Stephan Karpischek

Mobile sales assistant: NFC for retailers

The Mobile Sales Assistant helps retailers and customers to check the availability of articles with any NFC enabled mobile phone at the Point of Sale. The application uses NFC tags attached to products or to warehouse shelves to identify the articles by Electronic Product Code (EPC). It sends a request containing EPC to a server application which is connected to the local and company-wide Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system. Information about the article is sent to the mobile phone display. This makes the shopping experience for the customer faster and more convenient.

Mobile Sales Assistant - An NFC-Based Product Information System for Retailers

The Mobile Sales Assistant (MSA) is a mobile product information system for retailers based on a combination of Near Field Communication (NFC) and the Electronic Product Code (EPC). The MSA aims at optimizing the sales process in retail stores. It enables shop assistants to check the availability and stock information of products directly at the Point of Sale (PoS) with an NFC-enabled mobile phone. Thus, shop assistants can inform their customers without letting them wait, which might increase customer satisfaction and sales. This paper presents a prototype, which has been implemented for a clothing department store, and evaluates its acceptance with a focus group of shop assistants.

my2cents — Digitizing consumer opinions and comments about retail products

Consumers seek for trusted advice during buying decision. Brand owners and retailers invest large sums in marketing and market research, trying hard to find out what customers really want. my2cents is a mobile application for reading and sharing comments and ratings on retail products. Consumers have access to comments about a product via their mobile phone and can share their own product experience with other consumers and within their social networks. They benefit from the experience of other consumers and trusted friends. Brand owners and retailers benefit from tracking consumer opinions and brand recognition at low cost. This paper describes the development of this application and first results from deployment in practice.

What Can the Internet of Things Do for the Citizen? Workshop at Pervasive 2010

Approximately 25 researchers from Europe, Asia, and the US discussed applications and new challenges of linking networked objects reporting about their state, location, and conditions to mobile phones, networked appliances, and devices. Reports of several research projects yielded a consensus that simply building platforms and tools is not enough for doing successful research. Instead, research should target larger user bases and aim for larger-scale evaluations. Accordingly, discussions emerged about how to drive user adoption of research prototypes, when development transits from research to service provision, and a new notion of privacy where users who share their own data are be granted access to services that build on this data. The overall conclusion was that users no longer communicate only with people but also are empowered to interact with objects. The IoT was seen to reach a tipping point of not only embracing corporate users but also approaching the everyday user.

A Maintenance System Based on Near Field Communication

Maintenance of critical emergency infrastructure is potentially lifesaving, but also expensive and tedious to document and track. In this paper we demonstrate a maintenance system based on Near Field Communication (NFC). NFC-enabled mobile phones and NFC tags are used to improve recurring maintenance processes: the maintenance task itself becomes more efficient; and the system facilitates real-time documentation, central process control and proof of presence at the checkpoints.

my2cents: enabling research on consumer-product interaction

Barcode scanners for smartphones enable mobile product-centric services for consumers. We have developed a mobile app that enables consumers to share their use of and opinions about products with their friends and others. Our goal is to establish a product-centric information stream generated by users to benefit other consumers and retail businesses and to enable large-scale research on consumer-product interaction. This paper describes our approach to create a sustainable service. We report first experiences and an initial evaluation after releasing the app to the public, give an overview over possible business models, and discuss some of the challenges we experienced during implementation.

Towards a better understanding of mobile shopping assistants: a large scale usage analysis of a mobile bargain finder application

Mobile shopping assistants have been subject to research in the field of ubiquitous and pervasive computing for many years. Now the wide adoption of mobile shopping applications for smartphones allows evaluation on a large scale. To study how consumers actually use these applications, we analyze server logs of a mobile bargain finder application for the iPhone used by 33,000 users over a period of six months. In this paper we discuss our approach, the methods we have used, and some challenges and limitations we have encountered. First results indicate that contrary to the focus of most research in the field the application is used rather from home than at the point of sale or on the go.

Towards location-aware mobile web browsers

Location Based Services (LBS) promise interesting business opportunities. Today, most LBS are either implemented in hardware devices, or downloaded and installed by mobile phone users as software applications. Both approaches lead to scattered markets and hinder standardization. This paper suggests an alternative approach, which is to enhance mobile web-browsers with location information and implement LBS at the server-side. We define the design space for the location enhanced mobile web and present an implementation of a location enhanced web browser for the currently predominant mobile phone operating system, i.e. Symbian S60.

Usage Analysis of a Mobile Bargain Finder Application

Mobile shopping applications for smartphones are popular among consumers. While mobile commerce research has focused on experimental prototypes and evaluation in small groups, only little is known about the real-world usage of these applications. Established tools and methods for analysis are missing. In this paper, we present the usage analysis of a mobile bargain finder application based on server logs of more than 98,000 users over a period of 6 months. We show that plots of the cumulative distribution function (CDF) are well suited to analyze the distribution of relevant parameters and present simple heuristics to identify active users. We can show that Pareto’s law applies to the distribution of user requests. We also propose metrics to measure usage focus and find that active users tend to become more focused with increased usage. Finally, we combine the results from the log analysis with demographics from an online user survey.

The not so unique global trade identification number: product master data quality in publicly available sources (extended abstract)

This paper provides an extended abstract. The full paper is currently under review for Electronic Markets journal.