Media

Many mobile applications retrieve content from remote servers via user generated queries. Processing these queries is often needed before the desired content can be identified. Processing the request on the mobile devices can quickly sap the limited battery resources. Conversely, processing user queries at remote servers can have slow response times due communication latency incurred during transmission of the potentially large query. We evaluate a network-assisted mobile computing scenario where mid-network nodes with “leasing” capabilities are deployed by a service provider.

Every business knows that the best customer is a happy customer. They return again and again, bring their friends and family, and deliver tons of free advertising via word of mouth and social media. But in order to grow that loyal base, you must be keenly aware of your customers' needs and preferences. Drawing on the latest research in the exploding field of positive psychology, Columbia Business School professor Bernd Schmitt offers three unique approaches any business can use to turning a casual customer into a committed fan:

We live in an "Information Age" of overabundant data and lightning-fast transmission. Yet although information and knowledge represent key factors in most economic decisions, we often forget that data, information, and knowledge are products created and traded within the knowledge economy. In Gurus and Oracles, Miklos Sarvary describes the information industry—the far-flung universe of companies whose core business is to sell information to decision makers.

Direct advertising—sending promotional messages to individual customers—is increasingly used by marketers as a result of the recent improvements in consumer reachability. Most current methods to calculate optimal budgets for such advertising campaigns consider customers in isolation and ignore word-of-mouth communication (WOM). When the customer base forms a network (as is the case in telecom or social network databases) ignoring WOM clearly leads to suboptimal advertising budgets. This paper develops a model to help address this challenge.

This article discusses the diffusion process in an online social network given the individual connections between members. The authors model the adoption decision of individuals as a binary choice affected by three factors: (1) the local network structure formed by already adopted neighbors, (2) the average characteristics of adopted neighbors (influencers), and (3) the characteristics of the potential adopters. Focusing on the first factor, the authors find two marked effects. First, an individual who is connected to many adopters has a greater adoption probability (degree effect).

Bill Grueskin, Ava Seave, and Lucas Graves spent close to a year tracking the reporting of on-site news organizations—some of which were founded over a century ago and others established only in the past year or two—and found in their traffic and audience engagement patterns, allocation of resources, and revenue streams ways to increase the profits of digital journalism.