• International Journal of Computer Science & Network Security
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• v.22 no.3
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• pp.189-200
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• 2022

In today's digital world, smartphones and web-based applications have gained remarkable importance throughout the globe. These smart applications are playing a very significant role in maintaining a powerful business. As well as, they are helping a lot to expand these businesses via social networks. Social media networks such as Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn are playing a prominent role to promote the companies. In the hospitality sector, most of the companies are running their hotel booking systems by utilizing mobile applications and a web-based infrastructure, but usability issues still exist. This study has been conducted specifically to tackle the usability issues of hotel booking systems and the best utilization of social networks to promote the business. TripAdvisor was selected as an authentic source for selecting those systems and two international hotels are selected for this study. The first step is to identify different hotel booking systems. In the second step, the user's satisfaction level was measured for the selected systems by performing the System Usability Scale (SUS, Quick & Dirty) approach. Additionally, by which source (social media or personal relations) they found these hotels. It is found that the SUS rating for both systems is below the acceptable level of usability. The Mean SUS for hotel 1 is found at 55.25 and 51.2 for hotel 2. The third step was to identify the user interface (UI) issues, and heuristic evaluation is performed for this. The experts identified the UI issues on the basis of their experience. The major issues were related to the visibility of system status, error prevention, flexibility and efficiency of use. Depending upon the identified issues, an interactive UI (prototype) for the selected web-based applications was proposed. This prototype is mainly based on the user's perspective. This prototype can be used for improving the UI of the selected systems which is based on the user's perspective. During the process of verifying the satisfaction level, it is revealed that the targeted audience is not able to use these systems efficiently and effectively. The reason behind this is the negligence of usability guidelines throughout the process of design and development of these hotel booking systems. Therefore, it is highly recommended that the usability of these systems should be evaluated and redesigned, based on expert opinions. It has also been observed that the reviews/ feedback of customers has spread a negative impact through social networks.

• KSCE Journal of Civil and Environmental Engineering Research
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• v.26 no.4D
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• pp.671-678
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• 2006

In this study, to describe vehicle-structure dynamic interaction phenomena with 1/4 vehicle model, nonlinear Hertzian contact spring and nonlinear contact damper are adopted. The external loads acting on 1/4 vehicle model are selfweight of vehicle and geometry information of running surface. The constraint equation on contact surface is implemented by the Penalty method with stabilization and the reaction from constraint violation. To describe pitching motion of various vehicles two types of the displacement constraint equations are exerted to connect between car bodies and between bogie frames, i.e., the rigid body connection and the rigid body connection with pin, respectively. For the time integration of dynamic equations of vehicles and structure Newmark time integration scheme is adopted. To reduce the error caused by inadequate time step size, adaptive time-stepping technique is also adopted. Thus, it is expected that more versatile dynamic interaction phenomena can be described by this approach and it can be applied to various railway dynamic problems with low computational cost.

• Journal of the Korean association of regional geographers
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• v.4 no.2
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• pp.165-182
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• 1998

When tour site is being used by people for the destination of tour, it has a life, or it will lose its life as a tour site. Therefore this paper aims to, based on Butler's theory, has chosen 46 hot spring spots in Korea which are legally assigned and presently running, and tried to analyze the life cycles, the stage of dispositional characteristics, and visitors' favoritism, and to try to find activating method which is not decline. Out of 46 spots, 29 Places were found on the stage of development, which took high percentage, 4 were on the growing stage, 5 were on the mature stage, 5 were on the stagnation or decline stage and the rest 3 were on the stage of rejuvenation. Geographically, Korean hot springs were located on the plain or mountainous areas mostly, and less of them were on hills and coast lines. In water quality, most of places had simple water while the places with salt and sulfur contained water were marked low rate. The temperatures of hot spring water were variable between $25^{\circ}C{\sim}78^{\circ}C$, but the older hot springs were hotter than new ones. After observing the relationship between disposition characteristics and life cycles, the geographical locations and the matter of approach were found as majour influential factors to the life cycles of them. The type of mountainous areas were observed slow progress in life cycle, due to traffic problem, until the road expansion or pavement work were done. Meanwhile, the suburban ones adjacent to big cities were favored by hot spring tourists due to their easy approach and easy traffic. The new born hot springs with such conditions have shown the fast growth. As studied above, since the hot springs were supposed to be for recuperation and vacational, a hot spring with better recreational and accommodational facilities was more favored by tourists than the one with pretty interior decorations. It was because the tour purpose of people has been switched from single purpose to multi one. Thus, the suggestion for activating a declining hot spring and bringing people in them is to develop new and attractive tour resources, expanding the related area, maintaining good quality of water, developing a complex site for long-term tour, developed traffic routs, hot spring festivals, utilizing adjacent tour resources, preparing public water supply system, and assigning as special tour zone.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.22 no.1
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• pp.83-105
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• 2016

Measuring an individual's subjective wellbeing in an accurate, unobtrusive, and cost-effective manner is a core success factor of the wellbeing support system, which is a type of medical IT service. However, measurements with a self-report questionnaire and wearable sensors are cost-intensive and obtrusive when the wellbeing support system should be running in real-time, despite being very accurate. Recently, reasoning the state of subjective wellbeing with conventional sentiment analysis and unstructured data has been proposed as an alternative to resolve the drawbacks of the self-report questionnaire and wearable sensors. However, this approach does not consider contextual polarity, which results in lower measurement accuracy. Moreover, there is no sentimental word net or ontology for the subjective wellbeing area. Hence, this paper proposes a method to extract keywords and their contextual polarity representing the subjective wellbeing state from the unstructured text in online websites in order to improve the reasoning accuracy of the sentiment analysis. The proposed method is as follows. First, a set of general sentimental words is proposed. SentiWordNet was adopted; this is the most widely used dictionary and contains about 100,000 words such as nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs with polarities from -1.0 (extremely negative) to 1.0 (extremely positive). Second, corpora on subjective wellbeing (SWB corpora) were obtained by crawling online text. A survey was conducted to prepare a learning dataset that includes an individual's opinion and the level of self-report wellness, such as stress and depression. The participants were asked to respond with their feelings about online news on two topics. Next, three data sources were extracted from the SWB corpora: demographic information, psychographic information, and the structural characteristics of the text (e.g., the number of words used in the text, simple statistics on the special characters used). These were considered to adjust the level of a specific SWB. Finally, a set of reasoning rules was generated for each wellbeing factor to estimate the SWB of an individual based on the text written by the individual. The experimental results suggested that using contextual polarity for each SWB factor (e.g., stress, depression) significantly improved the estimation accuracy compared to conventional sentiment analysis methods incorporating SentiWordNet. Even though literature is available on Korean sentiment analysis, such studies only used only a limited set of sentimental words. Due to the small number of words, many sentences are overlooked and ignored when estimating the level of sentiment. However, the proposed method can identify multiple sentiment-neutral words as sentiment words in the context of a specific SWB factor. The results also suggest that a specific type of senti-word dictionary containing contextual polarity needs to be constructed along with a dictionary based on common sense such as SenticNet. These efforts will enrich and enlarge the application area of sentic computing. The study is helpful to practitioners and managers of wellness services in that a couple of characteristics of unstructured text have been identified for improving SWB. Consistent with the literature, the results showed that the gender and age affect the SWB state when the individual is exposed to an identical queue from the online text. In addition, the length of the textual response and usage pattern of special characters were found to indicate the individual's SWB. These imply that better SWB measurement should involve collecting the textual structure and the individual's demographic conditions. In the future, the proposed method should be improved by automated identification of the contextual polarity in order to enlarge the vocabulary in a cost-effective manner.

• Journal of the Korean Orthopaedic Association
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• v.55 no.4
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• pp.281-293
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• 2020

An anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) reconstruction is one of the most frequent surgical procedures in the knee joint, but despite the better understanding of anatomy and biomechanics, surgical reconstruction procedures still fail to restore rotational stability in 7%-16% of patients. Hence, many studies have attempted to identify the factors for rotational laxity, including the anterolateral ligament (ALL), but still showed controversies. Descriptions of the ALL anatomy are also confused by overlapping nomenclature, but it is usually known as a distinctive fiber running in an anteroinferior and oblique direction from the lateral epicondyle of the femur to the proximal anterolateral tibia, between the fibular head and Gerdy's tubercle. The importance of the ALL as a secondary restraint in the knee has been emphasized for successful ACL reconstructions that can restore rotational stability, but there is still some controversy. Some studies reported that the ALL could be a restraint to the tibial rotation, but not to anterior tibial translation. On the other hand, some studies reported that the role of ALL in rotational stability would be limited as a secondary structure because it bears loads only beyond normal biomechanical motion. The diagnosis of an ALL injury can be performed by a physical examination, radiology examination, and magnetic resonance imaging, but it should be assessed using a multimodal approach. Recently, ALL was considered one of the anterolateral complex structures, as well as the Kaplan fiber in the iliotibial band. Many studies have introduced many indications and treatment options, but there is still some debate. The treatment methods are introduced mainly as ALL reconstructions or lateral extra-articular tenodesis, which can achieve additional benefit to the knee stability. Further studies will be needed on the indications and proper surgical methods of ALL treatment.

• Asia-Pacific Journal of Business Venturing and Entrepreneurship
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• v.18 no.5
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• pp.91-107
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• 2023

Lean startup is a concept that combines the words "lean," meaning an efficient way of running a business, and "startup," meaning a new business. It is often cited as a strategy for minimizing failure in early-stage businesses, especially in software-based startups. By scrutinizing the case of a startup L, this study suggests that lean startup methodology(LSM) can be useful for hardware and manufacturing companies and identifies ways for early startups to successfully implement LSM. To this end, the study explained the core of LSM including the concepts of hypothesis-driven approach, BML feedback loop, minimum viable product(MVP), and pivot. Five criteria to evaluate the successful implementation of LSM were derived from the core concepts and applied to evaluate the case of startup L . The early startup L pivoted its main business model from defecation alert system for patients with limited mobility to one for infants or toddlers, and finally to a smart bottle for infants. In developing the former two products, analyzed from LSM's perspective, company L neither established a specific customer value proposition for its startup idea and nor verified it through MVP experiment, thus failed to create a BML feedback loop. However, through two rounds of pivots, startup L discovered new target customers and customer needs, and was able to establish a successful business model by repeatedly experimenting with MVPs with minimal effort and time. In other words, Company L's case shows that it is essential to go through the customer-market validation stage at the beginning of the business, and that it should be done through an MVP method that does not waste the startup's time and resources. It also shows that it is necessary to abandon and pivot a product or service that customers do not want, even if it is technically superior and functionally complete. Lastly, the study proves that the lean startup methodology is not limited to the software industry, but can also be applied to technology-based hardware industry. The findings of this study can be used as guidelines and methodologies for early-stage companies to minimize failures and to accelerate the process of establishing a business model, scaling up, and going global.

• Journal of Distribution Science
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• v.8 no.3
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• pp.49-56
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• 2010

At the initial stage of Internet advertising, banner advertising came into fashion. As the Internet developed into a central part of daily lives and the competition in the on-line advertising market was getting fierce, there was not enough space for banner advertising, which rushed to portal sites only. All these factors was responsible for an upsurge in advertising prices. Consequently, the high-cost and low-efficiency problems with banner advertising were raised, which led to an emergence of keyword advertising as a new type of Internet advertising to replace its predecessor. In the beginning of 2000s, when Internet advertising came to be activated, display advertisement including banner advertising dominated the Net. However, display advertising showed signs of gradual decline, and registered minus growth in the year 2009, whereas keyword advertising showed rapid growth and started to outdo display advertising as of the year 2005. Keyword advertising refers to the advertising technique that exposes relevant advertisements on the top of research sites when one searches for a keyword. Instead of exposing advertisements to unspecified individuals like banner advertising, keyword advertising, or targeted advertising technique, shows advertisements only when customers search for a desired keyword so that only highly prospective customers are given a chance to see them. In this context, it is also referred to as search advertising. It is regarded as more aggressive advertising with a high hit rate than previous advertising in that, instead of the seller discovering customers and running an advertisement for them like TV, radios or banner advertising, it exposes advertisements to visiting customers. Keyword advertising makes it possible for a company to seek publicity on line simply by making use of a single word and to achieve a maximum of efficiency at a minimum cost. The strong point of keyword advertising is that customers are allowed to directly contact the products in question through its more efficient advertising when compared to the advertisements of mass media such as TV and radio, etc. The weak point of keyword advertising is that a company should have its advertisement registered on each and every portal site and finds it hard to exercise substantial supervision over its advertisement, there being a possibility of its advertising expenses exceeding its profits. Keyword advertising severs as the most appropriate methods of advertising for the sales and publicity of small and medium enterprises which are in need of a maximum of advertising effect at a low advertising cost. At present, keyword advertising is divided into CPC advertising and CPM advertising. The former is known as the most efficient technique, which is also referred to as advertising based on the meter rate system; A company is supposed to pay for the number of clicks on a searched keyword which users have searched. This is representatively adopted by Overture, Google's Adwords, Naver's Clickchoice, and Daum's Clicks, etc. CPM advertising is dependent upon the flat rate payment system, making a company pay for its advertisement on the basis of the number of exposure, not on the basis of the number of clicks. This method fixes a price for advertisement on the basis of 1,000-time exposure, and is mainly adopted by Naver's Timechoice, Daum's Speciallink, and Nate's Speedup, etc, At present, the CPC method is most frequently adopted. The weak point of the CPC method is that advertising cost can rise through constant clicks from the same IP. If a company makes good use of strategies for maximizing the strong points of keyword advertising and complementing its weak points, it is highly likely to turn its visitors into prospective customers. Accordingly, an advertiser should make an analysis of customers' behavior and approach them in a variety of ways, trying hard to find out what they want. With this in mind, her or she has to put multiple keywords into use when running for ads. When he or she first runs an ad, he or she should first give priority to which keyword to select. The advertiser should consider how many individuals using a search engine will click the keyword in question and how much money he or she has to pay for the advertisement. As the popular keywords that the users of search engines are frequently using are expensive in terms of a unit cost per click, the advertisers without much money for advertising at the initial phrase should pay attention to detailed keywords suitable to their budget. Detailed keywords are also referred to as peripheral keywords or extension keywords, which can be called a combination of major keywords. Most keywords are in the form of texts. The biggest strong point of text-based advertising is that it looks like search results, causing little antipathy to it. But it fails to attract much attention because of the fact that most keyword advertising is in the form of texts. Image-embedded advertising is easy to notice due to images, but it is exposed on the lower part of a web page and regarded as an advertisement, which leads to a low click through rate. However, its strong point is that its prices are lower than those of text-based advertising. If a company owns a logo or a product that is easy enough for people to recognize, the company is well advised to make good use of image-embedded advertising so as to attract Internet users' attention. Advertisers should make an analysis of their logos and examine customers' responses based on the events of sites in question and the composition of products as a vehicle for monitoring their behavior in detail. Besides, keyword advertising allows them to analyze the advertising effects of exposed keywords through the analysis of logos. The logo analysis refers to a close analysis of the current situation of a site by making an analysis of information about visitors on the basis of the analysis of the number of visitors and page view, and that of cookie values. It is in the log files generated through each Web server that a user's IP, used pages, the time when he or she uses it, and cookie values are stored. The log files contain a huge amount of data. As it is almost impossible to make a direct analysis of these log files, one is supposed to make an analysis of them by using solutions for a log analysis. The generic information that can be extracted from tools for each logo analysis includes the number of viewing the total pages, the number of average page view per day, the number of basic page view, the number of page view per visit, the total number of hits, the number of average hits per day, the number of hits per visit, the number of visits, the number of average visits per day, the net number of visitors, average visitors per day, one-time visitors, visitors who have come more than twice, and average using hours, etc. These sites are deemed to be useful for utilizing data for the analysis of the situation and current status of rival companies as well as benchmarking. As keyword advertising exposes advertisements exclusively on search-result pages, competition among advertisers attempting to preoccupy popular keywords is very fierce. Some portal sites keep on giving priority to the existing advertisers, whereas others provide chances to purchase keywords in question to all the advertisers after the advertising contract is over. If an advertiser tries to rely on keywords sensitive to seasons and timeliness in case of sites providing priority to the established advertisers, he or she may as well make a purchase of a vacant place for advertising lest he or she should miss appropriate timing for advertising. However, Naver doesn't provide priority to the existing advertisers as far as all the keyword advertisements are concerned. In this case, one can preoccupy keywords if he or she enters into a contract after confirming the contract period for advertising. This study is designed to take a look at marketing for keyword advertising and to present effective strategies for keyword advertising marketing. At present, the Korean CPC advertising market is virtually monopolized by Overture. Its strong points are that Overture is based on the CPC charging model and that advertisements are registered on the top of the most representative portal sites in Korea. These advantages serve as the most appropriate medium for small and medium enterprises to use. However, the CPC method of Overture has its weak points, too. That is, the CPC method is not the only perfect advertising model among the search advertisements in the on-line market. So it is absolutely necessary that small and medium enterprises including independent shopping malls should complement the weaknesses of the CPC method and make good use of strategies for maximizing its strengths so as to increase their sales and to create a point of contact with customers.

• Journal of Global Scholars of Marketing Science
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• v.18 no.4
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• pp.61-118
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• 2008

The purpose of this research is to construct research framework for international franchising based on existing literature and to identify research components in the framework. Franchise can be defined as management styles that allow franchisee use various management assets of franchisor in order to make or sell product or service. It can be divided into product distribution franchise that is designed to sell products and business format franchise that is designed for running it as business whatever its form is. International franchising can be defined as a way of internationalization of franchisor to foreign country by providing its business format or package to franchisee of host country. International franchising is growing fast for last four decades but academic research on this is quite limited. Especially in Korea, research about international franchising is carried out on by case study format with single case or empirical study format with survey based on domestic franchise theory. Therefore, this paper tries to review existing literature on international franchising research, providing research framework, and then stimulating new research on this field. International franchising research components include motives and environmental factors for decision of expanding to international franchising, entrance modes and development plan for international franchising, contracts and management strategy of international franchising, and various performance measures from different perspectives. First, motives of international franchising are fee collection from franchisee. Also it provides easier way to expanding to foreign country. The other motives including increase total sales volume, occupying better strategic position, getting quality resources, and improving efficiency. Environmental factors that facilitating international franchising encompasses economic condition, trend, and legal or political factors in host and/or home countries. In addition, control power and risk management capability of franchisor plays critical role in successful franchising contract. Final decision to enter foreign country via franchising is determined by numerous factors like history, size, growth, competitiveness, management system, bonding capability, industry characteristics of franchisor. After deciding to enter into foreign country, franchisor needs to set entrance modes of international franchising. Within contractual mode, there are master franchising and area developing franchising, licensing, direct franchising, and joint venture. Theories about entrance mode selection contain concepts of efficiency, knowledge-based approach, competence-based approach, agent theory, and governance cost. The next step after entrance decision is operation strategy. Operation strategy starts with selecting a target city and a target country for franchising. In order to finding, screening targets, franchisor needs to collect information about candidates. Critical information includes brand patent, commercial laws, regulations, market conditions, country risk, and industry analysis. After selecting a target city in target country, franchisor needs to select franchisee, in other word, partner. The first important criteria for selecting partners are financial credibility and capability, possession of real estate. And cultural similarity and knowledge about franchisor and/or home country are also recognized as critical criteria. The most important element in operating strategy is legal document between franchisor and franchisee with home and host countries. Terms and conditions in legal documents give objective information about characteristics of franchising agreement for academic research. Legal documents have definitions of terminology, territory and exclusivity, agreement of term, initial fee, continuing fees, clearing currency, and rights about sub-franchising. Also, legal documents could have terms about softer elements like training program and operation manual. And harder elements like law competent court and terms of expiration. Next element in operating strategy is about product and service. Especially for business format franchising, product/service deliverable, benefit communicators, system identifiers (architectural features), and format facilitators are listed for product/service strategic elements. Another important decision on product/service is standardization vs. customization. The rationale behind standardization is cost reduction, efficiency, consistency, image congruence, brand awareness, and competitiveness on price. Also standardization enables large scale R&D and innovative change in management style. Another element in operating strategy is control management. The simple way to control franchise contract is relying on legal terms, contractual control system. There are other control systems, administrative control system and ethical control system. Contractual control system is a coercive source of power, but franchisor usually doesn't want to use legal power since it doesn't help to build up positive relationship. Instead, self-regulation is widely used. Administrative control system uses control mechanism from ordinary work relationship. Its main component is supporting activities to franchisee and communication method. For example, franchisor provides advertising, training, manual, and delivery, then franchisee follows franchisor's direction. Another component is building franchisor's brand power. The last research element is performance factor of international franchising. Performance elements can be divided into franchisor's performance and franchisee's performance. The conceptual performance measures of franchisor are simple but not easy to obtain objectively. They are profit, sale, cost, experience, and brand power. The performance measures of franchisee are mostly about benefits of host country. They contain small business development, promotion of employment, introduction of new business model, and level up technology status. There are indirect benefits, like increase of tax, refinement of corporate citizenship, regional economic clustering, and improvement of international balance. In addition to those, host country gets socio-cultural change other than economic effects. It includes demographic change, social trend, customer value change, social communication, and social globalization. Sometimes it is called as westernization or McDonaldization of society. In addition, the paper reviews on theories that have been frequently applied to international franchising research, such as agent theory, resource-based view, transaction cost theory, organizational learning theory, and international expansion theories. Resource based theory is used in strategic decision based on resources, like decision about entrance and cooperation depending on resources of franchisee and franchisor. Transaction cost theory can be applied in determination of mutual trust or satisfaction of franchising players. Agent theory tries to explain strategic decision for reducing problem caused by utilizing agent, for example research on control system in franchising agreements. Organizational Learning theory is relatively new in franchising research. It assumes organization tries to maximize performance and learning of organization. In addition, Internalization theory advocates strategic decision of direct investment for removing inefficiency of market transaction and is applied in research on terms of contract. And oligopolistic competition theory is used to explain various entry modes for international expansion. Competency theory support strategic decision of utilizing key competitive advantage. Furthermore, research methodologies including qualitative and quantitative methodologies are suggested for more rigorous international franchising research. Quantitative research needs more real data other than survey data which is usually respondent's judgment. In order to verify theory more rigorously, research based on real data is essential. However, real quantitative data is quite hard to get. The qualitative research other than single case study is also highly recommended. Since international franchising has limited number of applications, scientific research based on grounded theory and ethnography study can be used. Scientific case study is differentiated with single case study on its data collection method and analysis method. The key concept is triangulation in measurement, logical coding and comparison. Finally, it provides overall research direction for international franchising after summarizing research trend in Korea. International franchising research in Korea has two different types, one is for studying Korean franchisor going overseas and the other is for Korean franchisee of foreign franchisor. Among research on Korean franchisor, two common patterns are observed. First of all, they usually deal with success story of one franchisor. The other common pattern is that they focus on same industry and country. Therefore, international franchise research needs to extend their focus to broader subjects with scientific research methodology as well as development of new theory.