time horizon, are central aspects of effective communication across a large population. The observed preference for personalization over the past two centuries and the importance of action and personal relationships to effective communication are aspects of information economies that are likely to have continuing significance for industry developments, economic statistics, and public policy

Consumer Culture and Purchase Intentions towards Fashion Apparel

This study examines the effectiveness of different fashion marketing strategies and analyzes of the consumer behavior in a cross-section of demographic settings in reference to fashion apparel retailing. This paper also discusses the marketing competencies of fashion apparel brands and retailers in reference to brand image, promotions, and externalmarket knowledge. The study examines the determinants of consumer behavior and their impact on purchase intentions towards fashion apparel. The results reveal that sociocultural and personality related factors induce the purchase intentions among consumers. One of the contributions that this research extends is the debate about the converging economic, cognitive and brand related factors to induce purchase intentions. Fashion loving consumers typically patronage multi-channel retail outlets, designer brands, and invest time and cost towards an advantageous product search. The results of the study show a positive effect of store and brand preferences on developing purchase intentions for fashion apparel among consumers.Consumer behavior, purchase intention, socio-cultural values, designer brands, store brands, fashion apparel, brand promotion, personalization, fashion retailing, psychographic drivers

A management system to personalize notifications in the TV ecosystem

This article presents a prototype to generate, schedule, and monitor personalized notifications for the TV ecosystem, which encompasses the television, connected devices, and personal mobile devices. Based on the identification of guidelines and usage scenarios in the literature and the collection of empirical data through focus groups, were systematized settings for the notifications according to the type of event/content to be notified. The settings include the sending moments and triggers on the TV set-top box (STB), as well as users’ responses to the notifications, like changing the channel, going to an app, or asking to repeat the reminder. The prototype, which will be tested in the laboratory with experts and field tests with users, is part of an R&D project in partnership with a Portuguese IPTV provider, to possibly integrate this feature into their service.publishe

Epidemic Information Diffusion: A Simple Solution to Support Community-based Recommendations in P2P Overlays

Epidemic protocols proved to be very efficient solutions for supporting dynamic and complex information diffusion in highly dis- tributed computing infrastructures, like P2P environments. They are useful bricks for building and maintaining virtual network topologies, in the form of overlay networks as well as to support pervasive diffusion of information when it is injected into the network. This paper proposes a simple architecture exploiting the features of epidemic approaches to foster a collaborative percolation of information between computing nodes belonging to the network aimed at building a system that groups similar users and spread useful information among them.Comment: 8 pages, 2 figure

Exploration of audiovisual heritage using audio indexing technology

This paper discusses audio indexing tools that have been implemented for the disclosure of Dutch audiovisual cultural heritage collections. It explains the role of language models and their adaptation to historical settings and the adaptation of acoustic models for homogeneous audio collections. In addition to the benefits of cross-media linking, the requirements for successful tuning and improvement of available tools for indexing the heterogeneous A/V collections from the cultural heritage domain are reviewed. And finally the paper argues that research is needed to cope with the varying information needs for different types of users

A New Account of Personalization and Effective Communication

To contribute to understanding of information economies of daily life, this paper explores over the past millennium given names of a large number of persons. Analysts have long both condemned and praised mass media as a source of common culture, national unity, or shared symbolic experiences. Names, however, indicate a large decline in shared symbolic experience over the past two centuries, a decline that the growth of mass media does not appear to have affected significantly. Study of names also shows that action and personal relationships, along with time horizon, are central aspects of effective communication across a large population. The observed preference for personalization over the past two centuries and the importance of action and personal relationships to effective communication are aspects of information economies that are likely to have continuing significance for industry developments, economic statistics, and public policy.new economy, information economy, personalization, mass media, communication, regulation, information theory, Industrial Revolution

CHORUS Deliverable 2.2: Second report - identification of multi-disciplinary key issues for gap analysis toward EU multimedia search engines roadmap

After addressing the state-of-the-art during the first year of Chorus and establishing the existing landscape in multimedia search engines, we have identified and analyzed gaps within European research effort during our second year. In this period we focused on three directions, notably technological issues, user-centred issues and use-cases and socio- economic and legal aspects. These were assessed by two central studies: firstly, a concerted vision of functional breakdown of generic multimedia search engine, and secondly, a representative use-cases descriptions with the related discussion on requirement for technological challenges. Both studies have been carried out in cooperation and consultation with the community at large through EC concertation meetings (multimedia search engines cluster), several meetings with our Think-Tank, presentations in international conferences, and surveys addressed to EU projects coordinators as well as National initiatives coordinators. Based on the obtained feedback we identified two types of gaps, namely core technological gaps that involve research challenges, and “enablers”, which are not necessarily technical research challenges, but have impact on innovation progress. New socio-economic trends are presented as well as emerging legal challenges

Converged Digital TV Services: The Role of Middleware and Future Directions of Interactive Television

The migration from analog to digital of the broadcasting technologies, already well consolidated for satellite systems, is becoming a reality also for terrestrial transmission. Digital Terrestrial Television (DTT) is also evolving to offer interactive services and a degree of flexibility which can be exploited to offer tailored applications to users which include, for instance interactivity, different levels of personalization, and innovative location-based, as well as context-aware, services. A clear example of this trend is given by the rising success of the Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) which allows for a degree of flexibility on offered services unknown to the traditional broadcasting systems. In this framework, several satellite operators are starting to launch IPTV services using direct satellite links, as well as some terrestrial internet service providers are offering digital TV channels embedded in the IP streaming over XDSL. Furthermore, IPTV services are likely to be broadcast also wirelessly, exploiting advanced broadband access technologies such asWiMAX, LTE, or LTEA. Last, but not least, TV and broadcast services for mobile users have also been deployed in many countries using DVBH and will be soon available on an even broader scale thanks to its satellite counterpart, DVB-SH. In the near future, a set of different technologies able to offer personalized and customized services to different classes of users are expected in the area of wireless broadcasting and convergence of technologies is auspicious. This concept entails different levels of convergence, namely, at terminal level (one device fits all), at service level (convergence of traditional fixed, mobile, and broadcast services), and at transport and network level with a common and standardized set of protocols and at access layer thanks to the harmonic coexistence of different radio technologies. This special issue aims to capture the state-of-the-art research work concerning the integration of DTT/Satellite/IPTV systems for the broadcasting of multimedia and interactive services