Mobile Ecosystem Annotated Bibliography

Entries by Ariel van Spronsen

Balaji, T.S. et al. (2005). Creating a Mobile Multimedia Service. Communications of the ACM, 48(7), p. 49-53.

An overview article describing the creation of Sprint's PCS Vision multimedia services which launched August 2004 from the perspective of the carrier's design team. Gives a good sense of the constraints under which design occurs in this context. These include rapid technological and cultural change within the target market, research challenges given the novel nature of the product, business (revenue) models and how the services would be billed, and marketing directives.
Citation and abstract

Horn, R.E. (2001, July 16). Knowledge Mapping for Complex Social Messes. Presentation to the "Foundations in Knowledge Economy" meeting at the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, Los Altos, CA.

Here Horn explains the concept and utility of knowledge maps for describing complex social situations - what he calls social messes. He describes a knowledge map as a "cross-boundary causality map that characterizes the situations, events, and phenomena" of a mess. These situations, events, and phenomena are connected by causality arrows. The maps facilitate direct comprehension of a situation and present those involved in making decisions arising from the situation with a stable patterned abstraction that allows them to see both the big picture and the relationships between its parts.
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Karvonen, and J. Warsta (2004, October 27-29). Mobile Multimedia Services Development - Value Chain Perspective. In Proceedings of the 3rd international conference on Mobile and ubiquitous multimedia (College Park, MD), p. 171-178. New York: ACM Press.

This article provided some good initial understanding of the mobile ecosystem from the perspective of value chain analysis. The model proposed by the authors builds on the work of previous researchers in this domain, conceiving of the interdependencies as between content, infrastructure, and business models. These three major categories of factors influencing mobile services is reflected in most of the discussions on the topic.
Citation and abstract

Ornella, P. and B. Stéphanie (2006, April 22-27). Universal Design for Mobile Phones: A Case Study. In CHI '06 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems (Montréal, Québec, Canada), p. 1229-1234. New York: ACM Press.

This article outlines the user-centered design process enacted by a team wishing to develop phones which take into account the needs of visually impaired, hearing impaired, and elderly consumers. The design criteria they came up with were: Sufficient device size, sufficient button size, limited number of buttons, raised marker on the 5 key, organization of the keypad, space between buttons, and a rounded top shape for the buttons. Of particular note in this article is the semantic map of existing phones that was used to inform the research. It gives a good graphical representation of where phones fall along axes of perceived simplicity vs. degree of innovation.
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Tarnacha, A. and C. Maitland (2006, August 14-16). Entrepreneurship in Mobile Application Development. In Proceedings of the 8th international conference on Electronic commerce (Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada), p. 589-593. New York: ACM Press.

This study looks at the obstacles facing application developers in the US mobile market, and as such, gives a good idea of the interrelationships of various entities in the mobile ecosystem. The findings focus on issues of technology, and indicate that application development platforms, even when they are open, do not fully integrate technological interdependencies due to operator-specific API extensions and certification requirements. Additionally, distribution is dependent on recommendation by aggregators which also plays into the certification process. Thus entrepreneurial activity is hindered by the current mobile ecosystem model.
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van Gorp, A., Maitland, C., and Cameron, B. (2005, August 1-3). Scaling the wall: Factors influencing conditions for market entry in the mobile data market. In Sørensen, C. et al. (Eds). Designing ubiquitous information environments: Socio-technical issues and challenges. IFIP TC 8 WG 8.2 International working conference (Cleveland, Ohio, USA), p. 277-292.

This study explores how the interdependencies between information service developers and mobile network operators in the US market affect the diversity of information sources on the mobile Internet. This article was very helpful because it gives significant background information on the mobile ecosystem. The authors explain the difference between carrier-controlled "walled gardens" and the free Internet, likening the walled garden to an intranet. The current dominant payment model, in which customers pay the carrier directly for services and the carrier in turn pays the content provider, further solidifies carrier control. The effects of technologies, distribution strategies, and informal institutions ("developer zones") are also discussed.
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Wehn de Montalvo, U., van de Kar, E., and Maitland, C. (2004, October 25-27). Resource-based interdependencies in value networks for mobile Internet services. In Proceedings of the 6^th international conference on Electronic commerce (Delft, The Netherlands), p. 627-638. New York: ACM Press.

This is another article focused on how the interdependencies within the mobile ecosystem affect value creation, studied through an examination of the entry experiences of five Dutch content providers. Because the authors were most interested in higher-level concepts surrounding the relationship between resources and value it was less helpful for this project, but it did confirm other authors' description of the complexity of the relationships among network operators, content providers, and intermediaries. The relative strength of these entities varied in different situations. The results of this study aren't directly applicable to the US market, where carriers dominate partnerships.
Citation and abstract

Williams, D.M.L. (2006). Co-Design, China, and the Commercialization of the Mobile User Interface. interactions, 13(5), p. 36-41.

The author, a user interface consultant working with Asian mobile companies, describes the emerging co-design model arising from intense competition for user loyalty in Asian markets coupled with operators' desire to push their own brand in all aspects of product design. Co-design requires collaboration among network operators and their marketing groups, phone manufacturers, application developers, and content providers. While this article mainly explores the ways this collaboration is accomplished, it also elucidates relationships among players in the mobile ecosystem. A key point is that mobile operators have the option of working with ODMs (original design manufacturers) or low brand equity phone manufacturers to ensure greater control over the user interface. Even in this emerging paradigm operators are the dominant party in the mobile ecosystem.
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