Consumer Value of Context Aware and Location Based Mobile Services

Context aware services have the ability to utilize information about the user’s context to adapt services to the user’s current situation and needs. In this paper we consider users’ perceptions of the added value of location awareness and presence information in mobile services. We use an experimental design, where stimuli comprising specific bundles of mobile services were presented to groups of respondents. The stimuli showed increasing, manipulated, levels of contextawareness, including location of the user and location and availability of buddies as distinct levels. Our results indicate that simply adding context aware features to mobile services does not necessarily provide added value to users, rather the contrary. The potential added value of insight in buddies’ location and availability is offset by people’s reluctance to share location information with others. Although the average perceived value overall is rather low there exists a substantial minority that does appreciate the added context aware features. High scores on constructs like product involvement, social influence and self-expressiveness characterize this group. The results also show that context aware service bundles with utilitarian elements have a higher perceived value than bundles with hedonic elements. On the basis of the different results some guidelines for designing context aware mobile services are formulated

Cloud computing and context-awareness: A study of the adapted user experience

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.Today, mobile technology is part of everyday life and activities and the mobile ecosystems are blossoming, with smartphones and tablets being the major growth drivers. The mobile phones are no longer just another device, we rely on their capabilities in work and in private. We look to our mobile phones for timely and updated information and we rely on this being provided any time of any day at any place. Nevertheless, no matter how much you trust and love your mobile phone the quality of the information and the user experience is directly associated with the sources and presentation of information. In this perspective, our activities, interactions and preferences help shape the quality of service, content and products we use. Context-aware systems use such information about end-users as input mechanisms for producing applications based on mobile, location, social, cloud and customized content services. This represents new possibilities for extracting aggregated user-centric information and includes novel sources for context-aware applications. Accordingly, a Design Research based approach has been taken to further investigate the creation, presentation and tailoring of user-centric information. Through user evaluated experiments findings show how multi-dimensional context-aware information can be used to create adaptive solutions tailoring the user experience to the users’ needs. Research findings in this work; highlight possible architectures for integration of cloud computing services in a heterogeneous mobile environment in future context-aware solutions. When it comes to combining context-aware results from local computations with those of cloud based services, the results provide findings that give users tailored and adapted experiences based on the collective efforts of the two

Anonymous Mobile Service Collaboration

Since the advent of mobile devices, a large amount of Applications (Apps) have been released to offer compatible services to satisfy the different needs of users all over the world, especially location-aware services, which have become more and more popular in today’s market. Normally, these Apps need to collaborate with other service providers, for example, the App needs the map service to show the location to users, and the map service needs to be supported by the location-based service to offer the coordinate data. In some situations, an App may find more than one service offering the same type of data; they may be located in different places and be in, or on, different networks, so the App service needs to consider which service provider to use. Quality is the most important factor to identify how good a service provider is. It includes many different factors, like the response time, accuracy, eliability, also security and privacy, because users may not want a third party to know who uses this service and where the user is. In this way, the mobile service collaboration has to be anonymous. In this project, an event-based, context-aware service collaboration is implemented, and it is on a publish/subscribe basis, also anonymity and quality are focused on as the most important factors in the implementation

Cloud computing and context-awareness : a study of the adapted user experience

Today, mobile technology is part of everyday life and activities and the mobile ecosystems are blossoming, with smartphones and tablets being the major growth drivers. The mobile phones are no longer just another device, we rely on their capabilities in work and in private. We look to our mobile phones for timely and updated information and we rely on this being provided any time of any day at any place. Nevertheless, no matter how much you trust and love your mobile phone the quality of the information and the user experience is directly associated with the sources and presentation of information. In this perspective, our activities, interactions and preferences help shape the quality of service, content and products we use. Context-aware systems use such information about end-users as input mechanisms for producing applications based on mobile, location, social, cloud and customized content services. This represents new possibilities for extracting aggregated user-centric information and includes novel sources for context-aware applications. Accordingly, a Design Research based approach has been taken to further investigate the creation, presentation and tailoring of user-centric information. Through user evaluated experiments findings show how multi-dimensional context-aware information can be used to create adaptive solutions tailoring the user experience to the users’ needs. Research findings in this work; highlight possible architectures for integration of cloud computing services in a heterogeneous mobile environment in future context-aware solutions. When it comes to combining context-aware results from local computations with those of cloud based services, the results provide findings that give users tailored and adapted experiences based on the collective efforts of the two.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

InHand: mobile professional context and location aware tool

“Copyright © [2010] IEEE. Reprinted from 16th International Conference on Software, Telecommunications and Computer Networks. SoftCOM 2008. ISBN:978-953-6114-97-9. This material is posted here with permission of the IEEE. Internal or personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution must be obtained from the IEEE by writing to [email protected]. By choosing to view this document, you agree to all provisions of the copyright laws protecting it.”A travel book salesman needs current information that leads to the development of an information system about costumers, supplies, orders and the books themselves. Such scenario demands maximum mobility and rapid information retrieval that points to a mobile application. The paper presents an application developed for local and remote use, called InHand, that is context-aware, presenting information related to the current user context and provides location-aware support through the use of the Global Positioning System (GPS). The location system keeps track of a client ’s location, schedules client visits for a given day, help user navigate through a map using real-time position acquisition, and gather the pathway followed by a user on a given day. The application has two channels: server and mobile client. The mobile client can synchronize data with the server, and relies on a local database to minimize wireless traffic to a minimum. We use Remote Data Access and Web Services to access remote data in a convenient way. Although the application is designed with book selling in mind, the concept is perfectly extendable to other fields of application

Toward location-aware Web: extraction method, applications and evaluation

Location-based services (LBS) belong to one of the most popular types of services today. However, a recurring issue is that most of the content in LBS has to be created from scratch and needs to be explicitly tagged to locations, which makes existing Web content not directly usable for LBS. In this paper, we aim at making Web sites location-aware and feed this information to LBS. Our approach toward location-aware Web is threefold: First, we present a location extraction method: SALT. It receives Web sites as input and equips them with location tags. Compared to other approaches, SALT is capable of extracting locations with a precision up to the street level. Performance evaluations further show high applicability for practice. Second, we present three applications for SALT: Webnear.me, Local Browsing and Local Facebook. Webnear.me offers location-aware Web surfing through a mobile Web site and a smartphone app. Local Browsing adds the feature to browse by nearby tags, extracted from Web sites delivered by SALT. Local Facebook extends location tagging to social networks, allowing to run SALT on one's own and one's friends' timeline. Finally, we evaluate SALT for technology acceptance of Webnear.me through a formative user study. Through real user data, collected during a 3 months pilot field deployment of Webnear.me, we assess whether SALT is a proper instance of "location of a Web site”

Recommending Services in Pervasive Environments

The presence of mobile devices with network connectivity continues to increase in all parts of the world, opening up direct channels to mobile users. The threat of information overload is prevalent, and if not subjected to control in terms of legislation and deployment of more intelligent and user-considerate systems it is likely to cause problems. This is particularly important in the case of push-based advertisement systems where information must be of relevance to the mobile user preferences, needs, and interest. This paper proposes a solution and architecture of a consumer-oriented, push-based, context aware location based advertisement system. The system is designed to operate in compliance with the World Wireless Research Foundation (WWRF) guidelines for the future space of information services: personalization, ambient awareness, and adaptability. The system is intended to operate in pervasive environments. The proposed system, called AdvertLBS, harvest knowledge about service providers and consumers in terms of preferences, geographical and temporal locations. The system applies knowledge about services, consumers, and learns context information in order to establish a broad service recommendation context. The AdvertLBS system adopts a hybrid approach to recommendation logic and proposes to use a subset of suitable matching algorithms to produce service recommendations relevant to the consumer’s interests and needs

Service-oriented Context-aware Framework

Location- and context-aware services are emerging technologies in mobile and desktop environments, however, most of them are difficult to use and do not seem to be beneficial enough. Our research focuses on designing and creating a service-oriented framework that helps location- and context-aware, client-service type application development and use. Location information is combined with other contexts such as the users' history, preferences and disabilities. The framework also handles the spatial model of the environment (e.g. map of a room or a building) as a context. The framework is built on a semantic backend where the ontologies are represented using the OWL description language. The use of ontologies enables the framework to run inference tasks and to easily adapt to new context types. The framework contains a compatibility layer for positioning devices, which hides the technical differences of positioning technologies and enables the combination of location data of various sources