Near field communication: an assessment for future payment systems

In this paper, we present an assessment of near field communication (NFC) in the context of a payment market. During these past years, we have been witnessing a number of mobile payment trials based on NFC. Early experiences are already quite encouraging and many expect NFC to become a highly efficient and effective technology for mobile payments. The objective of our research is to evaluate in a systematic manner the potential of NFC as an upcoming technology for mobile payments. In order to ensure the rigor of our research, we used a formal and structured approach based on multi-actor multi-criteria methods. Our research provides one of the first assessment of NFC and a realistic picture of the current Swiss situation as we involved numerous mobile payment experts. Our findings show that Swiss industry experts are quite enthusiastic about the future of NFC. A previous version of this paper was presented at the 6th international conference on mobile business, 2007. “Jan Ondrus, Yves Pigneur, An assessment of NFC for Future Payment Systems, Proceedings, Sixth International Conference on Mobile Business, 8–11 July 2007, IEEE Computer Society, ISBN 0-7695-2803-1.”     

A modeling approach and reference models for the analysis of mobile payment use cases

Mobile payments can be categorized according to their usage in each of the five payment scenarios presented here. The paper proposes the mobile payment modeling approach (MPMA) especially suited for value-based analysis of mobile payment use cases. Based on this approach, the study also develops a set of seven reference models that can classify any given mobile payment use case or mobile payment procedure and analyze it with regard to the business model, the roles of the market participants, and their interrelation from a value-based perspective. An introspective analysis of the mobile payment service provider role and a market constellation analysis which shows the implications of different actors assuming one or more of the respective roles complete the study.     

Inter-consortia battles in mobile payments standardisation

Mobile payments can be seen as an innovation service offered by key players from the financial and mobile communication industries. Many believe that standards ensure the success of mobile payments. However, actors with heterogeneous interests cause the complexity in standards-setting process and, therefore, the absence of standards for mobile payments. Various groups have been formed to generate standardised solutions for mobile payments. This paper describes and analyses the role of these groups and how they influence the development of mobile payments. Five consortia are explored in min-case analysis. They are the Mobile Payment Forum, the Mobey Forum, Simpay, PayCircle, and the European Committee for Banking Standards. The existence of these consortia has instigated inter-consortia competition. As a result, there are three types of mobile payments developments identified: bank-account based, telecommunications companies billing-based, and credit-card based. The implications of the developments are discussed with the help of interpretive theory.     

A communication infrastructure to ease the development of mobile collaborative applications

Mobile workers doing loosely coupled activities typically perform on demand collaboration in the physical workplace. Communication services available in such work scenarios are uncertain, therefore mobile collaborative applications supporting those activities must provide ad hoc communication mechanisms in order to use each cooperation opportunity. Typically, the complexity of implementing such mobile ad hoc communication mechanisms becomes a challenge that jeopardizes the development of mobile collaborative solutions. This article presents a communication infrastructure named HLMP API dealing with that challenge. HLMP API intends to ease the development of such applications through the reuse of communication services. The infrastructure is an application programming interface that implements the HLMP routing protocol and also some awareness mechanisms that are required for mobile loosely coupled work. Developers using this infrastructure do not have to perform low-level programming.     

Integrating mobile agents into the mobile middleware

Mobile agents are a new paradigm for distributed computing that is especially well suited for mobile computing over global wireless networks. This paper describes the approach taken in the ACTS On TheMove project to integrate a mobile agent system into the Mobile Application Support Environment (MASE), a middleware for mobile computing. In this project, an existing mobile agent system was adapted for the requirements of mobile computing. We present the changes that had to be made to the agent system to adapt it to the wireless communication. We also present some of the application areas where a mobile agent system is suitable for mobile communication. We describe an agent based pre-fetcher application where an agent operaes disconnected from the user on the fixed network and prepares web pages for the anticipated next connection of the user using the Quality-of-Service trading functions available in MASE.     

Social networking on smartphones: When mobile phones become addictive

As the penetration of mobile phones in societies increases, there is a large growth in the use of mobile phones especially among the youth. This trend is followed by the fast growth in use of online social networking services (SNS). Extensive use of technology can lead to addiction. This study finds that the use of SNS mobile applications is a significant predictor of mobile addiction. The result also shows that the use of SNS mobile applications is affected by both SNS network size and SNS intensity of the user. This study has implications for academia as well as governmental and non-for-profit organizations regarding the effect of mobile phones on individual’s and public health.     

An empirical examination of factors influencing the intention to use mobile payment

With recent advances in mobile technologies, mobile commerce is having an increasingly profound impact on our daily lives, and beginning to offer interesting and advantageous new services. In particular, the mobile payment (m-payment) system has emerged, enabling users to pay for goods and services using their mobile devices (especially mobile phones) wherever they go. Mobile payment is anticipated to enjoy a bright future.     

Distributed debugging for mobile networks

Debuggers are an integral part, albeit often neglected, of the development of distributed applications. Ambient-oriented programming (AmOP) is a distributed paradigm for applications running on mobile ad hoc networks. In AmOP the complexity of programming in a distributed setting is married with the network fragility and open topology of mobile applications. To our knowledge, there is no debugging approach that tackles both these issues. In this paper we argue that a novel kind of distributed debugger that we term an ambient-oriented debugger, is required. We present REME-D (read as remedy), an online ambient-oriented debugger that integrates techniques from distributed debugging (event-based debugging, message breakpoints) and proposes facilities to deal with ad hoc, fragile networks – epidemic debugging, and support for frequent disconnections.     

Utilisation of mobile handheld devices for care management at an Australian aged care facility

This paper reports on research into the implementation and evaluation of a wireless hand-held clinical care management system at an Aged Care Facility in Launceston, Tasmania. This socio-technical trial involved the use of handheld computers connected to an 802.11 wireless network itself linked to an ADSL broadband connection and Oracle server. Following system implementation, research was conducted to evaluate the usefulness of the system for the collection of care management data. This evaluation was conducted through the use of qualitative techniques that analysed the impact of this wireless system holistically to produce insights from three perspectives: technical, organisational and end-user.More broadly, this trial generated insights for the development of ‘next generation’ mobile technologies to support health care. These developments are one of the foci of the Smart Internet Technology Cooperative Research Centre (www.smartinternet.com.au). At this broader level the paper indicates that potentially significant benefits may be generated by enabling ‘live’ two-way transmission of clinical information to the point of care. It is anticipated that a future trial will investigate the suitability and feasibility of using voice activation and other modalities to support patient care.     

An energy-efficient mobile transaction processing method using random back-off in wireless broadcast environments

Broadcast is widely accepted as an efficient technique for disseminating data to a large number of mobile clients over a single or multiple channels. Due to the limited uplink bandwidth from mobile clients to server, conventional concurrency control methods cannot be directly applied. There has been many researches on concurrency control methods for wireless broadcast environments. However, they are mostly for read-only transactions or do not consider exploiting cache. They also suffer from the repetitive aborts and restarts of mobile transactions when the access patterns of mobile transactions are skewed. In this paper, we propose a new optimistic concurrency control method suitable for mobile broadcast environments. To prevent the repetitive aborts and restarts of mobile transactions, we propose a random back-off technique. To exploit the cache on mobile clients, our method keeps the read data set of mobile transactions and prefetches those data items when the mobile transactions are restarted. As other existing optimistic concurrency control methods for mobile broadcast environments does, it works for both read-only and update transactions. Read-only transactions are validated and locally committed without using any uplink bandwidth. Update transactions are validated with forward and backward validation, and committed after final validation consuming a small amount of uplink bandwidth. Our performance analysis shows that it significantly decreases uplink and downlink bandwidth usage compared to other existing methods.     

Antecedents of the adoption of the new mobile payment systems: The moderating effect of age

The purpose of this study was to propose and test an integrative theoretical model that allows one to determine the relative importance of certain factors (i.e. external influences, ease of use, attitude, usefulness, trust, risk) for the adoption of a new mobile payment system advertised on new electronic environments, as well as to analyze the eventual moderating effect of the age of the consumer in the use of this tool. The empirical results show that the proposed behavioral model was appropriately adjusted, thus proving that the age of the user introduces significant differences in the proposed relationships between influences from third parties and ease of use of the payment system, between the perceived trust in the system and its ease of use, as well as between trust and a favorable attitude towards its use.     

基于Aglets的校园网CA认证模型的研究与实现

文章旨在将一种新型的计算模式Agent／Server应用到CA(Certificate Authority)认证系统的开发和实现上。移动Agent代码可移动性的特点使得基于它所开发的应用程序能有效地降低分布式计算中的网络负载,提高通信效率。基于该模式开发的应用程序能克服基于传统的Client／Server和Browse／Server模式所开发的应用程序,只传输信息而不能双向传输代码的缺陷,从而缓解大量数据传输时网络拥塞的产生。Aglets是IBM日本公司开发的一种移动Agent平台,利用该平台开发CA认证系统可使系统更加灵活和智能,并能实现CA证书发放、管理和认证的智能化和高效化。     

The minimum positional error incurred by any connectivity-based positioning algorithm for mobile wireless systems

A very important problem in many wireless ad-hoc networks, including wireless sensor networks, is positioning or the determination of geographical locations of the wireless nodes. Positioning is used both in infrastructural aspects of sensor networks, like geographic routing and topology maintenance, and in applications like wildlife tracking. Connectivity-based positioning algorithms in mobile wireless systems are studied in this work. These algorithms compute node positions based only on the connectivity, i.e. the neighborhood information of each node. Many algorithms have been proposed for positioning in stationary node systems and bounds on positional error of algorithms have been derived. The design and analysis of positioning algorithms for mobile node systems is a more challenging problem. Node mobility increases the amount of positional information available to a positioning algorithm. The work in this paper establishes a bound on the positional error for connectivity-based algorithms in mobile systems. The formulation from the analysis is used to investigate the benefit of this additional positional information on reducing positional error. There is a limit to the usefulness of positional information from previous node positions due to movement. This captures an important performance tradeoff: historical positional information can yield reduced positional error but requires more connectivity information from the network which requires greater computational resources.     

Past, present and future of mobile payments research: A literature review

The mobile payment services markets are currently under transition with a history of numerous tried and failed solutions, and a future of promising but yet uncertain possibilities with potential new technology innovations. At this point of the development, we take a look at the current state of the mobile payment services market from a literature review perspective. We review prior literature on mobile payments, analyze the various factors that impact mobile payment services markets, and suggest directions for future research in this still emerging field. To facilitate the analysis of literature, we propose a framework of four contingency and five competitive force factors, and organize the mobile payment research under the proposed framework. Consumer perspective of mobile payments as well as technical security and trust are best covered by contemporary research. The impacts of social and cultural factors on mobile payments, as well as comparisons between mobile and traditional payment services are entirely uninvestigated issues. Most of the factors outlined by the framework have been addressed by exploratory and early phase studies.     

Using ubiquitous computing in interactive mobile marketing

Unique features of handheld devices, including their mobility, personalization and location-awareness engender new types of applications for mobile commerce, such as mobile advertising. Mobile marketing and advertising applications deliver promotional information to consumers based on their preferences and location. In this paper, we present SMMART, a context-aware, adaptive and personalized m-commerce application designed to deliver targeted promotions to the users of mobile devices about the products they like while guarding the users’ identity and protecting them from any unsolicited messages. Promotions distributed by SMMART are personalized by performing intelligent matching of the user’s shopping interests to current promotions available at a retail site. SMMART can adapt to changing preferences of its user by inconspicuously monitoring his or her shopping habits. We describe a fully functional prototype of SMMART built for Pocket PCs running Windows CE with .NET Compact Framework. This paper also presents a study demonstrating end-user usability and economic viability of SMMART.     

无人售货的无线通信关键技术研究与实现

随着科学技术的不断发展, 人力成本的不断提高, 传统的售货方式即将发生了改变,无人售货模式会成为未来提升销售竞争力的关键,基于移动支付方式的兴起,改变了人们的付款方式,未来这种支付方式将为无人售货模式的主流支付方式。因此有必要重新研究基于移动通信和移动支付的新型无人售货系统。采用何种无线通信技术成为其中的成为了研究的关键要素。通过实验对现行的几种无线通信方式进行了性能分析,最终确定可以采用GPRS通讯方式实现信息的可靠性传输。     

Determinants of accepting wireless mobile data services in China

Data services via wireless networks and mobile devices have experienced rapid growth worldwide. We investigated the factors influencing adoption of wireless mobile data services (WMDS) in China and tested our model for explaining adoption intentions there. We argued that individuals form their intention to adopt WMDS under the influence of wireless mobile technology, the social environment, personal innovativeness of IT, trust awareness, and the facilitating conditions. We examined the simultaneous effects of these five influences on beliefs in the context of wireless Internet data services via mobile phones. Survey data were collected from 1432 participants in several metro cities across China. The findings suggest that WMDS adoption intention in China is determined by consumers’ perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use of WMDS. Theoretical and practical implications are included in our paper.     

Understanding and measuring the urban pervasive infrastructure

The increasing popularity of mobile computing devices has allowed for new research and application areas. Specifically, urban areas exhibit an elevated concentration of such devices enabling potential ad-hoc co-operation and sharing of resources among citizens. Here, we argue that people, architecture and technology together provide the infrastructure for these applications and an understanding of this infrastructure is important for effective design and development. We focus on describing the metrics for describing this infrastructure and elaborate on a set of observation, analysis and simulation methods for capturing, deriving and utilising those metrics.

一种嵌入证书的移动投票方法研究

本文提出一种新方法：事先获得颁发无线证书的选民可以使用自己的手机或PDA投票。这种方法允许选民用简单、方便而且保密和匿名的方式表决,不受时间和地点限制,从而增加投票率。