Towards business model and technical platform for the service oriented context-aware mobile virtual communities

Pravin Pawar, Julien Subercaze, Pierre Maret, Bert-Jan van Beijnum, Dimitri Konstantas
2008 2008 IEEE Symposium on Computers and Communications  
Owing to the recent technical advances in the computing and mobile communications domain, the world of online virtual communities is experiencing a phenomenal growth and ever-increasing popularity. However, the focus of existing virtual communities is centered on a particular product or social interaction and the role of mobile devices is restricted to exchange a limited amount of contents. Herewith we envisage that the upcoming virtual communities will exploit the potential of social
more » ... n and context information to offer personalized services to its members and mobile devices will play a significant role in this process. As a step towards this direction, in this paper we propose a business model for the mobile virtual communities in which the mobile device takes on the role of a content producer and content consumer. Though there are a number of research issues which need to be addressed to realize such virtual communities, in this paper we focus on the service requirements, architecture and open source software implementation of a technical platform for the content producer and consumer mobile devices. The next phase of the technical platform is aimed at using context information of the community members for enhancing social interaction, services and product offering aspects. We present a case study of the proposed business model in the mobile healthcare domain.
doi:10.1109/iscc.2008.4625656 dblp:conf/iscc/PawarSMBK08 fatcat:yz4wwlbn3bebjjc2tdaabid22e