We describe how static anthropomorphic images of avatars affected users’ emotion perceptions of interactants and medium when they engaged in a conversation on a mobile telephone. We utilized measurements of social presence, specifically interactant satisfaction and social richness of medium. The items of these two measurements were modified to include new items of emotional credibility. The res...

Africa encompasses 53 countries with almost 1 billion people on a vast continent of 30 million square kilometers. In the last decade, Africa experienced a mobile telephone revolution. The continent “leapfrogged” fixed-line telephone systems with mobile telephony and is on the cusp of a broadband boom. As undersea cables are lit and terrestrial fiber networks expand, Africa is poised to experien...

It is difficult to find a doctor’s surgery or a pharmacy, particularly when you are traveling somewhere in Switzerland. For this reason, the Swiss insurance company Suva, in cooperation with a wide range of partners, has developed Sanday (Santé every day), an information system for use with a mobile telephone and via the Internet. Sanday combines a GIS (a geographical information system), a loc...

The simplest forms of mobile multimedia are already provided by GSM mobile telephones delivering audio and basic data services. However, they remain in the dark ages when compared to the multimedia applications we have grown accustomed to using over fixed data networks. Realising the potential of the mobile multimedia market, network operators have been designing and are beginning to deploy new...

The possibility of making the Internet accessible via mobile telephone has generated an important opportunity for electronic commerce. Nevertheless, the performances of mobile devices and intrinsic characteristics of wireless environments impose a set of constraints for mobile commerce development. The authors have developed alternative mechanisms based on standard technologies in order to impr...

The example of the youth mobile phone market is used for pilot empirical testing of a model of consumers’ decision making, based on common features of consumer behaviour in mature markets of information and high technology products. Firstly, we discuss the key properties of mature high technology markets which affect market behaviour and strategies. These properties include: established custome...