Business Models for ASP Marketplaces

ASP (Application Server Provider) marketplaces provide a fundamental alternative to the classical business model of software licensing. At this point, it is still unclear why and when customers prefer the ASP model over more traditional approaches. To make ASP more attractive, more knowledge about possible pricing and product strategies is needed. In this paper we describe different business models for ASP marketplaces. We first compare the cost structures of the classical licensing model with the new server-based approach. Then we illustrate how price and product differentiation may improve overall market efficiency. In particular, we show that by selling different software versions for different prices, ASP marketplaces may obtain near-optimal revenues with products that are relatively inexpensive, disaggregated, and customizable. Consumers can thus choose between a wide variety of product lines to fit their differing budgets and requirements

Using Online Services in Untrusted Environments: A Privacy Preserving Architecture

While online service providers are sometimes accused of forwarding identifying customer information as name and address to untrusted third parties, comparatively little attention is paid to the input data that customers provide explicitly to the service. If the input data is sensitive but the service provider is not completely trustworthy, this constitutes a serious privacy problem. From a privacy-defending point of view, the most desirable situation would be for the service not to require any kind of sensitive information at any time, while still yielding useful results for the customer. This paper presents a service architecture that allows for the use of a restricted number of services without requiring the transmission of unencrypted customer data to the service provider. The supported services include the execution of basic database and arithmetic operations that can be combined in numerous useful ways. The basic idea of this architecture is to transform sensitive data on the client side before transferring it to the service provider. The latter processes the transformed data without being able to draw any further conclusions from it. The pseudo-result obtained is returned to the customer who applies a special retransformation to obtain the actual result

Web Based Services: An Empirical Study of their Adoption and Penetration

Application service providers (ASPs) and web services are becoming an increasingly popular alternative to selling software the traditional, “shrink-wrapped” way. This paper presents the results of an empirical study of the German ASP market. We surveyed a representative sample of companies traded on the German equivalent of Nasdaq. We asked questions about the companies’ expectations and practical experiences with ASP-based services. The results confirm that ASPs are definitely on the rise. However, several problems remain. Most potential customers are concerned about the confidential treatment of their data once it has been transferred to the ASP site. Quality of service and maintenance need to be agreed upon in advance, in contractual form. Finally, numerous potential customers have problems understanding the ASPs’ offerings in sufficient detail. A more transparent marketing, coupled with a more personalized sales approach, should be a major concern for the ASP industry as a whole. The results of our study should be of interest both to ASP companies, to help them improve their services, and to IT management as a whole to help them decide which (if any) of their enterprise functions would gain from using ASPs

From Russia with Love: The Impact of Relocated Firms on Incumbent Survival

We identify the impact of local firm concentration on incumbent performance with a quasi natural experiment. When Germany was divided after World War II, many firms in the machine tool industry fled the Soviet occupied zone to prevent expropriation. We show that the regional location decisions of these firms upon moving to western Germany were driven by non-economic factors and heuristics rather than existing industrial conditions. Relocating firms increased the likelihood of incumbent failure in destination regions, a pattern that differs sharply from new entrants. We further provide evidence that these effects are due to increased competition for local resources.Agglomeration, competition, firm dynamics, labor, Germany

Architectural Patterns for RFID Applications in Manufacturing

When applying RFID in production, it needs to be integrated into the used IT systems. However, till today system designers cannot rely on a standard solution for integrating RFID technology in manufacturing software systems. Each manufacturer has to deal with the same challenges: No consolidated findings on how to integrate RFID into the IT infrastructure exist. The consequence is that each IT department has to develop a solution from scratch. In order to give well-founded design guidelines for embedding RFID into the company’s IT infrastructure, we conducted seven in-depth case studies of the state-of-the-art in manufacturing IT infrastructures. Our findings allowed us to specify architectural patterns for common RFID applications in manufacturing. With our work we support system designers in choosing the appropriate architecture for different RFID applications and design goals. We present our solutions in form of architectural patterns that enable manufacturing IT systems to benefit from RFID

SNS and 3rd Party Applications Privacy Policies and their Construction of Privacy Concerns

In this paper we use template analysis to study the content of privacy policies both of online social networks as well as 3rd party application providers. After analysing and prioritising the topics mentioned in these policies, we discuss potential problems, limitations of privacy policies, and the responsibilities they assign to various stakeholders. These findings will, in future work serve as stakeholder input for aligning social networking sites’ privacy definitions, concerns, and practices

What Works Better? A Study of Classifying Requirements

Classifying requirements into functional requirements (FR) and non-functional ones (NFR) is an important task in requirements engineering. However, automated classification of requirements written in natural language is not straightforward, due to the variability of natural language and the absence of a controlled vocabulary. This paper investigates how automated classification of requirements into FR and NFR can be improved and how well several machine learning approaches work in this context. We contribute an approach for preprocessing requirements that standardizes and normalizes requirements before applying classification algorithms. Further, we report on how well several existing machine learning methods perform for automated classification of NFRs into sub-categories such as usability, availability, or performance. Our study is performed on 625 requirements provided by the OpenScience tera-PROMISE repository. We found that our preprocessing improved the performance of an existing classification method. We further found significant differences in the performance of approaches such as Latent Dirichlet Allocation, Biterm Topic Modeling, or Naive Bayes for the sub-classification of NFRs.Comment: 7 pages, the 25th IEEE International Conference on Requirements Engineering (RE'17

It Won\u27t Happen To Me! : Self-Disclosure in Online Social Networks

Despite the considerable amount of self-disclosure in Online Social Networks (OSN), the motivation behind this phenomenon is still little understood. Building on the Privacy Calculus theory, this study fills this gap by taking a closer look at the factors behind individual self-disclosure decisions. In a Structural Equation Model with 237 subjects we find Perceived Enjoyment and Privacy Concerns to be significant determinants of information revelation. We confirm that the privacy concerns of OSN users are primarily determined by the perceived likelihood of a privacy violation and much less by the expected damage. These insights provide a solid basis for OSN providers and policy-makers in their effort to ensure healthy disclosure levels that are based on objective rationale rather than subjective misconceptions

Advising Customers on Products in Navigating Online Shops – An Empirical Analysis

Most online shops do not provide advisory services that take advantage of expert product knowledge. Therefore, consumersmay spend a higher search effort than necessary to find products that serve their needs. This study investigates to what extentan ontology-based, “advisory” navigation menu can decrease a consumers’ search effort. For this purpose, we conducted alaboratory experiment with 159 participants to assess the impact of an ontology-based navigation menu on participants’information behavior in an online shop. Our log file-based comparison with a conventional navigation menu showed asignificant decrease of search effort for the advisory navigation menu. Comparison criteria include the number of productresult pages viewed, the number of detail pages viewed, and the amount of filters used in a session. Implications of thisresearch concern the development of online shop interfaces that use ontology-based product catalogues and therefore supportconsumers in their information search