The 11th ICMB Conference on adoption, use and effect of Mobile Systems and
Applications will take place in Delft, The Netehrlands June 21 and 22

Mobile Business in Everyday life: users’ routines versus provider’s turbulence

Like ecommerce, mobile applications are becoming part of daily routines for consumers. Given the ease of use of smart phones and increasing mobile data network capacity, acceptance of mobile applications is increasing fast. Users switch to smart phones to deal with tasks they perform based on day-to-day routines, both in private life as well as in business environments. Academic research is shifting from acceptance and adoption issues to research questions that focus on usage patterns, preferences, substitution and displacement behavior and what the impact of Mobile Internet is going to be on daily routines.

What are the first and second order effects? Improved communication and information provisioning might be evident, but what about integration with other applications? Are mobile services going to be integrated with smart home systems? Is mobile going to be part of the larger ecosystem of ‘smart cities’ and the Internet of Things? And what does this mean for human behavior? Are mobile phones and tablets becoming the preferred way to deal with business routines, accessing ERP-systems, filling out expense forms, managing customer relations? How will mobile services be implemented in education systems? Are electronic books going to capture a part of the market? Is mobile TV changing to social mobile TV: sharing files across devices, making use of buddy lists?  It will be clear that not only domains such as media, entertainment and communications will be affected, but that mobile and sensor-based applications are going to have an impact on many other domains as well: banking, logistics, energy, health care, independent living.

Any potentially stabilizing acceptance patterns in the user market are in sharp contrast with the turbulence that the mobile industry is going through due to the convergence of the content, application, Internet and the telecommunication industry. The provider eco-system around mobile Internet is now facing profound changes in business models and technical architectures. The emergence of various types of software platforms and end-to-end architectures in mobile systems is increasing the pressure on the dominant technological and business set-up of the mobile industry, to the point of a reconfiguration of the entire mobile system. Will new platforms for converged communication services or novel ad hoc paradigms offer an alternative for telecom operators to sustain their control over the mobile communication market? Can they co-exist or will Internet and IT firms make significant inroads into the telecommunications market? Are applications providers and app stores able to capture a major share of all service revenues? How celar is the distinction between infrastructure, platform and service? Are device manufacturers coming up with new mobile cloud based technologies that even could make it possible to avoid the distribution channels controlled by Webco’s like Apple and Android? Are businesses and governments able to integrate mobile applications in their service offerings to users? How are specific ‘vertical’ service offerings and industries changing because of these dynamics? What are policy and regulatory priorities for well-functioning mobile markets?

Submission due: February 15th, 2012

See www.Mbusiness2012.org