Editorial 19/1

Welcome to the first issue of Electronic Markets’ 19th volume as well as the first issue of Electronic Markets with our new publisher Springer. It includes a compelling research section which consists of two extended conference articles from the Bled Conference 2008 and three general research articles. Last year’s Bled Conference covered the topic “e-Collaboration: Overcoming Boundaries through Multi-Channel Interaction”. Selected best papers of the conference have been invited and underwent the same rigorous review process like all submissions to Electronic Markets do. Both accepted papers deal with the topic of e-Collaboration. The first paper, Mobile business models: organizational and financial design issues that matter, was authored by Mark de Reuver, Harry Bouwman and Timber Haaker. In their research they focus on how to design balanced business models for organizations that collaborate to provide mobile Internet services. They propose a framework for relating critical design issues to success factors and test the relationship between these organizational and financial aspects of mobile business models. An international survey was conducted among 120 practitioners and experts in the mobile Internet services domain, most of them from EU countries. The findings show that organizational design issues deal with an acceptable division of roles among actors, while financial design issues focus on different risk levels that are perceived to be acceptable. The level of profitability that is perceived to be acceptable is influenced indirectly by these design issues, because the relationships are mediated through the risk level that the participants perceive to be acceptable and through the way the roles are divided among the actors. Jasminko Novak and Gerhard Schwabe investigate collaboration in the tourism industry. In their article titled Designing for Reintermediation in the Brick-and-Mortar World: Towards the Travel Agency of the Future, the authors present a reintermediation approach for traditional travel agencies based on a novel way of IT-enabled travel advisory. It integrates the advantages of interactive technologies and Internet channels with the advantages of direct customer interaction in the physical agency setting. Their proposed framework is based on the integration of theories from information seeking behavior, interactive value creation, relationship marketing and the design of hedonic information systems. The findings show that physically collocated travel advisory services can create a significant added value, if they succeed in uncovering customers’ hidden needs, heightening trust and relationship building in the advisory process and creating a better user experience. Involving users early on in the design process: closing the gap between mobile information services and their users, an article authored by Elisabeth van de Kar and Marielle den Hengst, was the first general research article we have for Volume 19. It stresses the important role users play or should play in designing mobile information services. The group-based approach includes the user in an efficient way and has been applied in three cases: mobile services for campus visitors, wireless applications for the Electron Markets (2009) 19:1–2 DOI 10.1007/s12525-009-0006-2