A taxonomy and business analysis for mobile web applications

Mobile web applications refer to web applications on mobile devices, aimed at personalizing, integrating, and discovering mobile contents in user contexts. This thesis presents a comprehensive study of mobile web applications by proposing a new taxonomy for mobile web applications, and conducting a business analysis in the field of mobile web applications. The thesis reviews the current surrounding environment for mobile web applications, namely, web 2.0 and 3.0, wireless communication technology, and Smartphone platform. The recent entry and success of Apple's iPhone greatly enhanced the public awareness of the Smartphone technology. Google's release of open-source Android platform and T-Mobile's deployment of Android-powered "Dream" Smartphone not only intensify the competition among suppliers, but also provide an open-source foundation for mobile web applications. This thesis introduces a new mobile web application taxonomy to systematically study the values and the groupings of the mobile web applications. By introducing features and categories, the taxonomy provides a framework so the related companies and businesses can be comparatively analyzed and summarized. Selected case companies are studied in the light of the taxonomy. The thesis discusses the key issues of mobile web aggregation, namely, mobile application development platform, context modeling, mobile user interface, mobile application logic, and mobile web aggregation strategy.

Department dc:contributor.department

System Design and Management Program.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2009

Author dc:creator

• Liu, Kevin H

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Stuart E. Madnick.

• System Design and Management Program.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/47870

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/47870