Social Networking on Mobile Environment on top of PeerHood

Social networking and social networking sites have gained popularity among internet users during the past few years. Social networks fulfill the need of users to stay connected to friends and other people interested in the same issues. Combining social networks to the mobile environment is a growing interest of mobile device users as it allows the users to be in their online social community despite their mobility. This thesis highlights the basics of mobile environment, social networking and PeerHood and introduces a new approach of social networking on mobile environment, which is a new concept in mobile social networking. This approach is based on dynamic group discovery in accordance to some common user interests and management in the PeerHood environment. A reference implementation of a social networking application built on top of PeerHood is presented and it is tested and analyzed to understand the social networking on mobile environment and the new concept of dynamic group discovery in it.

Mobile Subscription Acquisition and Retention Costs - An Actvity-Based Model

The objective of this master’s thesis was to develop a model for mobile subscription acquisition cost, SAC, and mobile subscription retention cost, SRC, by applying activity-based cost accounting principles. The thesis was conducted as a case study for a telecommunication company operating on the Finnish telecommunication market. In addition to activity-based cost accounting there were other theories studied and applied in order to establish a theory framework for this thesis. The concepts of acquisition and retention were explored in a broader context with the concepts of customer satisfaction, loyalty and profitability and eventually customer relationship management to understand the background and meaning of the theme of this thesis. The utilization of SAC and SRC information is discussed through the theories of decision making and activity-based management. Also, the present state and future needs of SAC and SRC information usage at the case company as well as the functions of the company were examined by interviewing some members of the company personnel. With the help of these theories and methods it was aimed at finding out both the theory-based and practical factors which affect the structure of the model. During the thesis study it was confirmed that the existing SAC and SRC model of the case company should be used as the basis in developing the activity-based model. As a result the indirect costs of the old model were transformed into activities and the direct costs were continued to be allocated directly to acquisition of new subscriptions and retention of old subscriptions. The refined model will enable managing the subscription acquisition, retention and the related costs better through the activity information. During the interviews it was found out that the SAC and SRC information is also used in performance measurement and operational and strategic planning. SAC and SRC are not fully absorbed costs and it was concluded that the model serves best as a source of indicative cost information. This thesis does not include calculating costs. Instead, the refined model together with both the theory-based and interview findings concerning the utilization of the information produced by the model will serve as a framework for the possible future development aiming at completing the model.

Error Modeling and Accuracy Analysis of a Novel Mobile Hybrid Parallel Robot

Over the last decades, calibration techniques have been widely used to improve the accuracy of robots and machine tools since they only involve software modification instead of changing the design and manufacture of the hardware. Traditionally, there are four steps are required for a calibration, i.e. error modeling, measurement, parameter identification and compensation. The objective of this thesis is to propose a method for the kinematics analysis and error modeling of a newly developed hybrid redundant robot IWR (Intersector Welding Robot), which possesses ten degrees of freedom (DOF) where 6-DOF in parallel and additional 4-DOF in serial. In this article, the problem of kinematics modeling and error modeling of the proposed IWR robot are discussed. Based on the vector arithmetic method, the kinematics model and the sensitivity model of the end-effector subject to the structure parameters is derived and analyzed. The relations between the pose (position and orientation) accuracy and manufacturing tolerances, actuation errors, and connection errors are formulated. Computer simulation is performed to examine the validity and effectiveness of the proposed method.

Cost Optimisation of Mobile Advertising Client Data Transfer

Data traffic caused by mobile advertising client software when it is communicating with the network server can be a pain point for many application developers who are considering advertising-funded application distribution, since the cost of the data transfer might scare their users away from using the applications. For the thesis project, a simulation environment was built to mimic the real client-server solution for measuring the data transfer over varying types of connections with different usage scenarios. For optimising data transfer, a few general-purpose compressors and XML-specific compressors were tried for compressing the XML data, and a few protocol optimisations were implemented. For optimising the cost, cache usage was improved and pre-loading was enhanced to use free connections to load the data. The data traffic structure and the various optimisations were analysed, and it was found that the cache usage and pre-loading should be enhanced and that the protocol should be changed, with report aggregation and compression using WBXML or gzip.

Real-Time Simulation of Mobile and Industrial Machines Using the Multibody Simulation Approach

This thesis introduces a real-time simulation environment based on the multibody simulation approach. The environment consists of components that are used in conventional product development, including computer aided drawing, visualization, dynamic simulation and finite element software architecture, data transfer and haptics. These components are combined to perform as a coupled system on one platform. The environment is used to simulate mobile and industrial machines at different stages of a product life time. Consequently, the demands of the simulated scenarios vary. In this thesis, a real-time simulation environment based on the multibody approach is used to study a reel mechanism of a paper machine and a gantry crane. These case systems are used to demonstrate the usability of the real-time simulation environment for fault detection purposes and in the context of a training simulator. In order to describe the dynamical performance of a mobile or industrial machine, the nonlinear equations of motion must be defined. In this thesis, the dynamical behaviour of machines is modelled using the multibody simulation approach. A multibody system may consist of rigid and flexible bodies which are joined using kinematic joint constraints while force components are used to describe the actuators. The strength of multibody dynamics relies upon its ability to describe nonlinearities arising from wearing of the components, friction, large rotations or contact forces in a systematic manner. For this reason, the interfaces between subsystems such as mechanics, hydraulics and control systems of the mechatronic machine can be defined and analyzed in a straightforward manner.

Measuring Customer Experience in Mobile Internet

Problems in the mobile services are complex where the lack of the user analysis is not the modest issue. User centered design has increasingly become as a basis for the design of mobile services. The concept of user centered design gives end-user extensive attention at each stage of the design process. Mobile service providers want to offer experiences for users and clearly the users look for services that can provide pleasant experiences. In this thesis, the elements of user experience in mobile internet were studied as well as user experience measuring methods were researched. This study was looking for user experience measuring metrics and methods to specify new factors to measure user experience. During this thesis research project an application called CEM4Mobile was designed and implemented. CEM4Mobile is an application for observing and analysing user experience based on the user activity and behaviour. As a result of this thesis, a collection of user experience elements and measuring metrics were found. The elements and metrics were designed and implemented to CEM4Mobile product, which measures user experience. It was found out that the user experience measuring methods were based on interaction between two people but CEM4Mobile makes user observation programmatic.

Mobile technology, gender and development in Africa, India and Bangladesh

Presenting

Determining the location for a mobile device by utilization of local resources of the environment

The subject being analyzed of this Master’s Thesis is a development of a service that is used to define a current location of a mobile device. The service utilized data that is obtained from own GPS receiver in some possible cases and as well data from mobile devices which can be afforded for the current environment for acquisition of more precise position of the device. The computation environment is based on context of a mobile device. The service is implemented as an application for communicator series Nokia N8XX. The Master’s Thesis presents theoretical concept of the method and its practical implementation, architecture of the application, requirements and describes a process of its functionality. Also users’ work with application is presented and recommendations for possible future improvements are made.

The Contribution of Mobile Device Manufacturers’ Site Usage to Brand Satisfaction and Loyalty

Recently most of the mobile phone manufacturer companies started to pay extra attention to their websites. This research investigates the sources of value creation on the mobile phone manufacturers’ website and the affect visiting the manufacturers’ website has on brand loyalty and brand satisfaction. The results show a correlation between positive website usage experience, brand loyalty and brand satisfaction. Moreover there is a relation between Novelty, Efficiency, Lock-in and the perceived usefulness the manufacturers’ website has on the mobile phone device. And finally the main reason behind Finnish student’s mobile phone brand loyalty is its country of origin.

Mobile system for pump working point estimation

In the current economy situation companies try to reduce their expenses. One of the solutions is to improve the energy efficiency of the processes. It is known that the energy consumption of pumping applications range from 20 up to 50% of the energy usage in the certain industrial plants operations. Some studies have shown that 30% to 50% of energy consumed by pump systems could be saved by changing the pump or the flow control method. The aim of this thesis is to create a mobile measurement system that can calculate a working point position of a pump drive. This information can be used to determine the efficiency of the pump drive operation and to develop a solution to bring pump’s efficiency to a maximum possible value. This can allow a great reduction in the pump drive’s life cycle cost. In the first part of the thesis, a brief introduction in the details of pump drive operation is given. Methods that can be used in the project are presented. Later, the review of available platforms for the project implementation is given. In the second part of the thesis, components of the project are presented. Detailed description for each created component is given. Finally, results of laboratory tests are presented. Acquired results are compared and analyzed. In addition, the operation of created system is analyzed and suggestions for the future development are given.

Service Description Creation Empowerment to Mobile End Users

Increasing usage of Web Services has been result of efforts to automate Web Services discovery and interoperability. The Semantic Web Service descriptions create basis for automatic Web Service information management tasks such as discovery and interoperability. The discussion of opportunities enabled by service descriptions have arisen in recent years. The end user has been considered only as a consumer of services and information sharing occurred from one service provider to public in service distribution. The social networking has changed the nature of services. The end user cannot be seen anymore only as service consumer, because by enabling semantically rich environment and right tools, the end user will be in the future the producer of services. This study investigates the ways to provide for end users the empowerment to create service descriptions on mobile device. Special focus is given to the changed role of the end user in service creation. In addition, the Web Services technologies are presented as well as different Semantic Web Service description approaches are compared. The main focus in the study is to investigate tools and techniques to enable service description creation and semantic information management on mobile device.

Certificate Handling Middleware for Mobile Devices

The purpose of this thesis was to study how certificates could be used to improve security of mobile devices. In the theoretical part the usage of certificates to improve security is explained. In the practical part a concept of certificate handling middleware is introduced and implemented. This is to demonstrate what kind of functionality is needed to provide an improvement over the current situation in security with mobile devices. The certificate handling middleware is a concept that would work better if implemented directly into mobile device's core functionality. Many of the mobile devices have a certificate store to some degree and often it is not used to store other people's certificates. A certificate store combined with address book and added with possibility to add attributes to the people such as group memberships would be sufficient to satisfy the needs of many emerging sharing and social applications.

Mobile Teleoperation of a Mobile Robot

This thesis describes the design and implementation of a graphical application on a mobile device to teleoperate a mobile robot. The department of information technology in Lappeenranta University conducts research in robotics, and the main motivation was to extend the available teleoperation applications for mobile devices. The challenge was to port existing robot software library onto an embedded device platform, then develop a suitable user interface application that provides sufficient functionality to perform teleoperation tasks over a wireless communication network. This thesis involved investigating previous teleoperation applications and conducted similar experiments to test and evaluate the designed application for functional activity and measure performance on a mobile device which have been identified and achieved. The implemented solution offered good results for navigation purposes particularly for teleoperating a visible robot and suggests solutions for exploration when no environment map for the operator is present.