Arguments regarding the presence of similarities and differences in management and organization across countries draw attention to the potential relevance of culture, contextual contingencies, and economic-cum-political system. These are examined by reference to comparisons of corporate goals, managerial objectives, and modes of organizational structuring (particularly around the investment decision process) in British and West German companies. The findings reinforce the view that in capitalist systems high profitability and growth are dominant corporate goals. In some respects, the structure adopted by companies in the two countries appeared to match their contingent conditions, although differences in decision making were consistent with a culturalist explanation. Where contrasts emerged in the objectives and opinions held by senior managers it was not always clear whether these were more likely to be a reflection of cultural factors rather than, for example, the generally greater success of the German companies.
Despite the ubiquity of barcodes there exists no common product repository available today linking product master data to the corresponding barcodes. This paper proposes a social network game (Product Empire) that motivates users to scan barcodes and to enter basic product information, such as product name, brand and category and to upload a picture of the product. This user-generated product repository aims at providing a base to link real world objects with virtual information. After a first prototype has been implemented and applied in an informative user study we released an improved version to the public on the android market. Within 17 days 244 users have generated more than 990 product descriptions and cross checked product data 1230 times. These results show the potential of generating an open product repository by motivating users with a game approach related to social network games.
The sharing of academic knowledge through printed publications has been widely and successfully utilized for more than a hundred years. However, the need to process huge amounts of data in scientific analysis and communicate its results to the scientific community has presented a big challenge for researchers in the data-intensive era. In addition to providing accurate and flexible graphical representations of data, the entire research process should ideally be made verifiable by peers. While web-based tools have been proposed to address this problem, most of them lack important features for scientific work such as real-time collaboration, powerful multimedia visualization and interaction, and environment persistency. Therefore, in this paper, we will propose the use of virtual world technology to address these issues. In particular, we will give an overview of the different methods that we have implemented in the context of multimedia interaction, which is considered the most critical factor in the development of virtual worlds as sound platforms for human-centered multimedia systems.
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