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This paper aims to set out to demonstrate the need for an integrated model that was titled, after the famous optical illusion (Hill, 1915), “Like My Wife and Mother-in-Law”, addressing three prevalent definitions of consumers’ communities: subculture, neo-tribe and brand community. It shows how it is only the use made of insights gleaned from all three that can faithfully describe the world of local and global meanings found in a computer game-based consumer community of children.

The analysis relies on a semiotic analysis of this computer game’s contents as well as on information obtained by a way of ethnography performed among group members, 9-11-year-olds. The combination of methods proves appropriate in tackling this model’s complexity, allowing to describe the interaction offered by the game, and the type of conduct attending it, online as well as offline.

Like the optical illusion where one can see two images in a single picture, this analysis shows that the participant children demonstrate complex, conflictual attitudes to the website’s effort to market subscriptions and products. Despite the game’s high popularity among children, a tension was identified between developers’ intentions and the game’s nature in practice.

Previous works seek to describe the experience of a given consumer community by opting for one of the three definitions. Unlike this approach, the author intends to show how the three-dimensional model offers a richer view of the consumers’ experience. Communicating this view may also prevent marketing misguided approaches when targeting consumer communities, based on a single-dimensional characterization of audiences.

President Bill Clinton has had many opponents and enemies, most of whom come from the political right wing. Clinton supporters contend that these opponents, throughout the Clinton presidency, systematically have sought to undermine this president with the goal of bringing down his presidency and running him out of office; and that they have sought non‐electoral means to remove him from office, including Travelgate, the death of Deputy White House Counsel Vincent Foster, the Filegate controversy, and the Monica Lewinsky matter. This bibliography identifies these and other means by presenting citations about these individuals and organizations that have opposed Clinton. The bibliography is divided into five sections: General; “The conspiracy stream of conspiracy commerce”, a White House‐produced “report” presenting its view of a right‐wing conspiracy against the Clinton presidency; Funding; Conservative organizations; and Publishing/media. Many of the annotations note the links among these key players.

The curve construction on surfaces is becoming more and more important in computer-aided design (CAD), computer graphics (CG) and the other related fields. This problem is often encountered in NC machining, tool path generation, automated fiber placement and so on. However, designing curves on curved surfaces is quite different from constructing a curve in Euclidean space. Therefore, the traditional methods of curve design are not suitable for constructing a continuous curve on surface. The authors need to perform interpolation directly on surface so that the final target curve is embedded into the given surface and also meets the continuous conditions.

Firstly, adopting a series of Hermite blending functions, the authors design a space curve passing the given knots on the point-cloud surface. Then, the authors construct a class of directrixes that are adopted to determine vector fields for projection. Finally, a complete G2 continuous curve embedded in point-cloud surfaces is constructed by solving the first-order ordinary differential equations (ODEs).

The authors’ main contribution is to overcome the problem of constructing G¹ and G² continuous curves on point-cloud surfaces and the authors’ schemes are based on the projection moving least square (MLS) surfaces and traditional differential geometric.

Based on the framework of projection MLS surfaces, a novel method to overcome the problem of constructing G² continuous curves on point-cloud surfaces is proposed.

Two key factors in the success of general-purpose computing platforms are the creation of a technical standards architecture and managing an ecosystem of third-party suppliers of complementary products. Here, we examine Symbian Ltd., a startup firm that developed a strong technical architecture and broad range of third-party complements with its Symbian OS for smartphones. Symbian was shipped in nearly 450 million mobile phones from 2000 to 2010, making it the most popular smartphone platform during that period. However, its technical and market control of the platform were limited by its customers, particularly Nokia. From 2007 onward, Symbian lost market share and developer loyalty to the new iPhone and Android platforms, leading to the extinction of the company and eventually its platform. Together, this suggests lessons for the evolution of a complex ecosystem, and the impact of asymmetric dependencies and divided leadership upon ecosystem success.

The purpose of this study is to investigate user perceptions of mobile app characteristics and interrelationships among identified mobile app characteristics, perceived benefits and post-adoption behaviors.

Using a self-administered online survey (n = 503) drawn from a consumer panel of US smartphone users, this study tests the proposed model that explains why stickiness and word of mouth (WOM) are enhanced during the post-adoption stage.

The results indicate that user perceptions of mobile app characteristics, perceived ubiquity, perceived informativeness and perceived personalization are positively associated with mobile app usefulness, thereby leading to increased stickiness and positive WOM intentions. Furthermore, perceived personalization is found to become the strongest predictor of usefulness and playful engagement with the mobile app.

The findings are derived from a one-shot correlational study. There is no guarantee that the proposed model establishes causal directions among the latent constructs. Therefore, future research should test the conceptual model in an experimental setting by manipulating the degree and types of ubiquity, informativeness and personalization.

The findings of this research provide managerial guidelines for developing effective mobile app strategies involving utilitarian and hedonic benefits, thereby enhancing user stickiness and WOM intentions.

This paper is the first attempt to develop a conceptual framework that integrates user perceptions of mobile app characteristics into the underlying process of post-adoption behaviors. It empirically demonstrates the importance of ubiquity, informativeness and personalization in building and sustaining loyal relationships with mobile app users.

This article provides a broad overview of telecommunications and network‐related technologies. Topics covered include identification and review of network elements, analog and digital signals, synchronous and asynchronous transmission formats, transmission media and equipment, transmission techniques and characteristics, multiplexing, network types, access technologies, network architectures and topologies, local‐area network technologies and attributes, protocols and protocol issues, gateways, internetworking, local networking alternatives, equipment certification, and various aspects of network management. It is intended to provide the practicing professional in the field of library and information science with a broad, up‐to‐date technical review that might serve to support and facilitate further investigation of current developments in networks and networking. Although the broad range of topics is not treated in depth, numerous references are provided for further investigation.