• Asia pacific journal of information systems
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• v.22 no.3
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• pp.1-27
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• 2012

Many companies have recently become interested in using social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook as a new channel to communicate with their customers. For example, companies often offer "special deals" (e.g., coupons, discounts, free samples, etc.) to their customers who participate in promotions or events on social networking sites. Companies often make important announcements on their products or services on social networking sites. By doing so, customers are encouraged to continue to have relationships with companies on social networking sites and to recommend the companies' presence on social networking sites to other potential customers. Moreover, customers who keep close relationships with companies on social networking sites often provide the companies with valuable suggestions and feedback. For instance, Starbucks has more than 2 million followers on Twitter, and often receive suggestions and feedback for their product offerings and services from the followers on Twitter. Although companies realize potential benefits of using social networking sites as a channel to communicate with their customers, it appears that many companies have difficulty forging long-lasting relationships with customers on social networking sites. It is often reported that many customers who had followed companies on Twitter later stopped following them for various reasons. Therefore, it is an important issue to understand what motivates customers to continue to keep relationships with companies on social networking sites. Nonetheless, due attention has yet paid to this issue until recently. This study intends to contribute to our understanding on customers' intention to continue to follow companies on Twitter and to spread positive word-of-mouth about companies on Twitter. Specifically, we identify seven potential factors that customers perceive as important in evaluating their experience with companies on Twitter. The seven factors include similarity, receptivity, interactivity, ubiquitous connectivity, enjoyment, usefulness and transparency. We posit that the seven perception factors can affect the two types of satisfaction, emotional and cognitive, which can in turn influence on customers' intention to follow companies on Twitter and to spread positive word-of-mouth about companies on Twitter. Research hypotheses formulated in this study were tested with data collected from a questionnaire survey administered to customers who had been following companies on Twitter. The data was analyzed with the partial least square (PLS) approach to structural equation modeling. The results of data analysis based on 177 usable responses were generally supportive of our predictions for the effects of the seven factors identified and the two types of satisfaction. In particular, out results suggest that emotional satisfaction was strongly influenced by perceived similarity, perceived receptivity, perceived enjoyment, and perceived transparency. Cognitive satisfaction was significantly influenced by perceived similarity, perceived interactivity, perceived enjoyment, and perceived transparency. While cognitive satisfaction was found to have significant and positive effects on both continued following and word-of-mouth intentions, emotional satisfaction had a significant and positive effect only on word-of-mouth intention.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.21 no.4
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• pp.17-35
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• 2015

Demand forecasting is the activity of estimating the quantity of a product or service that consumers will purchase for a certain period of time. Developing precise forecasting models are considered important since corporates can make strategic decisions on new markets based on future demand estimated by the models. Many studies have developed market growth curve models, such as Bass, Logistic, Gompertz models, which estimate future demand when a market is in its early stage. Among the models, Bass model, which explains the demand from two types of adopters, innovators and imitators, has been widely used in forecasting. Such models require sufficient demand observations to ensure qualified results. In the beginning of a new market, however, observations are not sufficient for the models to precisely estimate the market's future demand. For this reason, as an alternative, demands guessed from those of most adjacent markets are often used as references in such cases. Reference markets can be those whose products are developed with the same categorical technologies. A market's demand may be expected to have the similar pattern with that of a reference market in case the adoption pattern of a product in the market is determined mainly by the technology related to the product. However, such processes may not always ensure pleasing results because the similarity between markets depends on intuition and/or experience. There are two major drawbacks that human experts cannot effectively handle in this approach. One is the abundance of candidate reference markets to consider, and the other is the difficulty in calculating the similarity between markets. First, there can be too many markets to consider in selecting reference markets. Mostly, markets in the same category in an industrial hierarchy can be reference markets because they are usually based on the similar technologies. However, markets can be classified into different categories even if they are based on the same generic technologies. Therefore, markets in other categories also need to be considered as potential candidates. Next, even domain experts cannot consistently calculate the similarity between markets with their own qualitative standards. The inconsistency implies missing adjacent reference markets, which may lead to the imprecise estimation of future demand. Even though there are no missing reference markets, the new market's parameters can be hardly estimated from the reference markets without quantitative standards. For this reason, this study proposes a case-based expert system that helps experts overcome the drawbacks in discovering referential markets. First, this study proposes the use of Euclidean distance measure to calculate the similarity between markets. Based on their similarities, markets are grouped into clusters. Then, missing markets with the characteristics of the cluster are searched for. Potential candidate reference markets are extracted and recommended to users. After the iteration of these steps, definite reference markets are determined according to the user's selection among those candidates. Then, finally, the new market's parameters are estimated from the reference markets. For this procedure, two techniques are used in the model. One is clustering data mining technique, and the other content-based filtering of recommender systems. The proposed system implemented with those techniques can determine the most adjacent markets based on whether a user accepts candidate markets. Experiments were conducted to validate the usefulness of the system with five ICT experts involved. In the experiments, the experts were given the list of 16 ICT markets whose parameters to be estimated. For each of the markets, the experts estimated its parameters of growth curve models with intuition at first, and then with the system. The comparison of the experiments results show that the estimated parameters are closer when they use the system in comparison with the results when they guessed them without the system.

• Asia Marketing Journal
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• v.14 no.2
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• pp.97-125
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• 2012

Companies recently introduce art collaborated products incorporating culture into a product. Art collaborated products include incorporating famous movies and/or design of an artist into a newly launched product. The introduction of art collaborated products are gradually increasing. However, research for this trend is relatively scarce. Although research concerning design has discussed a number of different factors as playing a role in influencing responses to design including culture, fashion, innate preferences, etc.), only limited attention has been paid to the processes by which consumers generate responses to product designs. People with different characteristics may respond differently. When people encounter these art products, they may become curious, may think that these products are unique, novel and innovative. People tend to show different levels of curiosity when they encounter new and novel objects, which they have rarely seen or experienced. Curiosity is defined as a desire for acquiring new knowledge and new sensory experience. Previous studies demonstrated that curiosity motivates individuals to engage in exploratory behaviors. People also show different levels of need for uniqueness, which is defined as being different from others or becoming distinctive among a larger group. Individual's need for uniqueness results from signals conveyed by the material objects that individuals choose to display. Recently, researcher have developed the need for uniqueness with three distinct constructs. These three concepts include creative choice, unpopular choice, and avoidance of similarity. Creative choice is a trait tendency of an individual by expressing or differentiating himself from others through consumptions of unique products. Unpopular choice is related to an individual's tendency to consume products, which deviates from group norms. Avoidance of similarity is linked to the avoidance of consumption behavior of products that are not famous. Past research implies that people with different levels of need for uniqueness show different motivational processes. Previous research also demonstrates that different customer emotions may be derived when consumers are exposed to these art collaborated products. Research tradition has been investigated three different emotional responses such as pleasure, arousal, and dominance. Pleasure is defined as the degree to which a person feels good, joyful, happy, or satisfied in a situation. Arousal is defined as the extent to which a person feels stimulated, active, or excited. Dominance is defined as the extent that a person feels powerful vis-a-vis the environment that surrounds him/her. Previous research show that complex, speedy, and surprising stimuli may excite consumers and thus make them more pleased and engaged in their approach behavior. However, the current study identified these emotional responses as positive emotion, negative emotion, and arousal. These derived emotions may lead consumers to approach and/or avoidance behaviors. In addition, males and females tend to respond differently when they are exposed to art collaboration products. Building on this research tradition, the current study aims to investigate the inter-relationships between individual traits such as curiosity and need for uniqueness and individual's emotional responses including positive and negative emotion and arousal when people encounter various art collaborated products. Emotional responses are proposed to influence purchase intention. Additionally, previous studies show that male and females respond differently to similar stimuli. Accordingly, gender difference are proposed to moderate the links between individual traits and emotional responses. These research aims of the current study may contribute to extending our knowledge in terms of (1) which individual characteristics are related to different emotions, and (2) how these different emotional responses inter-connected to future purchase intention of arts collaborated products. In addition, (3) the different responses to these arts collaborated products by males and females will guide managers how to concoct different strategies to these segments. The questionnaire for the present study was adopted from the previous literature and validated with a pilot test. The survey was conducted in Daegu, a third largest city in South Korea, for three weeks during June and July 2011. Most respondents were in their twenties and thirties. 350 questionnaires were distributed and among them 300 were proved to be valid (valid response rate of 85.7%). Survey questionnaires from valid 300 respondents are used to test hypotheses proposed. The structural equation model (SEM) was used to validate the research model. The measurement and structural model was tested using LISREL 8.7. The measurement model test demonstrated that consistency, convergent validity, and discriminat validity of the measurement items were acceptable. The results from the structural model demonstrate that curiosity has a positive impact on positive emotion, but not on negative emotion and arousal. Need for uniqueness has three different sub-concepts such as creative choice, unpopular choice, and avoidance of similarity. The results show that creative choice has a positive effect on arousal and positive emotion, but has a negative impact on negative emotion. Unpopular choice has a positive effect on arousal, but on neither positive nor negative emotions. Avoidance of similarity has no impact on neither emotions nor arousal. The results also demonstrated that gender has a moderating influence. Males show more negative emotion to creative and unpopular choices. Implications and future research directions are discussed in conclusion.

• Journal of Microbiology and Biotechnology
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• v.15 no.5
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• pp.1054-1059
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• 2005

An extracellular protease was identified from Bacillus subtilis KCCM 10257 by N-terminal sequencing and mass spectral analysis. The molecular mass of the extracellular protease was estimated to be 28 kDa by SDS-PAGE. Sequencing of the N-terminal of the protease revealed the sequence of A(G,S,R)QXVPYG(A)V(P,L)SQ. The N-terminal sequence exhibited close similarity to the sequence of other proteases from Bacillus sp. A mass list of the monoisotopic peaks in the MALDI-TOF spectrum was searched after peptide fragmentation of the protease. Six peptide sequences exhibiting monoisotopic masses of 1,276.61, 1,513.67, 1,652.81, 1,661.83, 1,252.61, and 1,033.46 were observed from the fragmented protease. These monisotopic masses corresponded to the lytic enzyme L27 from Bacillus subtilis 168, and the Mowse score was found to be 75. A doubly charged Top product (MS) at a m/z of 517.3 exhibiting a molecular mass of 1034.6 was further analyzed by de novo sequencing using a PE Sciex QSTAR Hybrid Quadropole-TOF (MS/MS) mass spectrometer. MS/MS spectra of the Top product (MS) at a m/z of 517.3 obtained from the fragmented peptide mixture of protease with Q-star contained the b-ion series of 114.2, 171.2, 286.2, 357.2, 504.2, 667.4, 830.1, and 887.1 and y-ion series of 147.5, 204.2, 367.2, 530.3, 677.4, 748.4, 863.4, and 920.5. The sequence of analyzed peptide ion was identified as LGDAFYYG from the b- and y-ion series by de novo sequencing and corresponded to the results from the MALDI-TOF spectrum. From these results the extracellular protease from Bacillus subtilis KCCM 10257 was successfully identified with the lytic enzyme L27 from Bacillus subtilis 168.

• Korean Journal of Cognitive Science
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• v.25 no.1
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• pp.25-49
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• 2014

Advertisement for one type of product competes against another type using different advertising strategies. It is important to know which factors influence people's perception of the message within the advertisement and their formation of attitudes towards the advertisement. Using multidimensional scaling, this study investigated what main factors were important when people perceive beverage advertisements on TV. A positioning map was constructed based on similarity ratings of 14 drink advertisements. We examined the meaning of the three dimensions of the positioning map by asking a different group of participants to rate on components of attention, attitudes toward advertisements and products, and intention to purchase the product in each advertisement. It was found that three dimensions in the map was attention to content, color, and motion respectively. More importantly, the attentional component to content was related to the attitude of affection and action toward a beverage introduced in advertisement. These results suggest that content-based attention in advertisements induces a positive attitude toward the advertisements.

• The Journal of Information Systems
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• v.29 no.3
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• pp.237-251
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• 2020

Purpose The research was studied the hierarchical Hangul emotion index by organizing all the emotions which SNS users are thinking. As a preliminary study by the researcher, the English-based Plutchick (1980)'s emotional standard was reinterpreted in Korean, and a hashtag with implicit meaning on SNS was studied. To build a multidimensional emotion dictionary and classify three-dimensional emotions, an emotion seed was selected for the composition of seven emotion sets, and an emotion word dictionary was constructed by collecting SNS hashtags derived from each emotion seed. We also want to explore the priority of each Hangul emotion index. Design/methodology/approach In the process of transforming the matrix through the vector process of words constituting the sentence, weights were extracted using TF-IDF (Term Frequency Inverse Document Frequency), and the dimension reduction technique of the matrix in the emotion set was NMF (Nonnegative Matrix Factorization) algorithm. The emotional dimension was solved by using the characteristic value of the emotional word. The cosine distance algorithm was used to measure the distance between vectors by measuring the similarity of emotion words in the emotion set. Findings Customer needs analysis is a force to read changes in emotions, and Korean emotion word research is the customer's needs. In addition, the ranking of the emotion words within the emotion set will be a special criterion for reading the depth of the emotion. The sentiment index study of this research believes that by providing companies with effective information for emotional marketing, new business opportunities will be expanded and valued. In addition, if the emotion dictionary is eventually connected to the emotional DNA of the product, it will be possible to define the "emotional DNA", which is a set of emotions that the product should have.

• International Journal of Industrial Entomology and Biomaterials
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• v.7 no.2
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• pp.133-137
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• 2003

Cells respond to an accumulation of unfolded proteins in the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) by increasing transcription of genes encoding molecular chaperones and folding enzymes. The information is transmitted from the ER lumen to the nucleus by intracellular signaling pathway, called the unfolded protein response (UPR). In Saccharomyces cerevisiae, such induction is mediated by the cis-acting unfolded response element (UPRE) which has been thought to be recognized by Hac1p transcription factor. We cloned the ATFC gene showing similarity with Hac1p, and then examined to determine whether ATFC gene product specifically binds to UPRE by electrophoretic mobility shift assays. ATFC gene product displayed appreciable binding ${to ^{32}}P-labelled$ UPRE. Therefore, we concluded that ATFC represents a major component of the putative transcription factor responsible for the UPR leading to the induction of ER-localized stress proteins.

• Journal of the Korean Applied Science and Technology
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• v.31 no.1
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• pp.92-100
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• 2014

Hydrophobic magnesium hydroxide [$Mg(OH)_2$] was modified by hydrothermal method using non-ionic sorbitol surfactant with Span series. Mganesium chloride [$MgCl_2$] and sodium hydroxide [NaOH] were used for synthesis of $Mg(OH)_2$. Also non-ionic surfactant were added as a stabilizer, dispersant and surface modifier. Addition of non-ionic surfactant was favourable to obtain small sized $Mg(OH)_2$ particles with better dispersibility and hydrophobic property of $Mg(OH)_2$ particles. The obtained product were characterized by particle size analysis(PSA), scanning electron microscope(SEM), energy dispersive spectroscopy(EDS), x-ray diffraction(XRD) and fourier transform infrared spectroscopy(FT-IR). The results show that the product are prepared with this method has a well hydrophobic properties and dispersity compared with unmodified $Mg(OH)_2$ particles. The improve properties of surface modified $Mg(OH)_2$ particles were also verified by similarity synthesizing under slightly different conditions.

• Journal of Korean Society of Industrial and Systems Engineering
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• v.43 no.2
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• pp.14-24
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• 2020

Google Trends is a useful tool not only for setting search periods, but also for providing search volume to specific countries, regions, and cities. Extant research showed that the big data from Google Trends could be used for an on-line market analysis of opinion sensitive products instead of an on-site survey. This study investigated the market share of tumor necrosis factor-alpha (TNF-α) inhibitor, which is in a great demand pharmaceutical product, based on big data analysis provided by Google Trends. In this case study, the consumer interest data from Google Trends were compared to the actual product sales of Top 3 TNF-α inhibitors (Enbrel, Remicade, and Humira). A correlation analysis and relative gap were analyzed by statistical analysis between sales-based market share and interest-based market share. Besides, in the country-specific analysis, three major countries (USA, Germany, and France) were selected for market share analysis for Top 3 TNF-α inhibitors. As a result, significant correlation and similarity were identified by data analysis. In the case of Remicade's biosimilars, the consumer interest in two biosimilar products (Inflectra and Renflexis) increased after the FDA approval. The analytical data showed that Google Trends is a powerful tool for market share estimation for biosimilars. This study is the first investigation in market share analysis for pharmaceutical products using Google Trends big data, and it shows that global and regional market share analysis and estimation are applicable for the interest-sensitive products.

• Biomolecules & Therapeutics
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• v.25 no.2
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• pp.171-176
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• 2017

Streptomyces avermitilis produces clinically useful drugs such as avermectins and oligomycins. Its genome contains approximately 33 cytochrome P450 genes and they seem to play important roles in the biosynthesis of many secondary metabolites. The SAV_7130 gene from S. avermitilis encodes CYP158A3. The amino acid sequence of this enzyme has high similarity with that of CYP158A2, a biflaviolin synthase from S. coelicolor A3(2). Recombinant S. avermitilis CYP158A3 was heterologously expressed and purified. It exhibited the typical P450 Soret peak at 447 nm in the reduced CO-bound form. Type I binding spectral changes were observed when CYP158A3 was titrated with myristic acid; however, no oxidative product was formed. An analog of flaviolin, 2-hydroxynaphthoquinone (2-OH NQ) displayed similar type I binding upon titration with purified CYP158A3. It underwent an enzymatic reaction forming dimerized product. A homology model of CYP158A3 was superimposed with the structure of CYP158A2, and the majority of structural elements aligned. These results suggest that CYP158A3 might be an orthologue of biflaviolin synthase, catalyzing C-C coupling reactions during pigment biosynthesis in S. avermitilis.