Digital Marketplaces Unleashed
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Favored by the increasing popularity of smart phones and social networks instant messaging gained a lot of traction in the past years. The most popular messenger nowadays is WhatsApp with one billion users [12] and over 30 billion exchanged messages a day [13]. Our everyday communication is moving from asynchronous towards a synchronous real time exchange of information.
These change in behavior is especially remarkable for adolescents for who instant messaging becomes an inherent part of their life [14].
Analyzing behavior there is huge increase of pictorial representations (e. g. with emoji’s) of expressing feelings instead of describing them textual. Whole phrases can be reduced e. g. “see you” is shortened to “cu”. The transmitted information is the same but “cu” saves 66% of the characters. Especially greeting and farewell phrases are shortened and common phrases like “for your information” – fyi.
There is more to the change in behavior than just the shortening of phrases. The “hashtag” for example is a modern element which gained popularity through micro blogging services. Buzzwords in a message are “hashtagged” (e. g. “#hashtag”) and therefore these words become searchable, because they are now tagged. With this tagging language now becomes searchable and this offers new possibilities and dimensions in communication. In a closed system certain messages are easy to find and can be brought in context with other topics and can be categorized and the whole message gets a defined context. Furthermore, it is possible to analyze the relation of hashtags and key performance indicators e. g. “Done with the module #milestone” by the frequency of the hashtag and weighting of it.
The current boom of new techniques and possibilities in communication paired with new mechanics need to be transferred into the business sector right now because those modern and efficient approaches are mapping the needs of corporations to digitize themselves. One question to ask is which requirements should a platform meet to digitalize a business in a holistic way.
69.4 Efficient Business Tools and Security
Meanwhile, there are some systems which are concerned with the transfer of the in Sect. 69.3 introduced approaches from the private to the business environment. However, these systems focus mostly on a particular topic. For example, they enable effective communication through the implementation of instant messaging concepts or focus on other specific features, such as document management. Dedicated social networks for internal communication in organizations take an additional step by focusing on relationships between employees. The security subject is treated individually by all available solutions, so that a different number of security features may be included, both from the perspective of the user as well as at technical level.
Instant messaging slowly but surely finds its way into business communication. The popular cloud‐based collaboration tool Slack shows this development by its steadily growing number of up to three million daily active users [15]. Slack offers possibilities to communicate with employees in the same organization through different types of channels. Direct messages can be easily exchanged between two persons. In contrast, open channels provide space for group discussions, such as special topics or projects.
The first positive effects can already be observed in using this service. The number of internally sent emails has been reduced by up to 48.5% [16]. Furthermore, an increase in productivity as well as a reduction of necessary meetings can be determined, which additionally confirms the concept and emphasizes the use of new modern, efficient and smart tools in business communication.
When reviewing the security practices of that service, it can be seen that the concept does not include all possibilities to protect the customer’s data. While all traffic in transit goes over an encrypted connection, so no one can eavesdrop on it and customer data is encrypted at rest by the service provider on their servers, using the latest recommended secure cipher suites, there is no end‐to‐end encryption included [17]. Therefore, customers still hand over their data to a third party by sending it to the provider’s servers. This approach is followed by several solutions in the business environment. WhatsApp is also a popular instant messaging service which is also establishing end to end encryption but they offer no compliance to business systems so that processes can be integrated. It is solely focused on being a product for customers and not for businesses (s. Table 69.1. Table 69.1Overview of leading apps in private and business sector
Product
WhatsApp
Dropbox
Slack
Sector
Private
Both
Business
Focused on
Messaging
Document Management
Messaging
Business compliance
No
No
License depending
End‐to‐end encryption
Yes
No
No
Encryption of data in transit?
Yes
Yes
Yes
Encryption of data at rest?
Yes
Yes
Yes
Provider has access to user data?
Maybe
Yes
Yes
Provider use data for itself?
Yes
Yes
Yes
Users must trust provider?
Yes
Yes
Yes
69.5 Quvert – Smart. Efficient. Secure.
Quvert is a modern and innovative communication tool and enables fast, reliable, usable and secure business communication. It is tailored for daily internal corporate communication with the primary goal to increase the effectiveness without sacrificing security, privacy and usability. These points were considered from the beginning of the planning phase and form parts of the foundation of the platform.
Quvert is chat‐based and includes all now well‐known advantages of instant messaging, such as sending text messages in real time, exchanging different types of media or using hashtags and similar techniques. However, Quvert does not stop here. In addition to introducing new approaches for transferring information between employees, like the concept for the exchange of internal company knowledge, Quvert also integrates business processes.
The foundation of Quvert is a secure, distributed and reliable server based on XMPP and Erlang with various database‐schemes (e. g. Postgres or CouchDB) available to ensure up to 99.99999% service uptime. The mobile and desktop applications have a composed user interface and are easily usable by non‐professionals. They also provide security in terms that user input can be concealed and all messages are encrypted on transport and application layer before they are being transmitted to the server. The encryption scheme is the Signal protocol that has already proven that it is capable of securing connections efficiently also in asynchronous transportations by using ratchets [18]. The whole platform is designed by the following principles: 1.Business by design: Inclusion of business processes into a communication Platform
2.Compliance by design: Data autonomy and legally watertight archiving
3.Security by design: Usable and economic security from the start of development
4.Privacy by design: Privacy is dealt with during the development process to preserve it
5.Usability by design: Easy and usable for users, low training periods
Quvert has no access to user data and does not use it to generate personalized advertisements or feedback. Furthermore, no data is transmitted to third parties and companies can use an on premise server to be sure they do not share any sensible data with the service and everything is kept in house. To be compliant Quvert offers Handshakes where users can define business relevant topics to be archived. If users do not send a specified handshake the server acts as a zero knowledge server. If the hands
hake is activated the server stores the message in an encrypted database which is only decryptable via four eyes principle to offer legally watertight agreements (s. Fig. 69.1). One side effect of this is that business irrelevant communication is not stored by the service and therefore usage of disk space can be reduced.
Fig. 69.1Handshake flow
Quvert has a module called Quvert.Knowledge which uses anonymized data to get an overview of the knowledge available in the company and what kind of profile a new employee should have to grant an increase in knowledge available in the organization. This is especially vital in times of demographic change where staff grows older and leaves the company and therefore their knowledge is gone and on the other hand less young people are joining the company [19].
69.6 Summary
To create an usable, secure and efficient communication tool is not a trivial task. In terms of security for the platform there has to be a solution to post quantum cryptography and how to modify the Signal protocol to gain the highest possible security. Table 69.2 shows Quvert in comparison to a few of other business communication tools on the market. Table 69.2Quvert in comparison
Product
WhatsApp
Dropbox
Slack
Quvert
Sector
Private
Both
Business
Business
Focused on
Messaging
Document Management
Messaging
Business processes
Business compliance
No
No
License depending
Yes
End‐to‐end encryption
Yes
No
No
Yes
Encryption of data in transit?
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Encryption of data at rest?
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Provider has access to user data?
Maybe
Yes
Yes
No
Provider use data for itself?
Yes
Yes
Yes
No
Users must trust provider?
Yes
Yes
Yes
No
Furthermore, it is essential to verify the functionalities offered by Quvert to get to know how the platform is accepted by users. Therefore, testers have been acquired but at the time of writing this paper no results could be drawn from the feedback and this is to be analyzed in the future. There will also be penetration testing in the near future to evaluate possible threat vectors for the platform and to prevent data leakage.
Current research is in the field of Internet of Things to connect Smart Objects to the platform and offer interactive and configurable control panels based on the transmitted certificate attributes by Smart Objects [20].
All in all Quvert shows a promising approach towards a smart, efficient and secure communication platform that is usable on all current operating systems, whether they are mobile or stationary. It also adds real value to currently used communication systems by offering an integrated lightweight yet highly utilizable knowledge management and one can conduct legally watertight agreements. In the near future the connection to the Internet of Things will also serve as a unique identifier for the platform.
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© Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany 2018
Claudia Linnhoff-Popien, Ralf Schneider and Michael Zaddach (eds.)Digital Marketplaces Unleashedhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-49275-8_70
70. City as a Service and City On-Demand – New concepts for intelligent urban development
Georg Klassen1 and Martin Buske2
(1)Rohde & Schwarz GmbH & Co. KG, Munich, Germany
(2)Buske Consulting GmbH, Sankt Augustin, Germany
Georg Klassen (Corresponding author)
Email: georg.klassen@rohde-schwarz.com
Martin Buske
Email: mbuske@bus
ke-consulting.de
70.1 Main Definitions and Concepts
The urbanization process all over the world impacts all areas of life. Cities account for a major share of global economic output [1]. The United Nations predict that by 2050 about 64% of the developing world and 86% of the developed world will be urbanized [2]. More and more cities can be considered as Digital Cities because of extensive use of information and communication technology (ICT). During the last several years, the focus has been moving from the technology perspective to the smartness of a city. ICT remains very important. Its efficient use, resulting in smart services, play a very important role in a city’s development. There are various definitions of Smart City and the concept of Smart City is very broad and evolving. The implementation of this concept depends on specifics of a city, such as its story, brand, values, policies, objectives and socio‐technological constraints. According to the EU, the definition of a Smart City is “a city seeking to address public issues via ICT‐based solutions on the basis of a multi‐stakeholder, municipally based partnership” [3]. The main goal of a Smart City is to improve the quality of life (QOL) by developing and offering ICT‐based services that meet residents’ needs and boost efficiency of services [4]. Technology focused definitions of the Smart City are not treated further in this article.