A framework for electronic commerce research in small to medium-sized enterprises

It is believed that the recent emergence of electronic commerce (e-commerce) in the early '90s could provide different opportunities to small to medium-sized enterprises (SME's) in overcoming part of their technological, environmental, organizational, and managerial inadequacies. However, recent research portrays a gloomy picture about e-commerce uptake and use in SME's. Therefore, the implication here is twofold. Initially, there is a need to generate more e-commerce research that could penetrate much deeper into main impending issues pertaining to the SME’s in their potential uptake and use of e-commerce. On the other hand, e-commerce is characterized of being embryonic but growing very fast and fragmented across the different disciplines, which makes the task of capturing its different perspectives a very complex one. The preceding two implications represent the greatest challenge for researchers and professionals interested in undertaking e-commerce research in SME’s. In line with the above implications, the first objective of this research aims at capturing the different e-commerce perspectives from the SMEs' point of view, and the second objective aims at capturing the e-commerce perspective from the theoretical and the methodological point of view. Addressing the preceding implications in this research could shed some light into some of the gray areas in the e-commerce research in SMEs.

Egovernance : a growing paradigm in Germany and India

EGovernance is fast becoming a focal issue with governments worldwide, enabled by the ICT revolution. Many economies are adopting eGovernance as a medium of reaching out and empowering the average citizen, stretching tax revenues and cutting down transaction costs. In this paper, we have examined Germany and India, two disparate economies in terms of development yet similar in administrative structures against a backdrop of insightful socio-economic fabric. We have taken a positivist approach and used the exploratory research method, supported by the transaction cost economic theory to draw broad conclusions on similarities and differences in eGovernance adoption, within these economies.

Spatial coordinated medium sharing: Optimal access control management in drive-thru internet

Driven by the ever-growing expectation of ubiquitous connectivity and the widespread adoption of IEEE 802.11 networks, it is not only highly demanded but also entirely possible for in-motion vehicles to establish convenient Internet access to roadside WiFi access points (APs) than ever before, which is referred to as Drive-Thru Internet. The performance of Drive-Thru Internet, however, would suffer from the high vehicle mobility, severe channel contentions, and instinct issues of the IEEE 802.11 MAC as it was originally designed for static scenarios. As an effort to address these problems, in this paper, we develop a unified analytical framework to evaluate the performance of Drive-Thru Internet, which can accommodate various vehicular traffic flow states, and to be compatible with IEEE 802.11a/b/g networks with a distributed coordination function (DCF). We first develop the mathematical analysis to evaluate the mean saturated throughput of vehicles and the transmitted data volume of a vehicle per drive-thru. We show that the throughput performance of Drive-Thru Internet can be enhanced by selecting an optimal transmission region within an AP's coverage for the coordinated medium sharing of all vehicles. We then develop a spatial access control management approach accordingly, which ensures the airtime fairness for medium sharing and boosts the throughput performance of Drive-Thru Internet in a practical, efficient, and distributed manner. Simulation results show that our optimal access control management approach can efficiently work in IEEE 802.11b and 802.11g networks. The maximal transmitted data volume per drive-thru can be enhanced by 113.1% and 59.5% for IEEE 802.11b and IEEE 802.11g networks with a DCF, respectively, compared with the normal IEEE 802.11 medium access with a DCF.