MobileMarket The Social Advertisement Network

Abstract

In spite of the technological advances introduced lately into mobile phones, modern society still utilizes these appliances for the basic services of text messaging and voice calls. The ubiquitous nature of handsets is propitious for the development of innovative services that take advantage of the idiosyncrasies of the mobile environment. In order to examine the opportunities that new technologies bring, the thesis introduces a case study where a secondhand advertisement service for mobile phones (MobileMarket) was developed and evaluated. A prototyping approach was selected to perform the development and an ethnographic approach was chosen for the evaluation. The overall research question of the study is: “How can mobile applications that will succeed in contemporaneous society be developed?” Based on the analysis of related literature and systems, the development of MobileMarket, and empirically collected evidence from the evaluation of the service, the major findings of the study are synthesized in a taxonomy for mobile services, a set of design guidelines for mobile developments, as well as recommendations and requirements necessary in order to produce successful social mobile applications.