Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
to acquaint themselves with available services.
Links to or offline versions of the portals can
even be preinstalled on the device to ease getting
started with the mobile Internet.
Mobile users may benefit from personalized
context-aware portals that provide easy access to
services that the individual user would need or
typically uses in that context. As configuration is a
major effort for the user, it is often made available
on the desktop. Some mobile operators provide
desktop tools that facilitate updating bookmarks
on the mobile. The desktop service gives a simple
snapshot of titles available for the mobile user
to choose. The user can then save the ones (s)he
wants to get onto his/her mobile. The configura-
tion is automatically synchronized on the phone.
It has to be kept in mind that portals are only
starting points and the users should have ways
to access other sites as well. Walled gardens, i.e.
portals that do not allow users access other web-
sites, are very likely to frustrate users in the long
run. Since user experience with walled gardens is
poor, most walled-garden portals have already torn
down the walls and let users access any web sites.
need guidance services but find it difficult to get
information on what is available, and what it costs
to use those services. Tag technology provides
interesting tools to ease taking local services
into use by touching or pointing tags embedded
in environmental objects (Kaasinen et al., 2006).
Besides exploration (“what potentially interesting
services are in my vicinity”), technologies such
as Bluetooth messaging can be used to deliver
content and services and enable proximity services
(Jones, 2007).
Search Services
Search has emerged as a key enabling technology
to facilitate access to information for general Inter-
net users (White & Drucker, 2007). In the mobile
world, search can also be expected to become
the main means for users to discover sites and
content (Escofet, 2007). Based on a large-scale
study of wireless search behavior, Kamvar and
Baluja (2006) approximate that inputting a search
query with a mobile phone takes approximately
60 seconds. In their studies of mobile Internet
use, direct links were preferred to search. Internet
search providers such as Google, Yahoo or MSN
already propose solutions suitable for mobile
use, giving the user the possibility to search for
mobile-optimized sites such as.mobi domains.
Even if these search services facilitate searching
only mobile websites, going through the list of
results may be overwhelming in mobile use.
Church et al. (2008) have carried out an exten-
sive study of mobile Internet search requests with
searches by 260 000 individual European users.
Their results point out that only 8-10% of mobile
Internet users use regularly search services. Que-
ries are short and users tend to focus on the first
few search results. The vast majority of searches
(over 90%) failed to attract result selections
from the searcher. This is a strong indicator that
people failed to find relevant information from
the search results.
Sharing Information of Services
In addition to commercial information of services,
word of mouth is also important in informing users
about new services. The success of the Japanese
i-mode was partially based on users sharing web
links via e-mail and personal home pages (Funk,
2004). In the field study by Arter at al. (2007), users
appreciated incidental, location-based information
that they got in the form of local queries made by
other users. Providing users with technical enablers
to copy applications from each other would also
be beneficial (Roto & Kaasinen, 2008).
Local Services
In mobile use, the need for local services is em-
phasized, for instance when visiting a strange
city. In an unfamiliar environment mobile users
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