The particular characteristics and opportunities of mobile services

digital services ‘anytime, anywhere’. Mobile devices, especially smartphones and tablets, serve today as a multipurpose tool in the everyday life practices of the people, who use them practically in every aspect of their life, such as at home, at work, when they travel, in their social interactions, in their leisure time, etc. This way, mobile devices become the epicenter of people’s life and affect the lifestyle, the behavior and the mentality of the people. In addition, they become increasingly powerful and feature-rich due to hardware and software advances and their computing and sensing capacities make the environment more informative and interactive.

The use of mobile devices today is the most simple and natural way to provide a variety of services (‘mobile services’) to the user today. We consider mobile services as services that can be accessed and used with the use of mobile devices, with the support of mobile technologies and through mobile networks.

Mobile services support a wide spectrum of human activities, including social interaction, entertainment, learning, healthcare, economic transactions, business operations, personal time management, data management, emergency services, etc.

In accordance with the origins and the meaning of the word ‘mobile’, the key characteristic of mobile services is that they can support the mobility of the user, as they can be delivered and used in different locations, practically ‘anywhere’, even when the user is on the move. Mobility can refer to people or objects, devices and applications (Bouwman, 2012); for instance, pervasive computing regards mobility from a technological point of view and refers to the idea of seamless integration across different platforms (Yu et al., 2013). Location information is now an integral part of a variety of mobile devices and ubiquity and localization of service provision become the key characteristics of mobile services (Heinonen and Pura, 2008). At a first level, mobile service provision can be simply related to the characteristics of the location (‘location-based services’), while at a next level mobile services can become adapted to the specific attributes of the location (‘location-aware services’) (Kaasinen, 2003).

Localization offers the opportunity for a wide array of applications for mobile services; Giaglis et al. (2003) provide taxonomy of location-based services.

Specific applications are related to navigation and way-finding services, geopositioning, tracking services and intelligent transport systems, mobile guides, emergency services, etc. (Raper et al., 2007; Yus, 2014). Recent trends in mobile services seek the combination of location information with other sources of information, such as from social networks, aiming to aim to support interaction with other people in mobile social networks or simply in proximity to the user (Higutchi, 2014).

The increased sensing capacity of mobile devices adds the possibility for the development of context-aware mobile services, which can recognize –beyond the location of the user– the prevailing physical and social conditions. Context aware services have the ability to utilize information about the user’s context to be adjusted to the circumstances and the needs of the user (Heinonen and Pura, 2008). The definition of context includes any information about the situation of an entity (a user, an application/service, a device, or a location), which is considered relevant for the interaction of the entity with other entities and with the digital world (Knappmeyer et al., 2013). Context information can be related to location, time, other elements of the physical environment (e.g.

temperature), elements of the technological environment (e.g. features of underlying technological infrastructure), attributes of the social environment (e.g.

relationships), and attributes of the user (individual characteristics, mental characteristics, preferences, activities, etc.) (Knappmeyer et al., 2013). With the increase of the sensing and the processing capacities of mobile devices, there is a big array of context-aware services that take into account one or more contextual parameters.

Context awareness is a key enabler for the development of ‘smart services’.

Smart services are delivered via ‘smart appliances', such as smartphones or wearables, which are able to sense their context (and their own condition, too) and respond proactively, preemptively and intelligently to specific conditions (Allmendinger and Lombreglia, 2005). The embedded computing and sensing capacities allow for real-time data collection, interconnectedness and interactive feedback. The growth of smart services increases with the development of ubiquitous and pervasive computing and the digitalization of life (Dermikan et al., 2015; Raychoudhury et al., 2013). Smart services nurture in ‘smart environments’ (e.g. smart home, smart office, smart city, etc.), i.e. areas that provide smart interaction between computational devices and the users (Knappmeyer et al., 2013). Smart services can also derive from intelligent recommendation systems that are based on peer reviews, past experiences of the users and sophisticated data analytics (Dermikan et al., 2015).

Mobile devices are usually strictly personal and, thus, they can be used for the delivery of personalized services. Thus, personalization in mobile services is based not only on the profile and the past usage of the user, but can take advantage also from the personal use of the mobile device. Personalization offers opportunities for the delivery of services that are customized and better targeted at the needs of the specific user (Gummerus and Pihlstrom, 2011).

Taking all these together, we conclude that mobile services have sui generis characteristics, that make them different from other e-services and physical-world services (Baldauf, Dustdar and Rosenberg, 2007). Therefore, mobile services have the potential to provide increased value for the user and boost service innovations. In sum, mobile services offer improved personalization, ubiquity, localization, convenience, personalization, flexibility and immediacy, which imply also higher value for the user (Verkasalo, 2009). Under certain circumstances, mobile services can provide new types of value (e.g. location-aware services), new ways for value configuration (e.g. real-time interaction with friends and other users who share the same context), rich experiences (e.g.

context-aware services that adapt to the situation of the user) and opportunities

for more added value (e.g. receiving service any time and especially at the moment it is needed). There are many business opportunities to develop mobile services that support better the daily life practices of the users (Morabito, 2014).

Fragidis and Konstantas (2015) provided an integrated view on mobile services that combines technological, usage and value aspects and described models of mobile service provision and the roles, the concerns and the activities of the different actors.

Mobile cloud computing has been developed as a solution to the certain limitations of mobile devices, especially with concern to resources and capacity.

Mobile cloud computing can boost the development of mobile services, as well as enable the development of entirely new types of services (Satyanarayanan, 2011) and become the dominant model for mobile applications in the future (Fernando, Loke, and Rahayu, 2013). In the literature we can find several examples of mobile cloud applications and services that refer basically to mobile crowdsourcing, collective sensing, pooling mobile resources and sharing applications between mobile devices (Fernando, Loke, and Rahayu, 2013;

Satyanarayanan, 2011).

The importance of mobile services is expected to increase further in the near future. Mobile services are related to a variety of technological trends that shape in common the ‘Future Internet’ (Conti et al., 2011). According to a recent GSMA report (2014), the world of 2020 is envisioned to offer a wide range of life-enhancing mobile services that will improve the quality of consumers’ lives and will provide the conditions for ‘connected living’. This way, people become

‘digital users’ (Brennner et al., 2014), who operate on the digital world, too. The real and the digital/ virtual worlds get mixed to form cyber-physical environments (Conti et al., 2012) or ‘direal worlds’ (Hess et al., 2014). In these environments, service provision should integrate people’s needs with the characteristics of the physical environment surrounding people and the elements of the virtual environments with which people interact (Huang, Xing and Wu, 2013). The combination of people’s needs, technologies and the natural, social and virtual environments, which form the service context, set unique requirements for the study and the design of service offerings and service systems. The traditional approaches seem incapable to address these challenges, because they stem from the industrial paradigm and adopt the business priorities (Hess et al., 2014), not the requirements of the users in the use of service in their personal lives.