Decisions about entry modes for telecom companies into digital music business: An empirical case study

The digital music market offers an opportunity for telecom companies to furnish value-added services. However, little effort has been made to study empirically how to make a decision about entry modes for telecom companies into digital music business. This study therefore investigates various strategies that telecom companies may implement to enter the digital music industry. The results of a series of expert surveys reveal that the preference ranking of entry modes is acquisition, joint venture, and contractual agreement, respectively. Moreover, the leading key factors in selecting entry modes are complementary capabilities, hostility of environment, relational risk between firms as partners, commitment of resources, and availability of expertise. Furthermore, an importance-performance analysis was conducted to understand the different aspects that are of different performances and importance in each entry mode. The implications of the findings are also discussed. --Telecom companies,Digital music business,Entry modes,Value added

Promoting Competitive Advantage: The Role of IT Integration, Trust and Innovativeness

Due to the recent movements related to the focus of core competence and as a result of a tendency toward global profit squeezing, the innovativeness of the supply chain play a key role in influencing a firm’s competitive advantage. Enterprises keep good relationships with their suppliers and customers in the hope that the supply chain system can operate effectively. This means that firms have been encouraged to connect key suppliers and customers in order to establish strong supply chains and thus to enhance the competitive advantages related to their supply chain systems. Electronic OEMs in Taiwan currently are facing fierce challenges related to high elasticity, fast speed, and small amounts and various modes of production. Therefore, enterprises need to enhance quick response through effective IT integration and mechanisms intended connect supply chain members in order to increase innovativeness and competitive advantage. The model and hypothesized relationship are empirically tested using the structural equation modeling approach, supported by SmartPLS2.0 software. The results of this study showed that IT integration and trust of supply chain members all positively influence innovativeness, and further have positive effects on competitive advantage. Implications for researchers and practitioners, and suggestions for future research are also addressed in this study

Improving Conversational Passage Re-ranking with View Ensemble

This paper presents ConvRerank, a conversational passage re-ranker that employs a newly developed pseudo-labeling approach. Our proposed view-ensemble method enhances the quality of pseudo-labeled data, thus improving the fine-tuning of ConvRerank. Our experimental evaluation on benchmark datasets shows that combining ConvRerank with a conversational dense retriever in a cascaded manner achieves a good balance between effectiveness and efficiency. Compared to baseline methods, our cascaded pipeline demonstrates lower latency and higher top-ranking effectiveness. Furthermore, the in-depth analysis confirms the potential of our approach to improving the effectiveness of conversational search.Comment: SIGIR 202

Learning Chinese characters: A comparative study of the learning strategies of students whose native language is alphabet-based and students whose native language is character-based.

The study revealed that both groups used memory and cognitive strategies approximately equally, but that the groups emphasized different subcomponents of those strategies. Both groups reported usage of metacognitive strategies an equal amount, but the American group was more capable of describing how, exactly, such strategies were employed; and the Japanese group used compensation and social strategies to a greater extent.Two groups of students enrolled in a third-semester Chinese-language course participated in this study. The "alphabet-based" group consisted of American students whose native language was English, and the "character-based" group consist of native-Japanese students whose native language was Japanese. Interviews were conducted with all participants in the study. The participants' "study logs" were examined, and the researcher observed each participant's progress throughout the relevant semester to provide corroborative and evaluative data. Analysis of data showed that all participants from both groups viewed the task of Chinese-character learning as a difficult one, and consequently all employed learning strategies of various types, both direct and indirect, throughout the studied semester.The number of university students studying the Chinese-language in the United States has been increasing in recent years. But despite the growing number research studies regarding learning strategies, and language-learning strategies, little research has been conducted on the most effective methods of learning Chinese characters. A review of the literature has revealed no study that addresses this issue with an eye to the question whether students whose first language is alphabet-based use character-learning strategies in a manner that differ from the use of such strategies by students whose first language is character-based. This case study examines that question