Structural Analysis on Function, Content, and Industry of Mobile Services

Abstract

In the present decade, service industry has been expanding rapidly with service innovation. Firms earn money from services and services play a critical role in value creation process. In particular, mobile service innovation allows the development of the lucrative businesses and items. With the big bang innovation of smartphones, it is especially true that the mobile services, which are uploaded in Apples App Store or Googles Android, provide many service businesses. The mobile services extend the scope and depth of functions, contents, and industries of traditional services. An array of mobile services, such as banking, travel, hobby, traffic, and healthcare services, are provided from not only firms, but also consumers. Both firms and consumers are creating new service contents including various service functions, by incorporating numerous technical ways and developing many of which have not been previously possible. Thus, it is recognized that recent service industries are dominated by a new ecosystem of mobile services. Quite naturally, mobile services emerge as one of the critical actors in service industry innovation. In this circumstance, the main question arises as follow: can the mobile services based on mobile applications create a new academic field or new industry? This thesis tries to answer this question, Yes, they can do. Thus, as an exploratory and pioneering research, this doctoral thesis focuses on mobile services based on smartphone revolution to understand the structure of mobile services. To take a look at the structure of mobile service, three analytic issues are provided in terms of functions, contents, and industries of mobile services. For each issue, several methods are suggested, effectively providing impressive results of each part. A serial framework to the extent of functions, contents, and industries is proposed as well, to effectively identify the real-world situation of mobile service structure. Theme #1 focuses on exploring the structure of mobile service functions. Mobile services are considered one of the most opportune issues as the explosive growth of mobile applications has generated a myriad of service functions. In the converging mobile industries, various service functions in mobile applications offer ample commercial opportunities and enhance the availability of mobile technology. In response, this study aims to identify the dominant service functions and to explore structure of the service functions using a frequent pattern (FP)-tree algorithm. In this study, the FP-tree algorithm is utilized to extract information on the service functions of mobile applications in terms of two interesting factors: frequencies and associations based on the hierarchical structure. The dominant and auxiliary service functions are derived from a frequency-based analysis. Also, the convergence and divergence paths can be described as a form of service function tree in an association-based analysis. The types of service functions are also suggested based on the hierarchical structure. This paper is expected to provide users and developers with a useful method for understanding the current state of mobile service functions. Theme #2 aims to identify the structure of mobile service contents. The mobile service contents are analyzed and visualized to identify which mobile service contents are being developed and provided in detail. Using text information contained in web documents, the mobile service content is quantitatively and systematically analyzed through two steps. First, representative mobile service contents are identified to find distinctive and characteristic features of current mobile services in the App Store by using text-mining and the set-covering algorithm. Second, based on representative mobile service contents, three visual forms – grid, tree, and network – are illustrated to illuminate the trends of mobile service contents. Theme #3 represents the structure of mobile service industries. The traditional distribution of power in mobile sectors has significantly changed based on relations with the new actors, mobile service providers. Recently, the concept of a mobile ecosystem which embraces this environmental shift is highlighted. In this respect, this study aims to explore trends of the mobile industry ecosystem and to identify relationships of mobile industries based on mobile services. To be specific, the ecological relationships are proposed to take new roles and position of mobile service industries into account in the perspective of ecosystem. For this, the inter-industry analysis which includes the physical flows between industries is mainly used since ecosystem is operated by streamlining physical flows. As a result, we identified six roles for mobile industries and their relationships: commodity, landlord, controller, keystone, facilitator, and dominator. Regarding these ecological roles and relationships in mobile industries, strategic and policy implications are suggested to maintain a balance of the mobile ecosystem.