Russian mobile telecommunications market: players and trends

Objective of this work was to clarify the competitive situation of Russian mobile telecommunications market: who are the main players, are there many regional operators, what is the possibility of new entrants and how intensive is the competition. In the beginning the history of Russian mobile telecommunications sector is described. In the next chapter environmental factors of the market are examined with the help of PESTEL analysis. After that, players of the market are introduced to ease the following of next chapters. The main theory for this work was industry analysis of five competitive forces by Michael Porter, which is presented before the theory related industry analysis of Russian mobile telecommunications industry. Research for the industry analysis is mainly based on up-to-date articles describing Russian market. As a result of the industry analysis, competitive situation of Russian mobile telecommunications industry and the future prospects are described with the help of factors coming from the PESTEL-analysis. Finally development and future prospects for Russian 3G are reported. As a result of this work, it can be said that Russian mobile telecommunications market is not likely to maintain the growth of previous years, because the market is near saturation. According to passive SIM-cards it has already received saturated. The saturation will also make the market share game between operators more volatile. The market is dominated by three national operators that covered 88% of the income in the first half of 2007. In addition to these three, there are also several regional operators. Structure of the market is likely to consolidate.

Optimizing Mobile Java Location-Based Services in Symbian OS

This thesis evaluates methods for obtaining high performance in applications running on the mobile Java platform. Based on the evaluated methods, an optimization was done to a Java extension API running on top the Symbian operating system. The API provides location-based services for mobile Java applications. As a part of this thesis, the JNI implementation in Symbian OS was also benchmarked. A benchmarking tool was implemented in the analysis phase in order to implement extensive performance test set. Based on the benchmark results, it was noted that the landmarks implementation of the API was performing very slowly with large amounts of data. The existing implementation proved to be very inconvenient for optimization because the early implementers did not take performance and design issues into consideration. A completely new architecture was implemented for the API in order to provide scalable landmark initialization and data extraction by using lazy initialization methods. Additionally, runtime memory consumption was also an important part of the optimization. The improvement proved to be very efficient based on the measurements after the optimization. Most of the common API use cases performed extremely well compared to the old implementation. Performance optimization is an important quality attribute of any piece of software especially in embedded mobile devices. Typically, projects get into trouble with performance because there are no clear performance targets and knowledge how to achieve them. Well-known guidelines and performance models help to achieve good overall performance in Java applications and programming interfaces.

Moodle Mobile : Mejorando lo presente... plugin 'myprofile'

El proyecto trata sobre la aplicación Moodle Mobile y las posibilidades de personalización y mejoras que ofrece. Principalmente el proyecto se centra en la personalización gráfica del interfaz y en el desarrollo de un plugin que añada la funcionalidad de permitir a un usuario cambiar la fotografía de su perfil en una instalación Moodle.

Means and challenges in international operations for a Finnish mobile application provider

Master’s Thesis concentrates to means and challenges in international operations for a Finnish mobile application provider Small Planet Oy during its various company stages from founding till maturing and during macro economical phases between year 1998 and 2008. Small Planet has just celebrated its 10 year anniversary and is therefore quite an extraordinary company which has survived all the highs and lows during past ten years and which has operated in the market as long as the whole mobile application industry has existed. Master’s Thesis describes possibilities for a company’s internationalization with different entry modes like exporting, licensing, investment entry and co-operative operations which are suitable for a mobile application provider. Unsuitable entry modes like franchising or contract manufacturing are not explained. The goal has been to analyze Small Planet’s international operations and to make conclusions from the practical experiences. Analysis and conclusions shall help Small Planet in its international operations in the future and should give insight to other mobile application companies and their managers who are in the situation of planning their own international operations. Results show that the best ways for Small Planet to internationalize its operations has been the co-operation with a big domestic client and the co-operation with Finnish operator infrastructure providers which have complementary products with Small Planet. Through these co-operations Small Planet has got lot of new international clients. Same time financial risks and investment need for international operations have been low. Co-operative international sales can be the most efficient international entry mode for a mobile application provider.

Handover aspects in Unlicensed Mobile Access Technology

Fixed Mobile Convergence is the recent buzz in the field of telecommunication technology. Unlicensed Mobile Access (UMA) technology is a realistic implementation of Fixed Mobile Convergence. UMA involves communication between different types of networks. Handover is a very important issue in UMA. The study is an analysis of theoretical handover mechanism and practical test results. It includes a new proposal for handover performance test in UMA. It also provides an overview of basic handover operation on different scenarios in UMA. The practical test involves an experiment on handover performance test using network analyzers. The new proposal provides a different approach for an experimental setting on handover performance test without using network analyzers. The approach is not be implemented because of some technical problem in a network equipment in UMA. The analysis of the test results reveals that time of handover between UMA and Global System for Mobile Communication (GSM) network is similar to time of handover between inter base station controller (BSC) handover in GSM networks. The new approach is simple and provides measurement at the end point communicating entities. The study gives a general understanding of handover operation, an analysis of handover performance in UMA and specifically provides a new approach useful for further study of handover in different real world environments and scenarios.

Análisis del entorno colaborativo creado para una experiencia de mobile learning

Se presentan los resultados de una investigación sobre las concepciones y usos de dispositivos móviles de un grupo de estudiantes que trabajaron en un entorno de aprendizaje colaborativo como parte un proceso de e-learning. Se emplearon dos métodos de investigación, en primer lugar el análisis del contenido de los mensajes de un foro de discusión enviados durante todo el curso, para recoger datos acerca del uso y la valoración que hacían del proceso de mobile learning. Posteriormente, mediante las entrevistas en profundidad, se analizó la percepción de mobile learning y los cambios producido durante el curso en el entorno colaborativo de aprendizaje. Los resultados indican que el entorno de intercambio creado amplifica la participación y colaboración entre los alumnos en el proceso de mobile learning, favoreciendo un mayor protagonismo de los estudiantes en una experiencia de aprendizaje online.

Landslide detection and monitoring capability of boat-based mobile laser scanning along Dieppe coastal cliffs, Normandy

Integrated in a wide research assessing destabilizing and triggering factors to model cliff dynamic along the Dieppe's shoreline in High Normandy, this study aims at testing boat-based mobile LiDAR capabilities by scanning 3D point clouds of the unstable coastal cliffs. Two acquisition campaigns were performed in September 2012 and September 2013, scanning (1) a 30-km-long shoreline and (2) the same test cliffs in different environmental conditions and device settings. The potentials of collected data for 3D modelling, change detection and landslide monitoring were afterward assessed. By scanning during favourable meteorological and marine conditions and close to the coast, mobile LiDAR devices are able to quickly scan a long shoreline with median point spacing up to 10cm. The acquired data are then sufficiently detailed to map geomorphological features smaller than 0.5m2. Furthermore, our capability to detect rockfalls and erosion deposits (>m3) is confirmed, since using the classical approach of computing differences between sequential acquisitions reveals many cliff collapses between Pourville and Quiberville and only sparse changes between Dieppe and Belleville-sur-Mer. These different change rates result from different rockfall susceptibilities. Finally, we also confirmed the capability of the boat-based mobile LiDAR technique to monitor single large changes, characterizing the Dieppe landslide geometry with two main active scarps, retrogression up to 40m and about 100,000m3 of eroded materials.

Mobile ensembles: The uses of mobile phones for social protest by Spain¿s indignados

Peer-reviewed

Adaptive optimization schemes for mobile VoIP applications Battery life and call quality aspects

In this thesis programmatic, application-layer means for better energy-efficiency in the VoIP application domain are studied. The work presented concentrates on optimizations which are suitable for VoIP-implementations utilizing SIP and IEEE 802.11 technologies. Energy-saving optimizations can have an impact on perceived call quality, and thus energy-saving means are studied together with those factors affecting perceived call quality. In this thesis a general view on a topic is given. Based on theory, adaptive optimization schemes for dynamic controlling of application's operation are proposed. A runtime quality model, capable of being integrated into optimization schemes, is developed for VoIP call quality estimation. Based on proposed optimization schemes, some power consumption measurements are done to find out achievable advantages. Measurement results show that a reduction in power consumption is possible to achieve with the help of adaptive optimization schemes.

Context exchange between devices in mobile environment

Context awareness is emerging on mobile devices. Context awareness can be used to improve usability of a mobile device. Context awareness is particularly important on mobile devices due the limitations they have. At first in this work, a literature review on context awareness and mobile environment is made. For aiding context awareness there exist an implementation of a Context Framework for Symbian S60 devices. It provides a possibility for exchanging the contexts inside the device between the client applications of the local Context Framework. The main contribution of this thesis is to design and implement an enhancement to the S60 Context Framework for providing possibility to exchange context over device boundaries. Using the implemented Context Exchange System, the context exchange is neither depending on the type of the context nor the type of the client. In addition, the clients and the contexts can reside on any interconnected device. The usage of the system is independent of the programming language since in addition to using only Symbian C++ function interfaces it can also be utilized using XML scripts. The Meeting Sniffer application, which uses the Context Exchange System, was also developed in this work. Using this application, it is possible to recognize a meeting situation and suggest device profile change to a user.

Comovement of stock price risk in strategic alliance — Case: mobile internet

The focus of this study has been comovement of stock price risk level between two companies as they form strategic alliance. Thus the main reason has been to shed more light to possible increased risk level that the stockholder confronts when a company he owns forms a strategic alliance with another company. This study has centralized to interfirm cooperation between mobile and internet companies, which have furthered the development of mobile internet. The study has been divided into theoretical and empirical part. In theoretical part the main concepts riskiness of a stock (volatility), comovement and strategic alliance have been run through. In empirical part seven strategic alliances formed by mobile internet companies have been examined. Based on this, strategic alliance seems to increase comovement of stock price risk in some degree. This comovement seems to be stronger when core businesses or operating environments of cooperating companies differ more from each other.

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.