In recent years, we have seen the rise of Web 2.0, in which users become co-creators and software turns into services. During the last two years, we have also witnessed the phenomenal success of Apple’s App Store for which people produce the applications and can also create business of them. While the technologies and business services related to these phenomena have been studied separately, we suggest that the underlying digital ecosystem that ties them together has not been made explicit. In this paper, we provide a conceptual model of a digital ecosystem for understanding how companies can co-create business with people. To construct such a model, we use multiple case study approach and explore two cases: an ecosystem around smart phone application market App Store and an ecosystem around bioinformatics service registry BioCatalogue. Our results suggest that the required technical solutions and business services are now available. However, to make business flourish, the orchestration of the overall ecosystem is also essential and needs to be taken care of.
Human factors research has shown that automation is a mixed blessing. It changes the role of the human in the loop with effects on understanding, errors, control, skill, vigilance, and ultimately trust and usefulness. We raise the issue that many current mobile applications involve mechanisms that surreptitiously collect and propagate location information among users and we provide results from the first systematic real world study of the matter.Our observations come from a case study of Jaiku, a mobile microblogging service that automates disclosure and diffusion of location information. Three user groups in Finland and California used Jaiku for several months. The results reveal issues related to control, understanding, emergent practices, and privacy. The results convey that unsuitable automated features can preclude use in a group. While one group found automated features useful, and another was indifferent toward it, the third group stopped using the application almost entirely. To conclude, we discuss the need for user-centered development of automated features in location-based services.
In recent years, we have seen the rise of Web 2.0, where users become co-creators and software turns into services. While Web 2.0 technologies and concepts have been studied separately, we suggest that the digital ecosystem they form together and the ways in which users interact with it in social contexts have not been made explicit. In this paper, we provide a conceptual model of a community and a digital ecosystem for boosting user-driven service business. To construct such a model, we first identify the key actors and their interactions by applying use case modelling. Based on that, conceptual modelling is used to sketch an illustrative model of the overall ecosystem. Finally, we use the field of bioinformatics to evaluate the model and to propose ideas for boosting user-driven service business in that field as well.
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