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Owing to the rapid advancement of technologies, today's mobile phones e.g., smartphones can not only fulfill users' basic requirements for communication purposes but also serve as powerful pervasive devices with various valuable functions for users. With wide and close Internet accessibility, smartphones nowadays inevitably suffer security threats and information security management ISM issues like common computers do. In this research, information security related trust issues are investigated through a user-based empirical study. Our research project aims to study the relationships between smartphone users' computer literacy, network literacy, knowledge on mobile phone viruses, and trust in ISM principles i.e., confidentiality, integrity, and availability. The study results indicate that smartphone users' network literacy positively influence their knowledge on mobile phone viruses, whereas users' computer literacy is not significantly associated with their knowledge on mobile phone viruses. Moreover, smartphone users' knowledge on mobile phone viruses would significantly affect their trusts in three ISM principles. The validated research model and corresponding findings can be referenced by business executives and ISM decision makers in electronic commerce e-commerce for making favorable tactics to catch the revolutionary benefits offered by effective ISM policies in the ubiquitous computing environment. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

This study aims to explore how social networking sites (SNS) can be used to influence consumer behavior in the context of multi-channel retailing. A research framework with ten hypotheses was proposed to study important relationships between various consumer behaviors related to trust on physical stores, access to SNS fan pages, physical-store purchase, online information search, and online purchase. An empirical test was conducted by using PLS, a second-generation multivariate analysis tool, to analyze survey data collected from 205 SNS users. Our findings revealed that consumers' intention to online information search would significantly influence their intention to online purchase. Trust on physical stores would affect consumers' attitudes toward not only purchasing at physical-store but also joining retailers' SNS fan pages. In addition, attitude toward joining SNS fan pages was found to affect consumers' intention to online information search and physical-store purchasing. Moreover, consumers' physical-store purchasing would also affect their intention to related online information search. Based on the validated research model and corresponding findings, retail managers are suggested to use SNS fan pages to enhance consumers' purchase at physical stores and information search on their online stores, thus increasing overall sales. Retail managers should build and maintain consumer trust on their stores, since such trust significantly affects consumers' attitude to access SNS fan pages.

Although most users currently receive web services from web browser interfaces, pervasive computing is emerging and offering new ways of accessing Internet applications from any device, any time and anywhere. It is not only a technological change, but a philosophical and psychological one. Our research project investigated the theoretical concepts of pervasive computing as well as their practical applications, by using cellular phones as the pervasive device to access a web application prototype, the voice-enabled web system (VWS), through the voice user interface technology. The acceptance rate of consumers on new pervasive interfaces was studied using factors (including perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, attitude, subjective norms, perceived behavioural control and fun) adapted from technology acceptance theories. Although our empirical findings were in general consistent with the findings from several prior studies on various information technologies, there were still some discrepancies. Our ...

Other than providing Web services through popular Web browser interfaces, pervasive computing may offer new ways of accessing Internet applications by utilizing various modes of interfaces to interact with their end users, and its technology could involve new ways of interfacing with various types of gateways to back-end servers from any device, anytime, and anywhere. In this study, mobile phone was used as the pervasive device for accessing an Internet application prototype, a voice-enabled Web system (VWS), through voice user interface technology. Today’s Web sites are intricate but not intelligent, so finding an efficient method to assist user searching is particularly important. One of these efficient methods is to construct an adaptive Web site. This article shows that multimodal user-interface pages can be generated by using XSLT stylesheet which transforms XML documents into various formats including XHTML, WML, and VoiceXML. It also describes how VWS was designed to provide an adaptive voice interface using an Apache Web server, a voice server, a Java servlet engine, and a genetic algorithm based voice Web restructuring mechanism.

While most users currently access Web applications from Web browser interfaces, pervasive computing is emerging and offering new ways of accessing Internet applications from any device at any location, by utilizing various modes of interfaces to interact with their end users. The PC and its back-end servers remain important in a pervasive system, and the technology could involve new ways of interfacing with a PC and/or various types of gateways to back-end servers. In this research, cellular phone was used as the pervasive device for accessing an Internet application prototype, a multimodal Web system (MWS), through voice user interface technology. This paper describes how MWS was developed to provide a secure interactive voice channel using an Apache Web server, a voice server, and Java technology. Securing multimodal applications proves more challenging than securing traditional Internet applications. Various standards have been developed within a context of Java 2 Micro Edition (J2ME) platform to secure multimodal and wireless applications. In addition to covering these standards and their applicability to the MWS system implementation, this paper also shows that multimodal user-interface page can be generated by using XSLT stylesheet which transforms XML documents into various formats including XHTML, WML, and VoiceXML.

With the rapid progress of sensing and tracking technology, more and more location-based services (LBS) and applications are nowadays available in the market. But while it is convenient to retrieve various kinds of information via LBS, it is not easy to build up LBS apps which support a large amount of users and information. Therefore, it is important for developers to utilize the free application programming interface (API) resources available on the Internet for harvesting the benefit of the cloud computing, particularly for individual developers who have limited resources. This research explores the benefits of building LBS service/application based on free APIs and service-oriented computing (SOC). Using a social check-in app as example, the design and implementation of a smartphone application using the proposed approach will be described in this article. Moreover, by comparing with some other smartphone applications which also provide check-in services, the advantages and potential value of our approach to integrating social network APIs and SOC concept will be discussed.

With the rapid advancement of communication technology and mobile devices, many software companies and individual developers have started to develop a variety of mobile applications. However, since the resources individual developers can get are far less than a software company, it is important for individual developers to utilize the free API resources available on the Internet to harvest the benefit of the cloud computing. This research explores the benefits that individual developers can acquire from free APIs and service-oriented computing (SOC) in building desired smartphone applications (apps). Using a VoIP application (app) as an example, the design and implementation of a smartphone app using the proposed approach is described in this article. In addition, by comparing this VoIP app with some other smartphone apps which also provide VoIP services, the advantages and potential value of our approach to integrating social network APIs and SOC concept will be discussed.

This study aimed to investigate users' intention towards the adoption of Podcasting in the context of e-tourism. A research framework together with eight hypotheses was proposed and empirically tested using data collected from a questionnaire-based survey. Media selection theory and innovation diffusion theory (IDT) were used in this study to explore and explain people's intention to adopt Podcasting in tourism. Among the investigated factors, functionality, usability, situational factor, image, relative advantage, and low complexity were found to significantly affect users' intention to adopt Podcasting. Although there was no evidence showing that social influence was directly associated with users' intention to use Podcasting, social influence was found to significantly affect image. The validated research model and corresponding findings can be referenced by business executives and decision makers in tourism industry for making favorable tactics to catch the revolutionary benefits offered by Podcasting in the ubiquitous computing environment.

E-catalogues are widely used for presenting product information in e-commerce environment. Currently, many companies send product information to potential customers via e-mails, but there is a spam problem preventing such e-mails from reaching their target customers. Nevertheless, personalization is now considered as an important marketing strategy, so that mass distribution of e-catalogues may become less desirable for companies. In this study, we developed an innovative service platform for efficiently creating and effectively delivering personalized e-catalogues to target customers. This study not only utilizes but contributes to the body of knowledge associated with the emergent Web 2.0 concepts, service-oriented architecture, and Web-feed technologies.

Dictionaries are essential tools for looking up words people do not know when they read. This is especially true for non-native English speakers who do not have enough vocabulary, and for whom reading an English article can be a difficult task. Moreover, it could be time consuming to do the same thing when there are too many new words for them, consequently reducing the willingness to read or learn in the end. Therefore, a Web based asynchronous dictionary service was developed in our project for automating the repetitive look-up tasks. It provides an efficient and easy way to search for vocabulary automatically by the system. The result is formed in XML format and users may use Really Simple Syndication (RSS) readers to get the result on PCs or mobile devices, so the results can be read and studied anytime, anywhere. Moreover, people can share the results with others easily because RSS feeds are used to send the dictionary response to targeted groups of subscribers.

Nowadays, it is highly important for us to well organize, access, and store digital data in a way which is efficient and secure. Since there are many incidents which may cause the loss of important data, backing up and safe-keeping important data into some reliable and flexibly accessible media is an extremely important practice. In this paper we propose a Backward Web-feed Based Framework (BWBF) for supporting the automatic backup and restoration of important files by using an emerging web technology – the podcast technology. A sample BWBF based backup service designed and implemented to automatically and asynchronously backup files to (and restore files from) BWBF-based remote backup servers was described in this article.

While most users currently receive web services from web browser interfaces, pervasive computing is emerging and offering new ways of accessing internet applications from any device at any location. As a result, there is a growing demand for technology that will allow users to connect to the internet from anywhere through devices that are not suitable for the use of traditional keyboard, mouse and monitor. In this research, cellular phone was chosen as the pervasive device for accessing a multimodal internet application prototype, a voice-enabled web system, through voice user interface technology. The impacts of the forthcoming pervasive computing technology on consumer attitude and the acceptance rate of consumers on new pervasive interface were studied using the Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB), a widely used technology acceptance theory. The research findings may be referenced for the purpose of the design and development of successful business applications to catch the revolutionary opportunity and benefit of Voice-enabled Web Systems (VWS).