International Journal of E-Business Research, 2014
ABSTRACT Emerging mobile application ecosystems have had a clear effect on the software business.... more ABSTRACT Emerging mobile application ecosystems have had a clear effect on the software business. Apple App Store and Google Play have gathered both existing large software companies and new start-ups. In creating a healthy ecosystem, the role of the software developer is significant. In practice, the ecosystems' ability to entice developers to create software products to the ecosystem can be argued to be a major factor driving the competitiveness of the ecosystem. This article empirically investigates Google Play, by gathering the data of 350,000 applications from the marketplace. With the dataset, common assumptions linked to the marketplace are studied. The results show that the direct software sale is a practical revenue model only for a few while offering a trial and paid version of the application seems to improve the revenue. The impact of the number of applications in the marketplace is questioned.
ABSTRACT Software business has been changing from a customer-driven project business to a more co... more ABSTRACT Software business has been changing from a customer-driven project business to a more concrete product business. This has also changed the conceptualizations related to software products and product development. Terms such as ‘modularity’, ‘standardization’ and ‘productization’ have been introduced to describe these changes. This study reviews different conceptualizations in creating software products and tries to identify the research gap that has been arisen from the change of the business. The study shows that the paradigm change to more market-driven products has introduced ambiguous terminology, which significantly overlaps with existing mature product development concepts. The study suggests that research should focus more on existing approaches in analyzing software products.
ABSTRACT Speech recognition technology has reached the maturity required by serious business appl... more ABSTRACT Speech recognition technology has reached the maturity required by serious business applications, and the game industry is increasingly adopting the technology. Since usability is one of the key elements of enjoyability and, thus, the successfulness of games, a thorough analysis of the elements, properties and effects of this new user interface is needed. However, there seems to be no existing speech interface usability analysis methods for computer games. A pragmatic and rigorous framework, which the game industry could easily adopt, could help the utilization of speech recognition technology. In this paper, we discuss the usefulness of voice recognition in games and propose usability heuristics for games utilizing speech recognition.
ABSTRACT Emerging mobile ecosystems have had a clear effect on the software product business. Mar... more ABSTRACT Emerging mobile ecosystems have had a clear effect on the software product business. Marketplaces such as Apple App Store and Google Android Market have gathered both existing large software companies and new start-ups. Furthermore, the competition of the ecosystem providers will increase in the near future. In creating a healthy ecosystem, the role of the software developer is significant. In practise, the ecosystems‟ ability to entice developers to create software products to the ecosystem can be argued to be a major factor driving the competitiveness of the ecosystem. By offering a platform that enables the developers to easily create software products, which can be easily monetized, makes the platform more approachable. In this paper, we investigate an emerging mobile ecosystem, Android Market, its developers and users by gathering the data of 339,861 applications from the marketplace. With the dataset, we study some common assumptions linked to the marketplace. The results show that the direct software sale to the customers is a practical revenue model only for a few developers. The impact of the size of a marketplace is questioned by the results. However, offering a trial and paid version of the application seems to improve the revenue. Furthermore, certain conventional assumptions of users' behaviour do not seem to hold.
Page 1. OR Spectrum (2008) 30:493513 DOI 10.1007/s00291-007-0108-1 REGULAR ARTICLE Selecting the... more Page 1. OR Spectrum (2008) 30:493513 DOI 10.1007/s00291-007-0108-1 REGULAR ARTICLE Selecting the nozzle assortment for a Gantry-type placement machine Csaba Raduly-Baka · Timo Knuutila · Mika Johnsson · Olli S. Nevalainen ...
Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, 2012
ABSTRACT Mobile application ecosystems have growth rapidly in the past few years. Increasing numb... more ABSTRACT Mobile application ecosystems have growth rapidly in the past few years. Increasing number of startups and established developers are alike offering their products in different marketplaces such as Android Market and Apple App Store. In this paper, we are studying revenue models used in Android Market. For analysis, we gathered the data of 351,601 applications from their public pages at the marketplace. From these, a random sample of 100 applications was used in a qualitative study of revenue streams. The results indicate that a part of the marketplace can be explained with traditional models but free applications use complex revenue models. Basing on the qualitative analysis, we identified four general business strategy categories for further studies.
International Journal of Production Research, 2010
Several production planning tasks in the printed circuit board (PCB) assembly industry involve th... more Several production planning tasks in the printed circuit board (PCB) assembly industry involve the estimation of the component placement times for different PCB types and placement machines. This kind of task may be, for example, the scheduling of jobs or line balancing for single or multiple jobs. The simplest approach to time estimation is to let the production time be a linear function of the number of components to be placed. To achieve more accurate results, the model should include more parameters (e.g. the number of different component types, the number of different component shapes, the dimensions of the PCBs, etc.). In this study we train multilayer neural networks to approximate the assembly times of two different types of assembly machines based on several parameter combinations. It turns out that conventional learning methods are prone to overfitting when the number of hidden units of the network is large in relation to the number of training cases. To avoid this and complicated training and testing, we use Bayesian regularisation to achieve efficient learning and good accuracy automatically.
International Journal of Computer Integrated Manufacturing, 2014
ABSTRACT Production planning and control of the printed circuit board (PCB) assembly includes sev... more ABSTRACT Production planning and control of the printed circuit board (PCB) assembly includes several decisions dealing with, for example, grouping of PCB jobs, allocation of PCB batches to machine lines, sequencing of batches and load balancing of lines. The production time of a PCB job for a given placement machine is a key factor in this context and it must be quickly and accurately estimated, possibly millions of times in a single planning task, to avoid erroneous decisions. The commonly used nominal tact time-based estimators are very rough and the machine simulators too slow. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to give better machine-specific estimators that avoid the construction the actual machine control program. Two new estimators are proposed for gantry machines, one based on the information given by the manufacturer about the operations of the placement head, and the other on the regularised least-squares regression method trained with a set of PCB placement jobs. In practical evaluation with 95 PCB jobs, the mean absolute percentage error of the first and second methods are 3.75% and 6.52%, respectively, while that of the tact time-based approach is more than 17%. This indicates a great potential of the proposed methods as production time estimators.
International Journal of Computer Integrated Manufacturing, 2005
Ordering of batches of printed circuit boards (PCBs) has a significant impact on the efficiency o... more Ordering of batches of printed circuit boards (PCBs) has a significant impact on the efficiency of the electronic component placement processes. Through PCB batch grouping we aim to minimize the total setup time between batches. Batch groups are formed so that each group can be handled with one component setup. The job grouping problem calls for a set of groups
The International Journal of Advanced Manufacturing Technology, 2013
ABSTRACT The present work studies the operation control of so-called collect-and-place component ... more ABSTRACT The present work studies the operation control of so-called collect-and-place component placement machines. These kinds of machines are suited for the flexible manufacturing of various printed circuit board products. These machines operate in cycles where a set of components is first collected from the component feeders to the vacuum nozzles of the component placement head. The head then moves on the circuit board and places the components to their appropriate locations. Different component types require the use of different nozzle types, but the placement head has only a limited capacity for nozzles. Hence, the ability to change nozzles every now and then allows the manipulation of a great variety of component types with the same machine. This is accomplished by storing a larger selection of nozzles in a separate nozzle magazine from where the nozzle collection of the placement head can be updated. The cost of changing the nozzle setup is, however, relatively large compared to the time costs of other operations in the placement cycle. What complicates things more is that the nozzle change cost is affected by the organization of nozzles in the magazine, too. The aim of this work is to determine the contents of the nozzle magazine in such a way that the change operation times are as small as possible. We develop two heuristics (a genetic algorithm and a swarm optimization algorithm) for this purpose and evaluate their performance on sample problems. Both heuristic approaches are capable of processing realistic production problems, in particular the genetic algorithm finds near-optimal results for small problem instances and outperforms clearly our other approaches for larger problems.
Weighted grouping problems are shown to have an equivalent reduced form, which is often considera... more Weighted grouping problems are shown to have an equivalent reduced form, which is often considerably smaller than the original problem. Although the reduction may be small for randomly generated problems, real-life problems often contain non-random properties that greatly increase the effect of reduction. We give an efficient algorithm to build the reduced problem instance, and analyse the expected amount of
This article considers a scheduling problem arising in flexible manufacturing systems. It is assu... more This article considers a scheduling problem arising in flexible manufacturing systems. It is assumed that a computer numerical control machine processes a set of jobs with a set of wearing tools. The tool magazine of the machine has a given capacity and each job requires some subset of tools. The goal is to minimize the average completion time of the
International Journal of E-Business Research, 2014
ABSTRACT Emerging mobile application ecosystems have had a clear effect on the software business.... more ABSTRACT Emerging mobile application ecosystems have had a clear effect on the software business. Apple App Store and Google Play have gathered both existing large software companies and new start-ups. In creating a healthy ecosystem, the role of the software developer is significant. In practice, the ecosystems' ability to entice developers to create software products to the ecosystem can be argued to be a major factor driving the competitiveness of the ecosystem. This article empirically investigates Google Play, by gathering the data of 350,000 applications from the marketplace. With the dataset, common assumptions linked to the marketplace are studied. The results show that the direct software sale is a practical revenue model only for a few while offering a trial and paid version of the application seems to improve the revenue. The impact of the number of applications in the marketplace is questioned.
ABSTRACT Software business has been changing from a customer-driven project business to a more co... more ABSTRACT Software business has been changing from a customer-driven project business to a more concrete product business. This has also changed the conceptualizations related to software products and product development. Terms such as ‘modularity’, ‘standardization’ and ‘productization’ have been introduced to describe these changes. This study reviews different conceptualizations in creating software products and tries to identify the research gap that has been arisen from the change of the business. The study shows that the paradigm change to more market-driven products has introduced ambiguous terminology, which significantly overlaps with existing mature product development concepts. The study suggests that research should focus more on existing approaches in analyzing software products.
ABSTRACT Speech recognition technology has reached the maturity required by serious business appl... more ABSTRACT Speech recognition technology has reached the maturity required by serious business applications, and the game industry is increasingly adopting the technology. Since usability is one of the key elements of enjoyability and, thus, the successfulness of games, a thorough analysis of the elements, properties and effects of this new user interface is needed. However, there seems to be no existing speech interface usability analysis methods for computer games. A pragmatic and rigorous framework, which the game industry could easily adopt, could help the utilization of speech recognition technology. In this paper, we discuss the usefulness of voice recognition in games and propose usability heuristics for games utilizing speech recognition.
ABSTRACT Emerging mobile ecosystems have had a clear effect on the software product business. Mar... more ABSTRACT Emerging mobile ecosystems have had a clear effect on the software product business. Marketplaces such as Apple App Store and Google Android Market have gathered both existing large software companies and new start-ups. Furthermore, the competition of the ecosystem providers will increase in the near future. In creating a healthy ecosystem, the role of the software developer is significant. In practise, the ecosystems‟ ability to entice developers to create software products to the ecosystem can be argued to be a major factor driving the competitiveness of the ecosystem. By offering a platform that enables the developers to easily create software products, which can be easily monetized, makes the platform more approachable. In this paper, we investigate an emerging mobile ecosystem, Android Market, its developers and users by gathering the data of 339,861 applications from the marketplace. With the dataset, we study some common assumptions linked to the marketplace. The results show that the direct software sale to the customers is a practical revenue model only for a few developers. The impact of the size of a marketplace is questioned by the results. However, offering a trial and paid version of the application seems to improve the revenue. Furthermore, certain conventional assumptions of users' behaviour do not seem to hold.
Page 1. OR Spectrum (2008) 30:493513 DOI 10.1007/s00291-007-0108-1 REGULAR ARTICLE Selecting the... more Page 1. OR Spectrum (2008) 30:493513 DOI 10.1007/s00291-007-0108-1 REGULAR ARTICLE Selecting the nozzle assortment for a Gantry-type placement machine Csaba Raduly-Baka · Timo Knuutila · Mika Johnsson · Olli S. Nevalainen ...
Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, 2012
ABSTRACT Mobile application ecosystems have growth rapidly in the past few years. Increasing numb... more ABSTRACT Mobile application ecosystems have growth rapidly in the past few years. Increasing number of startups and established developers are alike offering their products in different marketplaces such as Android Market and Apple App Store. In this paper, we are studying revenue models used in Android Market. For analysis, we gathered the data of 351,601 applications from their public pages at the marketplace. From these, a random sample of 100 applications was used in a qualitative study of revenue streams. The results indicate that a part of the marketplace can be explained with traditional models but free applications use complex revenue models. Basing on the qualitative analysis, we identified four general business strategy categories for further studies.
International Journal of Production Research, 2010
Several production planning tasks in the printed circuit board (PCB) assembly industry involve th... more Several production planning tasks in the printed circuit board (PCB) assembly industry involve the estimation of the component placement times for different PCB types and placement machines. This kind of task may be, for example, the scheduling of jobs or line balancing for single or multiple jobs. The simplest approach to time estimation is to let the production time be a linear function of the number of components to be placed. To achieve more accurate results, the model should include more parameters (e.g. the number of different component types, the number of different component shapes, the dimensions of the PCBs, etc.). In this study we train multilayer neural networks to approximate the assembly times of two different types of assembly machines based on several parameter combinations. It turns out that conventional learning methods are prone to overfitting when the number of hidden units of the network is large in relation to the number of training cases. To avoid this and complicated training and testing, we use Bayesian regularisation to achieve efficient learning and good accuracy automatically.
International Journal of Computer Integrated Manufacturing, 2014
ABSTRACT Production planning and control of the printed circuit board (PCB) assembly includes sev... more ABSTRACT Production planning and control of the printed circuit board (PCB) assembly includes several decisions dealing with, for example, grouping of PCB jobs, allocation of PCB batches to machine lines, sequencing of batches and load balancing of lines. The production time of a PCB job for a given placement machine is a key factor in this context and it must be quickly and accurately estimated, possibly millions of times in a single planning task, to avoid erroneous decisions. The commonly used nominal tact time-based estimators are very rough and the machine simulators too slow. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to give better machine-specific estimators that avoid the construction the actual machine control program. Two new estimators are proposed for gantry machines, one based on the information given by the manufacturer about the operations of the placement head, and the other on the regularised least-squares regression method trained with a set of PCB placement jobs. In practical evaluation with 95 PCB jobs, the mean absolute percentage error of the first and second methods are 3.75% and 6.52%, respectively, while that of the tact time-based approach is more than 17%. This indicates a great potential of the proposed methods as production time estimators.
International Journal of Computer Integrated Manufacturing, 2005
Ordering of batches of printed circuit boards (PCBs) has a significant impact on the efficiency o... more Ordering of batches of printed circuit boards (PCBs) has a significant impact on the efficiency of the electronic component placement processes. Through PCB batch grouping we aim to minimize the total setup time between batches. Batch groups are formed so that each group can be handled with one component setup. The job grouping problem calls for a set of groups
The International Journal of Advanced Manufacturing Technology, 2013
ABSTRACT The present work studies the operation control of so-called collect-and-place component ... more ABSTRACT The present work studies the operation control of so-called collect-and-place component placement machines. These kinds of machines are suited for the flexible manufacturing of various printed circuit board products. These machines operate in cycles where a set of components is first collected from the component feeders to the vacuum nozzles of the component placement head. The head then moves on the circuit board and places the components to their appropriate locations. Different component types require the use of different nozzle types, but the placement head has only a limited capacity for nozzles. Hence, the ability to change nozzles every now and then allows the manipulation of a great variety of component types with the same machine. This is accomplished by storing a larger selection of nozzles in a separate nozzle magazine from where the nozzle collection of the placement head can be updated. The cost of changing the nozzle setup is, however, relatively large compared to the time costs of other operations in the placement cycle. What complicates things more is that the nozzle change cost is affected by the organization of nozzles in the magazine, too. The aim of this work is to determine the contents of the nozzle magazine in such a way that the change operation times are as small as possible. We develop two heuristics (a genetic algorithm and a swarm optimization algorithm) for this purpose and evaluate their performance on sample problems. Both heuristic approaches are capable of processing realistic production problems, in particular the genetic algorithm finds near-optimal results for small problem instances and outperforms clearly our other approaches for larger problems.
Weighted grouping problems are shown to have an equivalent reduced form, which is often considera... more Weighted grouping problems are shown to have an equivalent reduced form, which is often considerably smaller than the original problem. Although the reduction may be small for randomly generated problems, real-life problems often contain non-random properties that greatly increase the effect of reduction. We give an efficient algorithm to build the reduced problem instance, and analyse the expected amount of
This article considers a scheduling problem arising in flexible manufacturing systems. It is assu... more This article considers a scheduling problem arising in flexible manufacturing systems. It is assumed that a computer numerical control machine processes a set of jobs with a set of wearing tools. The tool magazine of the machine has a given capacity and each job requires some subset of tools. The goal is to minimize the average completion time of the
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