Information Communication

Page 1. 235 Best Price Guarantee Clauses: French Riviera Hotels versus Web Based Intermediaries Chiheb Ben Mahmoud Fr6d6ric Dimanche Center for Tourism Management CERAM European School of Business, Sophia Antipolis, France chiheb.ben-mahmoud@ceram, ...

This study uses pattern language theory in order to identify patterns of tourists’ interactions within their social networks while they are experiencing tourism destinations. The patterns were conceptualized from sequences of tourists’ stories and observers’ field notes through narrative analysis. The identified patterns were then organized into a typical scenario of tourism experiences. The Mobile 2.0 platform is then characterized as an interactive mediascape that mediates tourists in situ.

Page 1. An Experimental Usability Study for Augmented Reality Technologies in the Tourist Sector Aurkene Alzua-Sorzabaf Maria Teresa Linaza'' Marina Abad' " Faculty of Humanities, San Sebastian Campus Deusto University ...

Experiences in applying results from ECOLEAD on Collaborative Networked Organisations (CNOs) in real life have shown that the maturity level of SMEs (Small and Medium Enterprises), who joined these networks, are highly different. Soon it was found out that there are different process areas in which SMTEs have strengths and weaknesses. This paper will introduce the essential process areas which should be assessed by standardised and well established assessment methods to be able to establish improvement programs out of the results. The process areas and the assessment methodology are derived from CMMI, which is nowadays the prevailing assessment method in the software development area. Typical tourism domain specific process areas are Quality Management, Yield Management, Human Resource Management, Product Development, and eCommerce. While classical process areas of CMMI (Capability Maturity Model Integrated) will be analyzed insofar, if they are appropriate for CNOs and how they should be extended or modified.

This paper describes a real-time system for human detection, tracking and motion analysis. The system is an automated video surveillance system for detecting and monitoring people in both indoor and outdoor environments. Detection and tracking are achieved through several steps: First, we design a robust, adaptive background model that can deal with lightning changes, long term changes in the scene and objects occlusions. This model is used to get foreground pixels using the background subtraction method. Afterwards, noise cleaning and object detection are applied, followed by human modeling to recognize and monitor human activity in the scene such as human walking or running.

Evidence from the US General Social Surveys (GSS) suggests that during the past 20 years, people have become increasingly socially isolated and their core discussion networks have become smaller and less diverse. One explanation offered for this trend is the use of mobile phones and the Internet. This study reports on the findings of a 2008 survey that replicates and expands on the GSS network methodology to explore the relationship between the use of new technologies and the size and diversity of core networks. The findings conflict with the results of the 2004 GSS, i.e. we find that social isolation has not increased since 1985. However, the current study supports the conclusions that the size of core networks has declined and the number of nonkin in core networks has diminished. Mobile phone and Internet use, especially specific uses of social media, were found to have a positive relationship to network size and diversity. In discussing these trends, we speculate that specific social media provide for a ‘pervasive awareness’ within personal networks that has increased the specialization of close ties. We argue that this same pervasive awareness provides for heightened surveillance of network members, the result of which is a higher level of perceived diversity within networks based on metrics that include political affiliation.

An effective website is vital for a hotel to strengthen its customer relationships and harvest online sales. Yet despite the proliferation of hotel website studies, research seems to have under-emphasised a fundamental first step, the development of valid and reliable constructs and features for evaluating websites. Based on a literature review, expert judgement and in-depth interviews, this study proposes a framework for evaluating hotel websites. The results are five dimensions of website quality — information and process, value added, relationships, trust, and design and usability — reflected by 74 websites features. The paper closes with a proposed process for developing a website evaluation framework and future research opportunities.

Children and young people encounter a range of risks on the internet relating to communication. Making friends online has attracted particular attention as a risky behaviour, especially when this leads to offline meetings, as has giving out personal information online. This article, based on the 'UK Children Go Online' survey, seeks to explain the online communication of 9-19-year-olds in terms of their offline socio-psychological characteristics (shyness, life satisfaction, risk-taking), family communication patterns and online behaviour/skills. Findings show that older teens engage in more online communication activities than do younger children and so encounter more communication risks. Although girls communicate more on the internet, this seems not to put them more at risk. It was found that children's offline social psychological characteristics, particularly their levels of life satisfaction and risk-taking, influence their online communication, with different online communication activities being predicted by different patterns of off- and online characteristics. There are weak indications that, in families which have a more conversational style of communication, teens may take fewer risks online, including a lower likelihood of meeting online friends offline. Multiple regression analyses show that those children and teens who are less satisfied with their lives and who have become more frequent and skilled internet users are more likely to value the internet as a communicative environment in which they feel more confident than they do offline, particularly in relation to the potential for anonymous communication. Since this in turn leads some into risky activities, the implications for research and policy are discussed.

... likely to recruit customers via face-to-face channels, rather than via a phone call ... Two other general assertions about the impact of mobile use on MSE value systems receive less ... Indeed three of the papers focus specifically on middlemen, wholesalers or traders as enterprises, [2 ...

Trends in international development cooperation point to the increasing networking of initiatives and programmes, facilitated by information and communications technology (ICT). This allows many more people and organizations from around the world to contribute to a given ...