Bridging the digital divide in developing countries: The role of mobile technology in bridging the digital divide

This thesis investigates how mobile technology usage could help to bring Information and communication technologies (ICT) to the people in developing countries. Some people in developing countries have access to use ICT while other people do not have such opportunity. This digital divide among people is present in many developing countries where computers and the Internet are difficult to access. The Internet provides information that can increase productivity and enable markets to function more efficiently. The Internet reduces information travel time and provides more efficient ways for firms and workers to operate. ICT and the Internet can provide opportunities for economic growth and productivity in developing countries. This indicates that it is very important to bridge the digital divide and increase Internet connections in developing countries. The purpose of this thesis is to investigate how can mobile technology and mobile services help to bridge the digital divide in developing countries. Theoretical background of this thesis consists of a collection of articles and reports. Theoretical material was gathered by going through literature on the digital divide, mobile technology and mobile application development. The empirical research was conducted by sending a questionnaire by email to a selection of application developers located in developing countries. The questionnaire’s purpose was to gather qualitative information concerning mobile application development in developing countries. This thesis main result suggests that mobile phones and mobile technology usage can help to bridge the digital divide in developing countries. This study finds that mobile technology provides one of the best tools that can help to bridge the digital divide in developing countries. Mobile technology can bring affordable ICT to people who do not have access to use computers. Smartphones can provide Internet connection, mobile services and mobile applications to a rapidly growing number of mobile phone users in developing countries. New low-cost smartphones empower people in developing countries to have access to information through the Internet. Mobile technology has the potential to help to bridge the digital divide in developing countries where a vast amount of people own mobile phones.

The obstacles for cross-border transmission network investments in the Nordic electricity market: Case South-West link

The Nordic electricity market is often seen as an example of how to create a working, developed and integrated electricity market. Nevertheless, this thesis studies the obstacles of transmission network investments and the market integration challenges in the Nordic electricity market. The main focus is in the Nordic Transmission system operators (TSOs), which have a key role in grid development. This study introduces a case study of cancellation of South-West link, Western part, which was seen as essential grid investment in order to improve the Nordic electricity market functioning but ended up with cancellation in 2013. This study includes semi-structured theme interviews of the experts among Nordic electricity industry stakeholders. Despite the political will to create more equal prices for electricity in the Nordic market, the differing national regulation, mixed incentives created by bottleneck income and the focus moving from Nordic integration to European integration may create challenges to the Nordic electricity market integration in the future.

Development of agnostic mobile applications with cross-platform cloud computing platforms

Smart phones became part and parcel of our life, where mobility provides a freedom of not being bounded by time and space. In addition, number of smartphones produced each year is skyrocketing. However, this also created discrepancies or fragmentation among devices and OSes, which in turn made an exceeding hard for developers to deliver hundreds of similar featured applications with various versions for the market consumption. This thesis is an attempt to investigate whether cloud based mobile development platforms can mitigate and eventually eliminate fragmentation challenges. During this research, we have selected and analyzed the most popular cloud based development platforms and tested integrated cloud features. This research showed that cloud based mobile development platforms may able to reduce mobile fragmentation and enable to utilize single codebase to deliver a mobile application for different platforms.

Letters from the War of Ecosystems – An Analysis of Independent Software Vendors in Mobile Application Marketplaces

The recent emergence of a new generation of mobile application marketplaces has changed the business in the mobile ecosystems. The marketplaces have gathered over a million applications by hundreds of thousands of application developers and publishers. Thus, software ecosystems—consisting of developers, consumers and the orchestrator—have emerged as a part of the mobile ecosystem. This dissertation addresses the new challenges faced by mobile application developers in the new ecosystems through empirical methods. By using the theories of two-sided markets and business ecosystems as the basis, the thesis assesses monetization and value creation in the market as well as the impact of electronic Word-of-Mouth (eWOM) and developer multihoming— i. e. contributing for more than one platform—in the ecosystems. The data for the study was collected with web crawling from the three biggest marketplaces: Apple App Store, Google Play and Windows Phone Store. The dissertation consists of six individual articles. The results of the studies show a gap in monetization among the studied applications, while a majority of applications are produced by small or micro-enterprises. The study finds only weak support for the impact of eWOM on the sales of an application in the studied ecosystem. Finally, the study reveals a clear difference in the multi-homing rates between the top application developers and the rest. This has, as discussed in the thesis, an impact on the future market analyses—it seems that the smart device market can sustain several parallel application marketplaces.

Mobile Banking and Mobile Payments: Changing Banking Services in Finland

The purpose of this thesis is to examine how mobile banking and mobile payments services will change the banking sector in Finland, and what role non-bank companies from the IT and telecom industries will play in this process. The thesis consists of a literature review and a qualitative study. The literature review forms a comprehensive overview of mobile banking and mobile payments services. The qualitative research was conducted as a descriptive study, focusing on the views of bank and non-bank players. The results show that banks have a significant advantage over their IT and telecom rivals in regards to their service offering, financial buffer, and status as trustworthy institutions. The banks’ embrace of mobile financial services will change the Finnish banking sector into one, with a light branch network focused on sales power, and a heavy emphasis on new mobile devices providing service power regardless of time and place.

Development of Generic Simulation Model for Mobile Working Machines

This master’s thesis has been done for Drive! –project in which a new electric motor solution for mobile working machines is developed. Generic simulation model will be used as marketing and development tool. It can be used to model a wide variety of different vehicles with and without electric motor and to show customer the difference between traditionally build vehicles and those with new electric motor solution. Customers can also use simulation model to research different solutions for their own vehicles. At the start of the project it was decided that MeVEA software would be used as main simulation program and Simulink will only be used to simulate the operation of electrical components. Development of the generic model started with the research of these two software applications, simulation models which are made with them and how these simulation models can be build faster. Best results were used for building of generic simulation model. Finished generic model can be used to produce new tractor models for real-time simulations in short notice. All information about model is collected to one datasheet which can be easily filled by the user. After datasheet is filled a script will automatically build new simulation model in seconds. At the moment generic model is capable of building simulation models for wide variety of different tractors but it can be easily altered for other vehicle types too which would also benefit greatly from electric drive solution. Those could be for example wheel loaders and harvesters.

Novel virtual environment and real-time simulation based methods for improving life-cycle efficiency of non-road mobile machinery

Virtual environments and real-time simulators (VERS) are becoming more and more important tools in research and development (R&D) process of non-road mobile machinery (NRMM). The virtual prototyping techniques enable faster and more cost-efficient development of machines compared to use of real life prototypes. High energy efficiency has become an important topic in the world of NRMM because of environmental and economic demands. The objective of this thesis is to develop VERS based methods for research and development of NRMM. A process using VERS for assessing effects of human operators on the life-cycle efficiency of NRMM was developed. Human in the loop simulations are ran using an underground mining loader to study the developed process. The simulations were ran in the virtual environment of the Laboratory of Intelligent Machines of Lappeenranta University of Technology. A physically adequate real-time simulation model of NRMM was shown to be reliable and cost effective in testing of hardware components by the means of hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) simulations. A control interface connecting integrated electro-hydraulic energy converter (IEHEC) with virtual simulation model of log crane was developed. IEHEC consists of a hydraulic pump-motor and an integrated electrical permanent magnet synchronous motorgenerator. The results show that state of the art real-time NRMM simulators are capable to solve factors related to energy consumption and productivity of the NRMM. A significant variation between the test drivers is found. The results show that VERS can be used for assessing human effects on the life-cycle efficiency of NRMM. HIL simulation responses compared to that achieved with conventional simulation method demonstrate the advances and drawbacks of various possible interfaces between the simulator and hardware part of the system under study. Novel ideas for arranging the interface are successfully tested and compared with the more traditional one. The proposed process for assessing the effects of operators on the life-cycle efficiency will be applied for wider group of operators in the future. Driving styles of the operators can be analysed statistically from sufficient large result data. The statistical analysis can find the most life-cycle efficient driving style for the specific environment and machinery. The proposed control interface for HIL simulation need to be further studied. The robustness and the adaptation of the interface in different situations must be verified. The future work will also include studying the suitability of the IEHEC for different working machines using the proposed HIL simulation method.

Implementing Green IT approach for transferring Big Data over Parallel Data Link

The whole research of the current Master Thesis project is related to Big Data transfer over Parallel Data Link and my main objective is to assist the Saint-Petersburg National Research University ITMO research team to accomplish this project and apply Green IT methods for the data transfer system. The goal of the team is to transfer Big Data by using parallel data links with SDN Openflow approach. My task as a team member was to compare existing data transfer applications in case to verify which results the highest data transfer speed in which occasions and explain the reasons. In the context of this thesis work a comparison between 5 different utilities was done, which including Fast Data Transfer (FDT), BBCP, BBFTP, GridFTP, and FTS3. A number of scripts where developed which consist of creating random binary data to be incompressible to have fair comparison between utilities, execute the Utilities with specified parameters, create log files, results, system parameters, and plot graphs to compare the results. Transferring such an enormous variety of data can take a long time, and hence, the necessity appears to reduce the energy consumption to make them greener. In the context of Green IT approach, our team used Cloud Computing infrastructure called OpenStack. It’s more efficient to allocated specific amount of hardware resources to test different scenarios rather than using the whole resources from our testbed. Testing our implementation with OpenStack infrastructure results that the virtual channel does not consist of any traffic and we can achieve the highest possible throughput. After receiving the final results we are in place to identify which utilities produce faster data transfer in different scenarios with specific TCP parameters and we can use them in real network data links.

Energy Consumption of Applications on Mobile Phones

Battery consumption in mobile applications development is a very important aspect and has to be considered by all the developers in their applications. This study will present an analysis of different relevant concepts and parameters that may have impact on energy consumption of Windows Phone applications. This operating system was chosen because there is limited research even though there are related studies for Android an iOS operating systems. Furthermore, another reason is the increasing number of Windows Phone users. The objective of this research is to categorise the energy consumption parameters (e.g. use of one thread or several thread for the same output). The result for each group of experiment will be analyzed and a rule will be derived. The set of derived rules will serve as a guide for developers who intend to develop energy efficient Windows Phone applications. For each experiment, one application is created for each concept and the results are presented in two ways: a table and a chart. The table presents the duration of the experiment, the battery consumed by the experiment, the expected battery lifetime and the energy consumption, while the charts display the energy distribution based on the main threads: UI thread, application thread and network thread.

Novel Interaction Techniques for Mobile Augmented Reality applications. A Systematic Literature Review

This study reviews the research on interaction techniques and methods that could be applied in mobile augmented reality scenarios. The review is focused on themost recent advances and considers especially the use of head-mounted displays. Inthe review process, we have followed a systematic approach, which makes the reviewtransparent, repeatable, and less prone to human errors than if it was conducted in amore traditional manner. The main research subjects covered in the review are headorientation and gaze-tracking, gestures and body part-tracking, and multimodality– as far as the subjects are related to human-computer interaction. Besides these,also a number of other areas of interest will be discussed.