Thirsty Rock

Stuck with your JPOS-EE database installation? Beanshell dies at launch or fails to resolve class names? The small Java utility below (written in the Eclipse environment) may just be the answer to your woes. Before you dive into Java code you may want to complete the following steps: i. Download EasyPHP (WAMP server) and create a database called jposee . ii. Start mysql and apache servers Start Eclipse. Create a new Java Project: File->New->Project . Select " Java " in the category list. Select " Java Project " in the project list. Click " Next ". Enter a project name into the Project name field, for example, " JPOS-dbmaker ". Click " Finish "--It will ask you if you want the Java perspective to open. (You do.) Create a new Java class: Click the " Create a Java Class " button in the toolbar. (This is the icon below ...

One in very five humans has a phone in their pocket. Yet only five companies in the world account for the GSM chipsets found in all GSM phones around the globe. Of these, more than half are powered by technologies developed by one company: ST/Ericsson. Such is the death grip on the mobile handset market by a handful of companies that there is little incentive to innovate around the GSM chip, the baseband processor. Any innovation would meet with some steep challenges. For starters, programming information (API) for the chip is a very closely guarded secret . This secrecy guarantees licensing fees to the G5 for the GSM protocol stack software. Hardly surprising that smart phones, which boast a second (more 'open') application processor, enjoy more creativity than their drab cousins the feature phones. Closed proprietary GSM hardware implementations could also be responsible for the rapid loss in market share to the new kids on the block - Android and the iPhone.

Nam Yong, CEO of the third largest mobile phone manufacturer LG Electronics, offered his resignation 17 Sept 2010 barely a week after the exit of Nokia CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo. The two executives are victims of a combined onslaught from Apple and Google. The latter grew its market share by 1500% selling almost 11 million handsets by Q2 2010 from only 0.8 million in Q2 2009. Android is on target to unseat the Blackberry (Research in Motion) from the #2 slot by the close of 2010.

Back in 2004, NTT DoCoMo introduced the first mobile wallet. DoCoMo is a spin-off of Nippon Telephone and Telegraph (NTT), the largest telecommunications carrier in Japan. Named Osaifu-Keitai which literally means 'Wallet Mobile', the wallet is based on the FeliCa integrated circuit developed by Sony. FeliCa is a smart card and is the de facto card standard in Japan. NTT DoCoMo fully integrates the chip into phone handsets thereby extending mobile device functionality to include payments. The chip communicates with contact-less readers such as POS equipment, parking meters and train ticketing kiosk to effect payment. While Osaifu-Keitai is a product of bringing together an array of players, other wallets are sponsored by either a bank, operator or a combination of both. Mobile operators typically favour SIM-based wallets. All the functionality is embedded onto the Subscriber Identity Module. The application is pre-loaded or provisioned over the air and the database is main...

A cursory look at mobile banking systems launched in the last five years provides interesting insights. The products on offer range from bank led initiatives such as Wizzit (South Africa), through 50/50 bank-operator JVs of which MobileMoney (Standard Bank, MTN - South Africa) is a good example to operator centric solutions led by SMART Money (Smart Communications - Philippines) and M-Pesa (Safaricom - Kenya). Although information around subscriber numbers, revenue per user and transaction volumes is generally unavailable there are rough estimates in the public domain. How do the numbers stack up? The top performers in terms of subscription are M-Pesa (7 mil), SMART (7 mil) and G-Cash at 1.5 million. All three services are bank agnostic. At the bottom of the table are the bank-led and JV solutions: Wizzit (200k est.) and MobileMoney (150k, 2007 estimate). Why is there such a staggering difference in subscriber numbers between bank-led solutions and those underpinned by MNOs? One...

Initiating a remote payment from a mobile phone is trivial. The most basic of handsets can utilise SMS or USSD access channels to initiate the payment process. In other words roughly 4 billion people around the world can potentially initiate a mobile payment. The question is: how does the recipient convert electronic money into physical bills? Traditional cash withdrawal channels such as ATMs and bank branch networks (which, globally, number around 1.5 and 0.5 million respectively) cannot cope with cash withdrawals triggered by mobile payment instructions. An alternative money dispenser should step in to cover for the increased demand. An unlikely contender to the ATM throne may be the humble cash till with the help of Point-of-Sales terminals. Cheap, lightweight and occupying limited real estate on the shop counter, the POS device is a perfect complement to the traditional till, eliminating the need for expensive automated cash dispensers. When merchants cash out through POS term...

There is growing interest within the financial and mobile communications communities in what some see as the next big application: Mobile Payments and Money Transfer (MMT). In the developing world mobile phones present a low cost opportunity for financial service providers; the devices are ubiquitous, inexpensive and free of costly maintenance. Compared to competing delivery channels such as EMV cards and ATMs, the mobile phone exacts the least cost on service providers. However, while the mobile phone is in everyone's pocket (well, almost), the most important commodity in any payment system which targets the under-banked is cash. As noted by Telco 2.0, cash is the crucial application in these cashless payment systems. Unlike mobile devices, cash redemption points are not ubiquitous. It is all very well to transfer funds from one mobile phone to another but the recipient must reserve the right to expunge real money from the system. To tackle this wicked problem network operato...

Less than four months after the launch of two social networking phones, Microsoft has withdrawn the mobile devices. Dismal device sales are the main reason for dropping the Kin I and Kin II. The European launch, slated for third quarter 2010, has also been cancelled. This is the second failed attempt by the Redmond firm to prise open the mobile phone market. In 2008 Microsoft acquired Danger Inc ., the company behind Kin, to get a foot onto the lower rungs of the mobile device manufacturing ladder. Like the Zune phone , Kin did not impress. Ironically, Andy Rubin a co-founder of Danger Inc. moved on to develop and sell the Android operating system to Microsoft's key competitor - Google. Android phones have outsold Kin by a long shot and are on track to challenge the iPhone's dominant position.

Most mobile phone manufacturers offer emulators to help developers with software tests. Java and C++ programming environments usually provide plug-in facilities for emulators . Products such as Pulsar go a step further to integrate and maintain the entire development space. Although emulators catch a fair amount of design and runtime errors, software behaviour on real phones is unpredictable. For most developers it is not financially feasible to test the behaviour of their mobile applications on all target platforms. To get around this obstacle some companies offer on-line services that allow for application testing on real devices. These services are often expensive. In software provided by phone manufacturers multiple instances of the emulator are invoked to simulate the behaviour of federated handsets. One solution is to run an instance of the application on a PC and set up a local communication channel with a real phone. A neat, inexpensive and elegant solution is availab...

Mobile Network Operators (MNO) seldom roll out GSM services in rural or sparsely populated communities. Average Revenue Per User (ARPU), CAPEX and OPEX determine which areas are serviced and those which are not. A small rural population of 2.000 can generate annual revenues around USD 48.000 (assuming ARPU of USD 2.00/month). Lets see how this compares with equipment cost. Equipment manufacturers do not publish price lists and almost all transactions are covered by Non Disclosure Agreements (NDA). However, by gleaning promotional materials it is possible to arrive at a good guestimate cost of a small BTS . To service a small subscription base of 2.000 you require an investment of about USD 90/subscriber (USD 90.000 per transceiver (TRX) including connectivity to the core network - BSC and MSC). About 70% of this cost is infrastructure related: air conditioning, security, generator sets, sleeping quarters, civil works etcetera. The cost of active elements (electronics) is roughly US...

Sedmak, M. and Longhurst, P. (2010) Business Process Management Journal, Vol 16(4), pp 76 - 91 This paper discusses research design choices available to enterprise systems researchers from a social science perspective. The overall approach is relevant to most IS systems research as it unpacks the different layers including the researchers notion of reality (epistemology), theory building (variance and process theory), research approach, strategy and the method of inquiry (survey, experiment, case study and grounded theory). The authors also discuss techniques for data collection as well as researcher involvement in the research setting (immersed, external or participant). From the onset the paper acknowledges the complexity of information systems research and highlights the problematic distinction between closing an IS project and going 'live'. A second hurdle for a novice researcher is the absence of standardised terminology within the research community. While the third ...

In 2008 Jerome Kerviel, a French national, was formally charged with the trading incident in which Société De Générale lost close to € 5 billion. Jerome held pole position as the greatest rogue trader to tread the earth. Until Bernard Madoff turned up. Last week Fabrice Tourre, believed to be the architect of the sub-prime mortgage mess, took leave to wait out an SEC probe into privileged hedging aided (and some say abetted) by Goldman Sachs . Mr Tourre is a French national. France has a history of producing some of the best brains in mathematics: Siméon-Denis Poisson (1781-1840), Joseph Fourier (1768–1830) and, of course, Pierre-Simon Laplace (1749 – 1827). Concocting complex derivatives demands a high aptitude for numbers, a trait shared by Monsieur Kerviel and Tourre. We haven't seen the last of French mathematicians brewing complex algorithms.

Microsoft on Monday (12 April 2010) unveiled two new smart phones aimed at teenagers. The low cost phones target the bottom of the smart phone pyramid where Research In Motion's Blackberry rules supreme. Both phones (Kin One and Kin Two) have a touch screen and are wired for social networking (Facebook, Tweeter and MySpace) where teenagers like to hang out. The following Tuesday saw Nokia showcase the C3, E5 and C6 phones, aimed at the world's bottom billion - the low tier CIA markets (China, India and Africa). Nokia's arsenal in the battle for mobile commerce is almost complete. Expect to see an upswing in M&A involving OEMs, MNOs and financial institutions later in the year.

Software developers are flocking to the mobile platform en masse lured by exponential growth in subscriptions that are fast approaching one billion. However, mobile phones present different challenges to PC software development. The most significant hurdle is size – both physical and virtual. Mass market handset typically sport 512 KB on-board memory, with 2 MB or more available on smart phones. Another challenge is security. Since data is transmitted over the air (using well known frequencies), rogue intrusions and interceptions are a real threat. Advanced encryption techniques only add to the another limitation of mobile phones – power. Network traffic places a huge demand on processors and therefore power consumption. Inelegant designs place limitations on application usage (hours). One final hurdle is choice of development environment. Developers are faced with a plethora of tools: Java ME, EclipseME, C++, Adobe Flash, QT and many others. Then add to that cocktail a slew of di...

Researchers (Ngai and Gunasekan (2007); Clarke (1992)) locate the discipline of Information Systems (IS) between computer science and social sciences. A study by Li et al (2009) which found that theories drawn from Psychology and Sociology inform 49% of research papers supports the hybrid nature of IS. A dearth of home grown theory in the IS discipline has sparked debate in major journals including MISQ, Information Systems Research and Communications of the AIM. Novice researchers are confounded by a lack of indigenous theory within IS depending instead on theories lifted from various reference disciplines. One of the main reasons for conducting any research is to increase the body of knowledge (Clarke, 2000). On this score alone IS has not fared well. Benbast (2008) argues that the propensity for cohorts to use dominant theories such as the Technology Acceptance Model (Davies, 1989) and Innovation Diffusion Theory (Rodger, 1990) has meant that resources that could have been applie...

In most developing countries there are possibly many more mobile phone users than there are bank account holders. This ubiquitous nature of mobile terminals will position them as the preferred access point for ‘anytime, anywhere’ services (Cyr et al 2006). Yet, in spite of advancements in cellular technology such as increased bandwidth and packet switching (Lee et al 2003), researchers acknowledge that mobile communication technologies present new challenges for diffusion to both banks and users (Harker and Van Akken 2002; Sugai 2005). High penetration rates of mobile devices have not been matched by a high uptake in mobile commerce (Khalifa and Ning Shen 2008). That may change. At the recent GSMA Mobile World Conference held in Barcelona key industry heavyweights including Vodafone and Nokia signalled their intention to provide platforms for mobile banking. Many are motivated by the resounding success of M-PESA in Kenya. Researchers are keen to establish antecedents to the behavio...