Special Issue of Personal and Ubiquitous Computing: Papers from the Fourth International Conference on Mobile Business

The papers in this Special Issue particularly focus on the area of Business-to-Consumer Mobile Business. This issue of Personal and Ubiquitous Computing contains papers presented at the Fourth International Conference on Mobile Business (ICMB05) which was held in Sydney, Australia, 11–13 July 2005 and related papers. Eight of the contributions are extended versions of papers from ICMB05 and a further two papers are invited and peer-reviewed issue related papers. How the emerging Business-to-Consumer Mobile Business field will evolve is of great interest to the research community and to industry alike. However, a large number of disparate factors will affect which services will emerge and be widely adopted. Such factors include emerging mobile device capabilities and usability, perceived and actual security and privacy support, the economics of service provision and usage, future trends in content development, emerging network and provider capabilities and the role and place of mobile marketing amongst many others. The first two papers in the issue look at systems for close-range mobile interaction and advertising. The paper by Rashid, Coulton and Edwards presents a system for Location Based Advertising based on Bluetooth technology. The second paper by Moors, Mei and Salim describes a system for selectively controlling the functionality of mobile devices e.g., disabling mobile phone ringing in certain environments, via short-range communications capabilities. The next two papers examine different mobile interface issues. The paper by Chehimi, Coulton and Edwards considers current device constraints and probable future developments in the area of 3D mobile games (games with 3D graphics interfaces for use on mobile devices). The paper by Michelis, Resatsch, Nicolai and Schildhauer considers non-screen based interaction with mobile devices, particularly audible interfaces. The following two papers consider technical issues for mobile device connectivity. The paper by AliVehmas and Luukkainen considers enabling Push-toTalk capability over cellular networks. The next paper by Lin, Dillon and Wong considers a dynamic buffer size approach to enable more dependable location-aware information retrieval in a pervasive environment. The remaining four papers analyze adoption of mobile services from several perspectives. Mallat, Rossi, Tuunainen and OOrni consider study results from mobile ticketing adoption. The next paper by Koivumaki, Ristola and Kesti analyzes the effect of such factors as the familiarity of the mobile device, the duration of service use and user’s technology skills on mobile service usage experience and likelihood of continuous use. The paper by Wong and Hsu proposes a confidencebased framework for analyzing Business-to-Consumer, Mobile Commerce adoption. Finally, the paper by Heikkinen and Still analyzes the development of new mobile services from the perspective of business networks. R. Steele (&) Faculty of Information Technology, University of Technology, PO Box 123, Broadway, Sydney, NSW 2007, Australia e-mail: rsteele@it.uts.edu.au