The Lifecycles of Apps in a Social Ecosystem

Apps are emerging as an important form of on-line content, and they combine aspects of Web usage in interesting ways --- they exhibit a rich temporal structure of user adoption and long-term engagement, and they exist in a broader social ecosystem that helps drive these patterns of adoption and engagement. It has been difficult, however, to study apps in their natural setting since this requires a simultaneous analysis of a large set of popular apps and the underlying social network they inhabit. In this work we address this challenge through an analysis of the collection of apps on Facebook Login, developing a novel framework for analyzing both temporal and social properties. At the temporal level, we develop a retention model that represents a user's tendency to return to an app using a very small parameter set. At the social level, we organize the space of apps along two fundamental axes --- popularity and sociality --- and we show how a user's probability of adopting an app depends both on properties of the local network structure and on the match between the user's attributes, his or her friends' attributes, and the dominant attributes within the app's user population. We also develop models that show the importance of different feature sets with strong performance in predicting app success.Comment: 11 pages, 10 figures, 3 tables, International World Wide Web Conferenc

The Lifecycle and Cascade of WeChat Social Messaging Groups

Social instant messaging services are emerging as a transformative form with which people connect, communicate with friends in their daily life - they catalyze the formation of social groups, and they bring people stronger sense of community and connection. However, research community still knows little about the formation and evolution of groups in the context of social messaging - their lifecycles, the change in their underlying structures over time, and the diffusion processes by which they develop new members. In this paper, we analyze the daily usage logs from WeChat group messaging platform - the largest standalone messaging communication service in China - with the goal of understanding the processes by which social messaging groups come together, grow new members, and evolve over time. Specifically, we discover a strong dichotomy among groups in terms of their lifecycle, and develop a separability model by taking into account a broad range of group-level features, showing that long-term and short-term groups are inherently distinct. We also found that the lifecycle of messaging groups is largely dependent on their social roles and functions in users' daily social experiences and specific purposes. Given the strong separability between the long-term and short-term groups, we further address the problem concerning the early prediction of successful communities. In addition to modeling the growth and evolution from group-level perspective, we investigate the individual-level attributes of group members and study the diffusion process by which groups gain new members. By considering members' historical engagement behavior as well as the local social network structure that they embedded in, we develop a membership cascade model and demonstrate the effectiveness by achieving AUC of 95.31% in predicting inviter, and an AUC of 98.66% in predicting invitee.Comment: 10 pages, 8 figures, to appear in proceedings of the 25th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW 2016

Information Technology Platforms: Definition and Research Directions

The concept of an information technology (IT) related platform is broad and covers phenomena ranging from the operating system Linux to the Internet. Such platforms are of increasing importance to innovation and value creation across many facets of industry and daily life. There is, however, a lack of common understanding in both research and industry about what is mean by the term platform when related to IT. This lack of consensus is detrimental to research and knowledge development. Thus, the aims of this study are to: (i) provide a sound definition of the IT-platform concept by identifying its distinguishing dimensions; and (ii) identify important current research directions for the IT-platform concept. To achieve these aims a systematic literature review was undertaken with 133 relevant articles taken from major information systems journals, conferences, and business publications. The study contributes by providing a sound base for future research into IT-platforms.Comment: Research-in-progress ISBN# 978-0-646-95337-3 Presented at the Australasian Conference on Information Systems 2015 (arXiv:1605.01032

Understanding business ecosystem using a 6C framework in Internet-of-Things-based sectors

With fast development and application, the Internet of Things (IoT) brings more opportunities to business. This research aims to investigate how IoT could lead to a co-evolving business ecosystem rather than a supply chain. It develops the 6C framework to analyze the data collected from case companies, and identifies three patterns of IoT-based business ecosystem. It also provides a summary of practical implications to guide practitioners building an IoT-based business ecosystem

Challenges and Founding Pillars for a Manufacturing Platform to Support Value Networks Operating in a Circular Economy Framework

This research received no external funding. Publisher Copyright: © 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.Circularity is clearly a competitive advantage and a market opportunity for European industries. From this perspective, while digitalization is largely recognized as an accelerator and an enabler of Circular Economy, the fact that European industry is strong but fragmented (highly special-ized medium-and small-sized companies have different needs and different tools) naturally results in the proliferation of commercial platforms for digitalized manufacturing. If such fragmentation is not properly addressed, it will eventually become a threat to European competitiveness. Despite some examples, value networks still do not operate in a seamless, transparent, and effective way. This paper addresses the challenges and the resulting technical funding pillars for an IDS (International Data Space) manufacturing platform meant to empower a fully digital circular thread of products and services.publishersversionpublishe

A survey of app store analysis for software engineering

App Store Analysis studies information about applications obtained from app stores. App stores provide a wealth of information derived from users that would not exist had the applications been distributed via previous software deployment methods. App Store Analysis combines this non-technical information with technical information to learn trends and behaviours within these forms of software repositories. Findings from App Store Analysis have a direct and actionable impact on the software teams that develop software for app stores, and have led to techniques for requirements engineering, release planning, software design, security and testing. This survey describes and compares the areas of research that have been explored thus far, drawing out common aspects, trends and directions future research should take to address open problems and challenges

E-Leadership in small and medium-sized enterprises in the developing world

Small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) play an important role in the economies of many developing countries. A critical challenge faced by SME leaders, as digitization continues, is how to adopt digital technologies to create value and enable faster product commercialization. There is a paucity of empirical research examining how e-leadership in SMEs drives technology and new product commercialization processes in the developing world. In this study, we have broadened the notion of what constitutes e-leadership, from the perspective of how advanced information technologies affect the leadership dynamic and the appropriation of advanced information technologies. Although there have been several studies on leading technologies in developed countries, we focus on developing an e-leadership framework for SMEs in developing economies. Using this framework and five selection criteria, we conducted 11 interviews with a sample of successful SMEs selected from a pool of 2,240 firms in the city of Johannesburg, South Africa. We conclude by highlighting the five key findings of this study, which explain how SMEs can develop effective e-leadership to foster commercialization and improve firm performance

The business and dynamics of free-to-play social-casual game apps

Thesis (S.M. in Engineering and Management)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Engineering Systems Division, 2012.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 95-100).The rapid growth of social media platforms, specifically Facebook, has caused startup firms to develop new business models based on social technologies. By leveraging the Facebook platform, new entertainment companies making free-to-play social-casual games have created a multi-billion dollar market for virtual goods, a revenue model in which the core product is given away for free and ancillary goods are sold on top of it. Zynga, the most successful firm in this space, held the largest initial public offering for an Internet-based company since Google in 2004. However, concerns about Zynga's longevity (as well as the longevity of other social-oriented firms, including Groupon) persist for a variety of reasons, including the novelty of its business model, the dependence on hit products with short lifecycles, and the stress placed on internal development teams. This thesis analyzes some of the key problems faced by Zynga and its competitors, including how to monetize free products, how to maintain a user base over time (using platform strategy concepts), and how to develop short and long-term product management and new product development policies (using System Dynamics). An additional chapter develops principles for launching social platforms and products by comparing and contrasting key factors that influenced the growth of five major social media websites. The principles are then discussed as they pertain to Zynga and social-casual gaming, in which case there are notable applications and key exceptions based on Zynga's circumstances. The thesis concludes by discussing several future areas of research that pertain to the socialization of products and technology.by Thomas Hughes Speller, III.S.M.in Engineering and Managemen