In the wake of recent trends forcing local news organisations to adjust business models, local news publishers are often challenged with recognising new technologies as business opportunities. This contribution investigates the role of localisation technologies by using an abductive qualitative approach. We analyse how local media managers' everyday activities shape the capability of creating, identifying, and experimenting with new business opportunities in a local news media market - discussed here for location-based services (LBS) - in a case study of a local news market with local journalists with managerial responsibilities and newsroom managers. Doing so, this contribution comments on activities undertaken concerning evolving technologies. The findings indicate that the selected local media managers do not experiment with LBS, and most organisations use LBS only for advertising. We reveal the factors explaining this finding to be the media managers' limited information about technological developments, their lack of experimentation within core areas, and media organisations' constraints to the acceptance of mistakes.

Digitalization affects media businesses, media marketplaces, and with every single user the entire society, as well. But which of the new technologies, media distribution and usage will last? "Location-based services" (LBS), allowing to localize mobile devices to provide media content tailored to the user's current context, appear to be a sound approach to meet the demands of fast, flexible and individualized communication. However, due to rapid technological developments, their future - still - remains uncertain. This contribution assesses relevant international LBS-experts in a two-round Delphi study. Findings indicate a strong emphasis on future challenges for (potential) LBS providers and developers, mainly addressing an intraorganizational level - especially with regard to workflows of traditionally oriented media enterprises. Further barriers brought up were privacy and security issues. Regarding the motivation to install LBS apps, scientists consider reliability, ease of use, and fulfillment of human needs to be of importance. Regarding hardware components, the indoor-deployment of LBS was - rather surprisingly - deemed much more promising than an outdoor use. Concerning trends in research, user-centered studies integrating psychological perspectives were brought up, as well as research on socio-ethical implications of LBS.

In today's information era, the ability to address the needs of potential customers at a moment when they are particularly receptive to the information provided becomes increasingly important. Modern mobile devices allow to collect precise data about the users' context, thus enhancing possibilities to better estimate, proof and react to current situations in real time. Given that, `context marketing' nowadays is an approach frequently discussed in literature. This contribution aims to systematize existing publications on the subject of context marketing, in order to build a basis for future research and to uncover potential gaps and contradictions in previous research. Methodologically, the two scientific databases "Scopus" and "Web of Science" were searched for context marketing related contributions. The evaluation made use of a mixed methods approach including a qualitative content analysis, and subsequently further quantitative evaluations. The findings reveal the majority of publications to focus on the user's location as the only context factor, resulting in a predominant focus on location-based advertising related research.

Facing the last decades of information technology, the importance of ‘usable privacy and security’ (UPS) increased significantly. Previous studies have uncovered a tremendous gap in UPS-related research, especially concerning location-based services (LBS). This contribution aims to reduce this gap by identifying factors leading to a more user-centric design of LBS. It relies on guided interviews with international experts either with a scientific or an entrepreneurial background. The findings support solutions equipping the user with more control of owned data, thus ensuring more self-determination and decision-making authority affecting personal information. The study makes use of a qualitative content analysis in order to identify relevant factors that reveal which data security-related aspects are important by designing location-based services. The findings lead to two key outcomes: Firstly, the implementation of easier to use data security tools in applications based on LBS often comes with an information overload affecting the user. Secondly, a regulatory framework for third party vendors, users, and providers to address the lack of knowledge for user-friendly LBS turns out to be the key requirement for successful implementation of UPS.

ABSTRACT By measuring the possibilities of enterprises linking location-based services (LBS) to regional and local content of interest, research found a tremendous lack of knowledge, how media enterprises – as well as content providers – in- and outside legacy media can use innovative LBS. One could presume that the absence of fulfiling market-information about current LBS proves to be a decisive factor causing a poor implementation of LBS in content-related services especially for media outlets. This contribution aims to fill this gap by providing an innovative, new kind of market exploration method for creating a general overview of current applications and, with that, the entire market for LBS, based on specific mentions of LBS in tech-related newsletters. The resulting category system (focusing on providers, areas of application, functions and technologies) enables the identification of success factors concerning which services are well established, and how this is linked to the type of application, technology, business models and other characteristics. The findings reveal the application of location analytics to enhance the user experience to be a particularly promising opportunity for current LBS implementation. With its completely new method, the study provides a much-needed new framework for further market explorations in this field.

Absatzprobleme, anhaltende Konzentrationsprozesse und fortschreitende Digitalisierung: Der Druck auf traditionelle Medienunternehmen ist enorm und vielfach beschrieben. Journalistische Routinen sind in Produktion und Rezeption ohne digitale Werkzeuge längst nicht mehr vorstellbar und aus technischer Sicht rückt verstärkt das Thema SoLoMo (social, local, mobile) in den Blickpunkt. Standorterfassende Dienste („Location-based Services“, kurz LBS) liefern eine entscheidende Technologie, indem sie die geografische Lage ihrer mobilen Endgeräte lokalisieren und für Nutzer an den aktuellen Standort angepasste Inhalte bereitstellen. Dies macht LBS für Nachrichtenmedien aller Art interessant – unter anderem deshalb, weil sie auch den Nutzern ermöglichen, eigene SoLoMo-Inhalte zu erstellen und damit den entscheidenden Baustein für erfolgreiche, mediale Partizipation darstellen. In den traditionellen Medien schlägt sich bislang kaum nieder, dass Nutzer selbst zu Kommunikatoren im lokalen Umfeld werden. Dieser Beitrag zielt deshalb darauf ab, mittels eines zweistufigen Delphi-Verfahrens auch partizipative LBS-Anwendungen und die damit zusammenhängenden Herausforderungen, Lösungsansätze und den zukünftigen Forschungsbedarf zu identifizieren. Die Ergebnisse zeigen: Anwendungen mit Augmented Reality wird ein besonders hohes Partizipationspotenzial zugeschrieben – insbesondere in Kombination mit Gamification-Ansätzen und virtuellen Datenbrillen. Die Experten sehen zudem großes Potenzial in einer frei zugänglichen Plattform als zentrale Datenbasis für lokale und regionale Informationen, die es Nutzern ermöglicht, selbst eigene mediale Inhalte bereitzustellen. Zudem bewerten sie die direkte Beteiligung der Nutzer am Entwicklungsprozess von LBS-Apps als einen wichtigen Schritt im Zuge partizipativer Überlegungen im Medienmanagement.

This contribution focuses on tourists’ usage behaviour of Location-Based Services (LBS) during their vacation. LBS represents technologies that localise a user’s mobile device (Turowski & Pousttchi 2004: 73) to offer services and content based on the user’s current geographical location (Egger & Jooss 2010: 21; Frey et al. 2015: 124). In vacation spots tourists find themselves in a situation characterised by increased information and service needs (Link & Seidl 2008: 56). Given that, LBS are considered to be promising services in the tourist industry (Egger & Jooss 2010: 21). In order to make use of the entire potential of LBS in tourism, the following key question needs to be answered: Which factors influence tourists’ usage behaviour of LBS and which possibilities can be derived for tourism providers and destinations? To answer its research question, this empirical study follows a deductive approach using UTAUT2, a popular technology acceptance model. The findings show a high usage rate of LBS in vacation and indicate that especially performance expectancy, effort expectancy as well as hedonic motivation influence the rate of usage. Considering these main causes, we derive theoretical implications as well as valuable clues for tourism management in practice.