Mangleburg, T. F., Doney, P. M., and Bristol, T. Shopping with friends and teens’ susceptibility to peer influence. Journal of Retailing 80, 2 (2004), 101–116. [URL]

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Research on adult consumers indicates that, when adults shop with friends, this co-shopping has certain advantages for retailers, namely that co-shopping adults tend to spend more time in stores, cover more of the store’s area, and spend more money. Given that such positive effects have been found for co-shopping adults, it seems likely that shopping with friends would be even more important and relevant for teens and, thus, also have a significant and positive impact on retail performance. Peer groups are a particularly strong source of influence in the teenage years.

The purpose of this study was to examine how the social influence of friends might be related to teens’ retailing attitudes and behaviors. The authors’ basic premise was that teens’ evaluations of retailing are an output of a social comparison process with co-oriented others. Specifically, they proposed that shopping with co-oriented friends provides teens with information and normative standards by which teens may evaluate retailing phenomena.

To test these ideas, they collected data from high-school students via a survey design. They found that susceptibility to interpersonal influence from friends was significantly related to teens’ enjoyment and frequency of shopping with friends, which, in turn, were generally related to sentiments toward retailing and spending tendencies. However, the pattern of findings suggests that informational influence may be a more important basis in shaping retailing attitudes and behaviors, while normative influence from friends is not and may even have negative effects. This is consistent with results from other studies indicating that people are more influenced by the information that groups provide rather than by group pressures to conform. It appears that teens are more susceptible to friends’ informational influence, which, in turn, affects teens’ retailing attitudes and behaviors.

Chiang, H.-K., and Liao, Y.-W. An agent-based framework or impulse-induced mobile shopping. In Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Computer and Information Technology (CIT’04) (Wuhan, China, 14-16 September 2004), pp. 509–514. [url]

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This paper describes a framwork for mobile commerce which follows five principles: 1) the omni-present availability of an agent-based system that can inform the user with relevant information when s/he access the application; 2) the system being pro-active in displaying relevant information; 3) location-aware, therefore modifying the information given to the shoppers based on the shopping context; 4) collaborative, allowing communication between friends; finally 5) customizable to the users’ needs.

Yesterday, I participated in MobileMonday here in Barcelona. This is a community of mobile professionals that promotes mobile industry and fosters cooperation and networking. They organize presentation every once in a while to disseminate nice ideas. Yesterday, they invited four Mobile Social Media start-ups to present their concept ideas.

Udo Szabo, presented the OVI Technology platform. Udo presented the main concepts behind the idea of the OVI framework. Basically, Nokia understand that the growth of the mobile marked will not provide new revenues in the future unless they concentrate in providing new mobile experiences to their customers. They started to study carefully how people use mobile media and they found interesting differences compared to traditional desktop media. For instance, they found that on a mobile phone people like to use their real name instead of their nickname because when we share location it makes sense to know who you are. Therefore, people are willing to disclose their privacy. Also, he highlighted how the convergence achieved in mobile phones creates complexity instead of simplifying things. Their philosophy, incarnated in the OVI platform, consists on simplify experience by offering consistently adaptive interfaces and focussing on what is personal and relevant. The OVI differ from their previous products because the way they defined context. Context increases relevancy, allows people to connect in new and better ways, and connects the online and virtual world. Their OVI platform will be open source. Nokia will be announcing the release of this software and new related hardware this week at Nokia World 2008.

Sampo Karajalainen presented Mini Friday, the mobile interface of Habbo Hotel. It is a mobile virtual world available for Nokia Series60. Sampo revealed some interesting facts during the presentation. For instance, they had over one million virtual characters created in Mini Friday since they started one year ago. This is still little compared to the 130 millions avatars created in the web portal but still it reveals nice possibilities for mobile interfaces. Also, Sampo explained how virtual services take off in unexpected places. For instance, they found that over 18% of their accounts, the largest chunk, were created from Indonesia. Also, they found that people connected mainly from home instead that during commuting time. Others findings were more expected: shorter and more frequent sessions compared to the sessions in the desktop portal. One of the mayor challenges that they have to deal with the limited attention span that users have for elements of the interface because while mobile, attention switches between real and virtual world continuously. The challenges that we need to fight are always the mobile frameworks fragmentation, the latency of mobile phones and the data pricing. However, this case study shows also the new forms of communication enabled by virtual worlds.

Peter Vesterbacka presented ConnectedDay, a service for the daycare sector: the providers and their parents. Peter started from the assumption that it is difficult for parents and kids to share their daily activities when it comes the dinner. So, they designed a service that would enable parents and kids to share media. The main idea is to give to the daycare providers a mobile phone with a dataplan and the application (paid by the parents). By using the software preloaded on the phone, the educators can take pictures of the kids and add descriptions of the activities. This material is uploaded in realtime to a browser-based interface, accessible by the parents. Additionally, the daycare centers can reuse this material for documentation and publication purposes.

Finally, Peter Green presented Ramblas Digital a mobile social media. I have to admit that I was quite tired and I might be missed the point of Peter’s presentation. He presented lots of examples of polls created through SMSs that are usually used in public events and the results projected on a big screen. He said that they started this as a fun game and they are thinking to transform this into a startup.

Finally, Jonathan Wareham led the closing panel on mobile social media. I took a couple of random notes about ideas which I found interesting:

1- more research should be devoted in unlocking the social nature of the phone book;

2- we witness an incredible raise of freely available data from which we can extract knowledge. For instance, Google found that certain search terms are good indicators of flu activity. Google Flu Trends uses aggregated Google search data to estimate flu activity in your state up to two weeks faster than traditional systems.

3- Do we have to establish a governance in social networks? It is difficult to manage networks with more than 150 friends. Interfaces might constitute a big issue for this problem (e.g., blog’s conversations are usually serial, while we do not think in linear ways).

–lettera inviata il 28 ottobre 2008 alle 20:00 —

Ciao Beppe,

seguo sempre il tuo blog e sono da sempre tuo sostenitore. Oggi ho avuto modo di leggere l’articolo pubblicato al seguente indirizzo:

http://www.disinformazione.it/beppe_grillo.htm

Come dici sempre tu: internet é assolutamente democratica perché se fai una stronzata ti sputtanano subito. Nei prossimi giorni mi piacerebbe leggere un post nel quale spieghi che relazione hai con la Casaleggio Associati, se é vero quello che Marcello Pamio scrive, e quali sono i rapporti della Casaleggio con le orribili corporations menzionate nell’articolo, e contro cui ti sei sempre schierato.

Grazie,

Mauro

Kjeldskov, J. and Graham, C. (2003). A review of mobile hci research methods. Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services, pages 317–335. [PDF]

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This paper reviews 102 publications on mobile human-computer interaction research. The authors describe the the different publications using a number of categories describing the theoretical approach followed by the authors. The paper describes a number of challenges for Mobile HCI research.

This paper examines and reviews research methods applied within the field of mobile human-computer interaction. The purpose is to provide a snapshot of current practice for studying mobile HCI to identify shortcomings in the way research is conducted and to propose opportunities for future approaches. 102 publications on mobile human-computer interaction research were categorized in a matrix relating their research methods and purpose. The matrix revealed a number of significant trends with a clear bias towards building systems and evaluating them only in laboratory settings, if at all. Also, gaps in the distribution of research approaches and purposes were identified; action research, case studies, field studies and basic research being applied very infrequently. Consequently, we argue that the bias towards building systems and a lack of research for understanding design and use limits the development of cumulative knowledge on mobile human computer interaction. This in turn inhibits future development of the research field as a whole.

http://labs.mozilla.com/geode_welcome/#content

Thansk for installing Geode, an experimental Firefox add-on to explore geolocation in Firefox ahead of its implementation in a future product release. Geode provides a rudimentary implementation of geolocation for the current version of Firefox uses a single hard-coded location provider to enable Wifi-based positioning conforming to the W3C Geolocation specification so that developers can begin experimenting with enabling location-aware experiences today.

Roto, V., Oulasvirta, A., Haikarainene, T., Kuorelahti, J., Lehmuskallio, H., and Nyyssönen, T. (2004). Examining mobile phone use in the wild with quasi-experimentation. HIIT Technical Report 2004-1, Helsinki Institute for Information Technology, Helsinky, Finland. [PDF]

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This paper describes a methodology for conducting controlled experiments in the wild. The authors describe the limitation of many methodologies for conducting research with mobile technology. Their initial argument is that currently it is not possible to conduct controlled experiments in the wild because the difficulty of controlling nuisance variables and because it is difficult to record comprensively user’s data while on the move. They propose a technique to overcome many of these limitations with micro-cameras mounted on the device and on the body of the subject which record continuously what is happening around the user.

This methodology was proven to be effective to conduct reseach on how users assign attentional resources between the different elements of the environment while on the move (Oulasvirta et al., 2005). This paper discuss the pros and cons of this quasi-experimental methodology.

Blom, J., Chipchase, J., and Lehikoinen, J. (2005). Contextual and cultural challenges for user mobility research. Commun. ACM, 48(7):37–41. [PDF]

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This article describes contextual and cultural challenges while conducting qualitative field studies. The author participated in several field study using a technique called “shadowing” which consists in following people with their permission and recodring salient fact of their interaction with people, objects, or the environment. These techniques are widely used to collect user data and to inform the design of mobile technology. However, this technique has several limitation that the author describe in details.

Additionally, as they conducted similar research in different geographical regions of the world, they draw conclusions on how conducting mobility research poses cultural challenges. They define three particular challenges: a) anticipating the technological climate; b) dealing with the social acceptance; and c) meta-reflection on the research process.

a) The risk here is that isufficient market insight can lead to the adoption of inappropriate methodological tools; b) Blending in is easier when a researcher is condidered “local,” but outsiders tend to have more leeway in what is socially acceptable; c) conducting cross-cultural reseach leads to vast amount of data and to development of new research methodologies that can be perfectioned through reflection and proper dissemination.

On Saturday, I participated in a public protest against the law which was voted on July this year which gives our prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, immunity against justice prosecution (here an article on the issue, in Spanish).

Italian political situation is in immense crisis. Opposition is inexistent and Berlusconi controls the majority of journals and broadcast channels. As a citizen I feel really depressed as I am not represented by this current government. Additionally, my options to protest are minimal.

Luckily, there are still Italians like Beppe Grillo, Marco Travaglio, and Antonio DiPietro to cheer me up. DiPietro organized a referendum against this horrible law. On Saturday I signed. Actually, many people signed: 250000 signatures in one day. This gives me hope that there are many Italians like me who do not like to be manipulated and who are able to circumvent the mainstream propaganda.

This is the democracy we have left. It is real democracy because it comes directly from people.

Language class. Once again starting from scratch, but I do agree with the following: “creo que aprender idiomas ayuda a ser m?s tolerante con gente de otras culturas”.