• Journal of Global Scholars of Marketing Science
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• v.18 no.4
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• pp.157-194
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• 2008

The popularity of communities on the internet has captured the attention of marketing scholars and practitioners. By adapting to the culture of the internet, however, and providing consumer with the ability to interact with one another in addition to the company, businesses can build new and deeper relationships with customers. The economic potential of online communities has been discussed with much hope in the many popular papers. In contrast to this enthusiastic prognostications, empirical and practical evidence regarding the economic potential of the online community has shown a little different conclusion. To date, even communities with high levels of membership and vibrant social arenas have failed to build financial viability. In this perspective, this study investigates the role of various kinds of influencing factors to online community loyalty and basically suggests the framework that explains the process of building purchase loyalty. Even though the importance of building loyalty in an online environment has been emphasized from the marketing theorists and practitioners, there is no sufficient research conclusion about what is the process of building purchase loyalty and the most powerful factors that influence to it. In this study, the process of building purchase loyalty is divided into three levels; characteristics of community site such as content superiority, site vividness, navigation easiness, and customerization, the mediating variables such as self congruency, consumer experience, and consumer to consumer interactivity, and finally various factors about online community loyalty such as visit loyalty, affect, trust, and purchase loyalty are those things. And the findings of this research are as follows. First, consumer-to-consumer interactivity is an important factor to online community purchase loyalty and other loyalty factors. This means, in order to interact with other people more actively, many participants in online community have the willingness to buy some kinds of products such as music, content, avatar, and etc. From this perspective, marketers of online community have to create some online environments in order that consumers can easily interact with other consumers and make some site environments in order that consumer can feel experience in this site is interesting and self congruency is higher than at other community sites. It has been argued that giving consumers a good experience is vital in cyber space, and websites create an active (rather than passive) customer by their nature. Some researchers have tried to pin down the positive experience, with limited success and less empirical support. Web sites can provide a cognitively stimulating experience for the user. We define the online community experience as playfulness based on the past studies. Playfulness is created by the excitement generated through a website's content and measured using three descriptors Marketers can promote using and visiting online communities, which deliver a superior web experience, to influence their customers' attitudes and actions, encouraging high involvement with those communities. Specially, we suggest that transcendent customer experiences(TCEs) which have aspects of flow and/or peak experience, can generate lasting shifts in beliefs and attitudes including subjective self-transformation and facilitate strong consumer's ties to a online community. And we find that website success is closely related to positive website experiences: consumers will spend more time on the site, interacting with other users. As we can see figure 2, visit loyalty and consumer affect toward the online community site didn't directly influence to purchase loyalty. This implies that there may be a little different situations here in online community site compared to online shopping mall studies that shows close relations between revisit intention and purchase intention. There are so many alternative sites on web, consumers do not want to spend money to buy content and etc. In this sense, marketers of community websites must know consumers' affect toward online community site is not a last goal and important factor to influnece consumers' purchase. Third, building good content environment can be a really important marketing tool to create a competitive advantage in cyberspace. For example, Cyworld, Korea's number one community site shows distinctive superiority in the consumer evaluations of content characteristics such as content superiority, site vividness, and customerization. Particularly, comsumer evaluation about customerization was remarkably higher than the other sites. In this point, we can conclude that providing comsumers with good, unique and highly customized content will be urgent and important task directly and indirectly impacting to self congruency, consumer experience, c-to-c interactivity, and various loyalty factors of online community. By creating enjoyable, useful, and unique online community environments, online community portals such as Daum, Naver, and Cyworld are able to build customer loyalty to a degree that many of today's online marketer can only dream of these loyalty, in turn, generates strong economic returns. Another way to build good online community site is to provide consumers with an interactive, fun, experience-oriented or experiential Web site. Elements that can make a dot.com's Web site experiential include graphics, 3-D images, animation, video and audio capabilities. In addition, chat rooms and real-time customer service applications (which link site visitors directly to other visitors, or with company support personnel, respectively) are also being used to make web sites more interactive. Researchers note that online communities are increasingly incorporating such applications in their Web sites, in order to make consumers' online shopping experience more similar to that of an offline store. That is, if consumers are able to experience sensory stimulation (e.g. via 3-D images and audio sound), interact with other consumers (e.g., via chat rooms), and interact with sales or support people (e.g. via a real-time chat interface or e-mail), then they are likely to have a more positive dot.com experience, and develop a more positive image toward the online company itself). Analysts caution, however, that, while high quality graphics, animation and the like may create a fun experience for consumers, when heavily used, they can slow site navigation, resulting in frustrated consumers, who may never return to a site. Consequently, some analysts suggest that, at least with current technology, the rule-of-thumb is that less is more. That is, while graphics etc. can draw consumers to a site, they should be kept to a minimum, so as not to impact negatively on consumers' overall site experience.

• Journal of Korean Library and Information Science Society
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• v.50 no.4
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• pp.339-358
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• 2019

The purpose of this study is to understand the topics of the research for the establishment of cooperative platform between libraries, archives, and museums that carry out the common task of providing knowledge information in a broad sense. To achieve the purpose of this study, 637 bibliographic information on three institutions were collected from the Web version of Scopus database. Among the collected bibliographic information, 5,218 words were extracted through NetMiner V.4 and analysed topic modeling. The results are as follows: First, as a result of analyzing the frequency of word appearance according to the tf-idf weight 'Preservation' was the most hottest topic. Second, the topic modeling analysis through LDA(Latent Dirichlet Allocation) algorithm resulted in 13 topic areas. Third, as a result of expressing 13 topic areas as a network, repository construction was the central topic, and the research topics such as cooperation among institutions, conservation environment for collections, system and policy discovery, life cycle of collections, exhibition of information resources, and information retrieval were closely related to the central topic. Fourth, the trend of 13 topic areas by year 1998 is limited to the specific subjects such as system and policy discovery, information retrieval, and life cycle of collections, while the subsequent studies have been carried out after that year.

• Journal of the Korea Computer Graphics Society
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• v.14 no.4
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• pp.35-39
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• 2008

A computer supported collaborative system provides with a shared virtual workspace over the Internet where its remote users cooperate in order to achieve their goals by overcoming problems caused by distance and time. VRMMS (Virtual Reality Molecular Modeling System) [1] is a VR based collaborative system where biologists can remotely participate in and exercise molecular modeling tasks such as viewing three dimensional structures of molecular models, confirming results of molecular simulations and providing with feedbacks for the next simulations. Biologists can utilize VRMMS in executing molecular simulations. However, first-time users and beginners need to spend some time for studying and practicing in order to skillfully manipulate molecular models and the system. The best way to resolve the problem is to have a face-to-face session of teaching and learning VRMMS. However, it is not practically recommended in the sense that the users are remotely located. It follows that the learning time could last longer than desired. In this paper, we propose to use Second Life [2] combining with VRMMS for removing the problem. It can be used in building a shared workplace over the Internet where molecular simulations using VRMMS can be exercised, taught, learned and practiced. Through the web, users can collaborate with each other using VRMMS. Their avatars and tools of molecular simulations can be remotely utilized in order to provide with senses of 'being there' to the remote users. The users can discuss, teach and learn over the Internet. The shared workspaces for discussion and education are designed and implemented in Second Life. Since the activities in Second Life and VRMMS are designed to realistic, the system is expected to help users in improving their learning and experimental performances.

• Journal of Distribution Science
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• v.13 no.8
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• pp.97-104
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• 2015

Purpose - This study examines the positive impact of the social distance between producers and users of online content, investigating and analyzing the most popular Web content. In addition, it tries to elicit the matching effect that appears when the individuals'cultural background is consistent with social distance. Research design, data, and methodology - We collected and analyzed actual data about 4,981 videos clips on YouTube, looking at six countries in order to verify the content of this study. Based on the results of the data analysis, the study conducted behavioral measurements on popularity, social distance, culture, and user engagement. The unit of analysis was the content and we collected information about the content producers and the content records. We controlled the views, comments, likes, calendar dates, and ages in the empirical models. The data was collected in 2011, with the records coming from South Korea, Japan, China, U.S., German, and France. A total of 4,980 elements were analyzed in the model. The empirical model estimated is the bivariate negative binomial distribution (NBD) model. Results - It turns out that there is a possibility that the matching effect can be diminished by variables that reflect the psychological involvement of user engagement. This study proposes academic and practical implications based on these research results. This research shows the positive effect of social distance between users and producers on the increased performance of the online content. We find the effect of social distance to be a stronger tendency in collectivism. The collectivists follow their sense of friendship and intimacy in their culture and, the social congruence effect can be found there as well. The effect, however, could erode in a social case where users are motivated by strong intrinsic and psychological factors. In addition, user engagement complicates the process of user decision making regarding the information. Conclusions - This study examines how the differential effects of social distance caused by culture could disappear through user commitment as a complicated user motivation. Some potential implications are as follows. First, a firm in the collectivism culture has to communicate based on the social distance. In fact, most online channels do not have a function that indicates the social distance as measured by favorites or subscribers. This function could help increase the performance of the content in online channels, but this increasing effect can only be found in a collectivist culture. Based on this, the firms have to communicate and announce to users the actual social distance between users and producers. Second, firms should develop a system that discovers the social distance and culture and shows these measures to users and producers, since the congruence effect between social distance and culture is found only for low user engagement. The firms can take the advantage of the congruence effect only for the development of the social distance and culture visualized system.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.17 no.10
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• pp.396-402
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• 2016

Recently, as the performance of smart phones has advanced and their distribution has increased, various functions in existing devices are accumulated. In particular, functions in smart devices have matured through improvement of diverse sensors. Various applications with the development of smart phones get fleshed out. As a result, services from applications promoting physical activity in users have gotten attention from the public. However, these services are about diet alone, and because these have no exercise motion recognition capability to detect movement in the correct position, the user has difficulty obtaining the benefits of exercise. In this paper, we develop exercise motion-recognition software that can sense the user's motion using a sensor built into a smart phone. In addition, we implement a system to offer exercise with friends who are connected via web server. The exercise motion recognition utilizes a Kalman filter algorithm to correct the user's motion data, and compared to data that exist in sampling, determines whether the user moves in the correct position by using a DTW algorithm.

• The Korean Journal of Archival Studies
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• no.39
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• pp.101-138
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• 2014

This study examined the influence and meaning of SNS as the hot topic of our time from the archival perspective and also studied the 'SNS records management'. The many users mean a high accessibility and utilization of SNS, which increase the influence and value of SNS as a record. Politically, SNS is a tool that strengthens the communication among the voters, politicians and the public while economically, it is a window to accept the complaints of the customers and a marketing tool. In addition, the voices of social minorities are also recorded unlike in the traditional media, which makes the SNS record a method to gain the social variety and diversity. SNS is a place of formation of collective memory and collective memory itself. Furthermore, it can play the role of public sphere. It also is a place for generation of 'big data' in an archival sense. In addition, this study has classified the SNS records management into primary and secondary management that include record management entities, subjects, periods, methods, and causes. This study analyzed the history, status, and the meaning of SNS to assess the values and meanings as the preliminary study for the future SNS record management studies.

• Journal of Korea Entertainment Industry Association
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• v.13 no.6
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• pp.53-67
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• 2019

This study is expected to be of significance in that it attempted to examine the personal information protection awareness of college students and the state of their personal information protection as prospective information processors and private information owners to boost their will to put private information protection in practice. As a result of making an analysis, the most common average time that the students spent in doing every online activity on weekdays was fewer than two or three hours, and the most dominant activities that they did over the Internet were for entertainment or hobbies. As for awareness of the nature of the Internet, they looked upon it as a quite open public space. Regarding the state of private information protection, they thought that changing passwords on a regular basis would be beneficial to personal information protection, and many thought that it's needed to withdraw from or shut down web sites that weren't used for a long time. In terms of actual practice, however, they didn't change their e-mail passwords regularly on the grounds that it's a hassle, and even the students who had experience of personal information leakage didn't report it or didn't ask for counsel on the grounds that they didn't want to be bothered as well. The majority of the students weren't cognizant of how to report or seek counsel. In the future, personal information protection should be educated on a continual basis as part of curriculum to raise awareness of it among students and boost their will to practice it with a sense of responsibility in an effort to prevent the occurrence of collateral damages triggered by personal information leakage.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.21 no.3
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• pp.101-116
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• 2015

Recently, due to the development of smart devices and social media, vast amounts of information with the various forms were accumulated. Particularly, considerable research efforts are being directed towards analyzing unstructured big data to resolve various social problems. Accordingly, focus of data-driven decision-making is being moved from structured data analysis to unstructured one. Also, in the field of recommendation system, which is the typical area of data-driven decision-making, the need of using unstructured data has been steadily increased to improve system performance. Approaches to improve the performance of recommendation systems can be found in two aspects- improving algorithms and acquiring useful data with high quality. Traditionally, most efforts to improve the performance of recommendation system were made by the former approach, while the latter approach has not attracted much attention relatively. In this sense, efforts to utilize unstructured data from variable sources are very timely and necessary. Particularly, as the interests of users are directly connected with their needs, identifying the interests of the user through unstructured big data analysis can be a crew for improving performance of recommendation systems. In this sense, this study proposes the methodology of improving recommendation system by measuring interests of the user. Specially, this study proposes the method to quantify interests of the user by analyzing user's internet usage patterns, and to predict user's repurchase based upon the discovered preferences. There are two important modules in this study. The first module predicts repurchase probability of each category through analyzing users' purchase history. We include the first module to our research scope for comparing the accuracy of traditional purchase-based prediction model to our new model presented in the second module. This procedure extracts purchase history of users. The core part of our methodology is in the second module. This module extracts users' interests by analyzing news articles the users have read. The second module constructs a correspondence matrix between topics and news articles by performing topic modeling on real world news articles. And then, the module analyzes users' news access patterns and then constructs a correspondence matrix between articles and users. After that, by merging the results of the previous processes in the second module, we can obtain a correspondence matrix between users and topics. This matrix describes users' interests in a structured manner. Finally, by using the matrix, the second module builds a model for predicting repurchase probability of each category. In this paper, we also provide experimental results of our performance evaluation. The outline of data used our experiments is as follows. We acquired web transaction data of 5,000 panels from a company that is specialized to analyzing ranks of internet sites. At first we extracted 15,000 URLs of news articles published from July 2012 to June 2013 from the original data and we crawled main contents of the news articles. After that we selected 2,615 users who have read at least one of the extracted news articles. Among the 2,615 users, we discovered that the number of target users who purchase at least one items from our target shopping mall 'G' is 359. In the experiments, we analyzed purchase history and news access records of the 359 internet users. From the performance evaluation, we found that our prediction model using both users' interests and purchase history outperforms a prediction model using only users' purchase history from a view point of misclassification ratio. In detail, our model outperformed the traditional one in appliance, beauty, computer, culture, digital, fashion, and sports categories when artificial neural network based models were used. Similarly, our model outperformed the traditional one in beauty, computer, digital, fashion, food, and furniture categories when decision tree based models were used although the improvement is very small.

• Asia pacific journal of information systems
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• v.18 no.4
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• pp.27-55
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• 2008

Due to the increasing and intensifying competition in the Internet shopping market, it has been recognized as very important to develop an effective policy and strategy for acquiring loyal customers. For this reason, web site designers need to know if a new Internet shopping mall(ISM) will be accepted. Researchers have been working on identifying factors for explaining and predicting user acceptance of an ISM. Some studies, however, revealed inconsistent findings on the antecedents of user acceptance of a website. Lack of consideration for individual differences in user ability is believed to be one of the key reasons for the mixed findings. The elaboration likelihood model (ELM) and several studies have suggested that individual differences in ability plays an moderating role on the relationship between the antecedents and user acceptance. Despite the critical role of user ability, little research has examined the role of user ability in the Internet shopping mall context. The purpose of this study is to develop a user acceptance model that consider the moderating role of user ability in the context of Internet shopping. This study was initiated to see the ability of the technology acceptance model(TAM) to explain the acceptance of a specific ISM. According to TAM. which is one of the most influential models for explaining user acceptance of IT, an intention to use IT is determined by usefulness and ease of use. Given that interaction between user and website takes place through web interface, the decisions to accept and continue using an ISM depend on these beliefs. However, TAM neglects to consider the fact that many users would not stick to an ISM until they trust it although they may think it useful and easy to use. The importance of trust for user acceptance of ISM has been raised by the relational views. The relational view emphasizes the trust-building process between the user and ISM, and user's trust on the website is a major determinant of user acceptance. The proposed model extends and integrates the TAM and relational views on user acceptance of ISM by incorporating usefulness, ease of use, and trust. User acceptance is defined as a user's intention to reuse a specific ISM. And user ability is introduced into the model as moderating variable. Here, the user ability is defined as a degree of experiences, knowledge and skills regarding Internet shopping sites. The research model proposes that the ease of use, usefulness and trust of ISM are key determinants of user acceptance. In addition, this paper hypothesizes that the effects of the antecedents(i.e., ease of use, usefulness, and trust) on user acceptance may differ among users. In particular, this paper proposes a moderating effect of a user's ability on the relationship between antecedents with user's intention to reuse. The research model with eleven hypotheses was derived and tested through a survey that involved 470 university students. For each research variable, this paper used measurement items recognized for reliability and widely used in previous research. We slightly modified some items proper to the research context. The reliability and validity of the research variables were tested using the Crobnach's alpha and internal consistency reliability (ICR) values, standard factor loadings of the confirmative factor analysis, and average variance extracted (AVE) values. A LISREL method was used to test the suitability of the research model and its relating six hypotheses. Key findings of the results are summarized in the following. First, TAM's two constructs, ease of use and usefulness directly affect user acceptance. In addition, ease of use indirectly influences user acceptance by affecting trust. This implies that users tend to trust a shopping site and visit repeatedly when they perceive a specific ISM easy to use. Accordingly, designing a shopping site that allows users to navigate with heuristic and minimal clicks for finding information and products within the site is important for improving the site's trust and acceptance. Usefulness, however, was not found to influence trust. Second, among the three belief constructs(ease of use, usefulness, and trust), trust was empirically supported as the most important determinants of user acceptance. This implies that users require trustworthiness from an Internet shopping site to be repeat visitors of an ISM. Providing a sense of safety and eliminating the anxiety of online shoppers in relation to privacy, security, delivery, and product returns are critically important conditions for acquiring repeat visitors. Hence, in addition to usefulness and ease of use as in TAM, trust should be a fundamental determinants of user acceptance in the context of internet shopping. Third, the user's ability on using an Internet shopping site played a moderating role. For users with low ability, ease of use was found to be a more important factors in deciding to reuse the shopping mall, whereas usefulness and trust had more effects on users with high ability. Applying the EML theory to these findings, we can suggest that experienced and knowledgeable ISM users tend to elaborate on such usefulness aspects as efficient and effective shopping performance and trust factors as ability, benevolence, integrity, and predictability of a shopping site before they become repeat visitors of the site. In contrast, novice users tend to rely on the low elaborating features, such as the perceived ease of use. The existence of moderating effects suggests the fact that different individuals evaluate an ISM from different perspectives. The expert users are more interested in the outcome of the visit(usefulness) and trustworthiness(trust) than those novice visitors. The latter evaluate the ISM in a more superficial manner focusing on the novelty of the site and on other instrumental beliefs(ease of use). This is consistent with the insights proposed by the Heuristic-Systematic model. According to the Heuristic-Systematic model. a users act on the principle of minimum effort. Thus, the user considers an ISM heuristically, focusing on those aspects that are easy to process and evaluate(ease of use). When the user has sufficient experience and skills, the user will change to systematic processing, where they will evaluate more complex aspects of the site(its usefulness and trustworthiness). This implies that an ISM has to provide a minimum level of ease of use to make it possible for a user to evaluate its usefulness and trustworthiness. Ease of use is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the acceptance and use of an ISM. Overall, the empirical results generally support the proposed model and identify the moderating effect of the effects of user ability. More detailed interpretations and implications of the findings are discussed. The limitations of this study are also discussed to provide directions for future research.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.20 no.3
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• pp.151-171
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• 2014

Firms today have sought management effectiveness and efficiency utilizing information technologies (IT). Numerous firms are outsourcing specific information systems functions to cope with their short of information resources or IT experts, or to reduce their capital cost. Recently, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) as a new type of information system has become one of the powerful outsourcing alternatives. SaaS is software deployed as a hosted and accessed over the internet. It is regarded as the idea of on-demand, pay-per-use, and utility computing and is now being applied to support the core competencies of clients in areas ranging from the individual productivity area to the vertical industry and e-commerce area. In this study, therefore, we seek to quantify the value that SaaS has on business performance by examining the relationships among firm strategies, SaaS technology maturity, and business performance of SaaS providers. We begin by drawing from prior literature on SaaS, technology maturity and firm strategy. SaaS technology maturity is classified into three different phases such as application service providing (ASP), Web-native application, and Web-service application. Firm strategies are manipulated by the low-cost strategy and differentiation strategy. Finally, we considered customer acquisition as a business performance. In this sense, specific objectives of this study are as follows. First, we examine the relationships between customer acquisition performance and both low-cost strategy and differentiation strategy of SaaS providers. Secondly, we investigate the mediating and moderating effects of SaaS technology maturity on those relationships. For this purpose, study collects data from the SaaS providers, and their line of applications registered in the database in CNK (Commerce net Korea) in Korea using a questionnaire method by the professional research institution. The unit of analysis in this study is the SBUs (strategic business unit) in the software provider. A total of 199 SBUs is used for analyzing and testing our hypotheses. With regards to the measurement of firm strategy, we take three measurement items for differentiation strategy such as the application uniqueness (referring an application aims to differentiate within just one or a small number of target industry), supply channel diversification (regarding whether SaaS vendor had diversified supply chain) as well as the number of specialized expertise and take two items for low cost strategy like subscription fee and initial set-up fee. We employ a hierarchical regression analysis technique for testing moderation effects of SaaS technology maturity and follow the Baron and Kenny's procedure for determining if firm strategies affect customer acquisition through technology maturity. Empirical results revealed that, firstly, when differentiation strategy is applied to attain business performance like customer acquisition, the effects of the strategy is moderated by the technology maturity level of SaaS providers. In other words, securing higher level of SaaS technology maturity is essential for higher business performance. For instance, given that firms implement application uniqueness or a distribution channel diversification as a differentiation strategy, they can acquire more customers when their level of SaaS technology maturity is higher rather than lower. Secondly, results indicate that pursuing differentiation strategy or low cost strategy effectively works for SaaS providers' obtaining customer, which means that continuously differentiating their service from others or making their service fee (subscription fee or initial set-up fee) lower are helpful for their business success in terms of acquiring their customers. Lastly, results show that the level of SaaS technology maturity mediates the relationships between low cost strategy and customer acquisition. That is, based on our research design, customers usually perceive the real value of the low subscription fee or initial set-up fee only through the SaaS service provide by vender and, in turn, this will affect their decision making whether subscribe or not.