Towards an audiovisual media services directive: an analysis of the Commission's proposal. Egmont European Affairs Publication, 2006

The current “Television without frontiers” (TVWF) Directive constitutes the basic regulation of the European Community’s broadcasting policy. Adopted in 1989, the Directive provides for the free movement of television broadcasting services in the Union as it requires Member States to guarantee the freedom of reception and transmission on their territory of television programmes which originate from other Member States. Consequently, the Directive harmonized certain national programming and advertising rules. With the aim of protecting the European TV market, it also introduced broadcasting quota for European and independent works. In the light of the rapid developments in the television sector, a revision of the Directive took place in 1997. Since 2002, the Commission is engaged in a new revision process in order to modernise the rules on televised services. It has also examined the possibility to extend the scope of these rules to cover all services which have an audiovisual content, including new media services delivered by Internet, email, mobile communication, etc. On 13 December 2005, the Commission eventually adopted the legislative proposal for the revision of the Directive. The aim of this paper is to analyse the Commission’s strategy in reviewing the regulatory framework. First, we will shortly discuss and evaluate the underlying principles of the present Directive. We will subsequently take a look at the elements which require a revision of the Directive. Third, we will examine the Commission’s proposal and we will conclude with some critical comments

Spending time with money: from shared values to social connectivity

This article has been made available through the Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund.There is a rapidly growing momentum driving the development of mobile payment systems for co-present interactions, using near-field communication on smartphones and contactless payment systems. The design (and marketing) imperative for this is to enable faster, simpler, effortless and secure transactions, yet our evidence shows that this focus on reducing transactional friction may ignore other important features around making payments. We draw from empirical data to consider user interactions around financial exchanges made on mobile phones. Our findings examine how the practices around making payments support people in making connections, to other people, to their communities, to the places they move through, to their environment, and to what they consume. While these social and community bonds shape the kinds of interactions that become possible, they also shape how users feel about, and act on, the values that they hold with their co-users. We draw implications for future payment systems that make use of community connections, build trust, leverage transactional latency, and generate opportunities for rich social interactions

Research on the Application of E-commerce to Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs): the Case of India

SMEs account for a large proportion and play an important role in the development of each country in the world, including India. The globalization will bring many advantages for enterprises however SMEs will face fierce competition at the local, national and International level. In order to maintain and promote the important role of SMEs in the context of increased competition, SMEs have to change and adopt new technologies. E-commerce and digital technologies are bringing opportunities to help SMEs improve their competitiveness, narrow the gap with big enterprises thanks to their fairness and flexibility of the digital business environment.       According to UNIDO (2017), India is one of the countries successfully applying e-commerce to SMEs. Contributing to this success is the important role of the Indian government. Therefore, this paper focuses on researching the application of e-commerce to SMEs in terms of the role of government in promoting and creating an ecosystem for SMEs and e-commerce development

Spaceprint: a Mobility-based Fingerprinting Scheme for Public Spaces

In this paper, we address the problem of how automated situation-awareness can be achieved by learning real-world situations from ubiquitously generated mobility data. Without semantic input about the time and space where situations take place, this turns out to be a fundamental challenging problem. Uncertainties also introduce technical challenges when data is generated in irregular time intervals, being mixed with noise, and errors. Purely relying on temporal patterns observable in mobility data, in this paper, we propose Spaceprint, a fully automated algorithm for finding the repetitive pattern of similar situations in spaces. We evaluate this technique by showing how the latent variables describing the category, and the actual identity of a space can be discovered from the extracted situation patterns. Doing so, we use different real-world mobility datasets with data about the presence of mobile entities in a variety of spaces. We also evaluate the performance of this technique by showing its robustness against uncertainties

PREDICTING BUYERS’ REPURCHASE INTENTIONS IN CROSS-BORDER E-COMMERCE: A VALENCE FRAMEWORK PERSPECTIVE

Cross-border e-commerce has become an important channel for promoting international trade. Yet, the factors influencing buyer behavior in cross-border e-commerce have received relatively less research attention than in domestic e-commerce settings. In this paper we draw on the valence framework to develop and test a research model of buyer repeat purchase intentions in cross-border e-commerce. We hypothesized the effects of positive valences (value, monetary saving, convenience and product offerings) along with negative valences (product and transaction-based uncertainties) on repeat purchase intention. Data was collected from users of a popular cross-border e-commerce provider in China. Results (n=169) revealed that positive valences exert the strongest effects on repeat purchase intention, but negative valences are also significant. These include product-based uncertainties and transaction-based uncertainties. Our model explained 69% of the variance in repeat purchase intentions in a cross-border e-commerce platform. Results enhance our understanding of cross-border e-commerce and have important implications for online providers competing in international markets