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Neighbourhood Effects on Firm Success and Strategy As a result of economic transitions and several societal developments over the past 50 years, residential neighbourhoods have developed from being places where people predominantly live into places where people also work. A growing number of small- and medium-sized firms are located in residential neighbourhoods, many of which are home-based. Triggered by relatively high levels of turbulence in residential neighbourhoods and inter-locality variation in firm survival, firm growth and firm relocation, this study concerned whether and how neighbourhood characteristics influence the success of local firms and the strategic options of their entrepreneurs. The research demonstrates that some ‘neighbourhood effects’ on firm success and strategy do exist, especially for the growing group of solo entrepreneurs and firms in locally-oriented sectors. In particular the social context in which entrepreneurs are embedded matters, as cohesive neighbourhoods trigger both firm growth and entrepreneurial investments. Furthermore, the accumulation of liveability-related problems in disadvantaged neighbourhoods seems to contribute to an unfavourable business climate.

The robotics industry is growing rapidly, and to a large extent the development of this market sector is due to the area of social robotics - the production of robots that are designed to enter the space of human social interaction, both physically and semantically.

Ambient Intelligence Perspectives contains selected papers from the first international ambient Intelligence Forum - AmIF 2008 in Hradec Králové, Czech Republic. The forum is intended as the beginning of a series of rather broadly oriented discussion opportunities for discussing interdisciplinary, if not transdisciplinary aspects of rapidly evolving areas of Ambient Intelligence. Its aims were to review and discuss recent advances and promising research trends in AmI technology, intelligent environments, methods, middleware development, as well as applications in areas such as healthcare, product lifecycle and transport services. The intention to provide an opportunity of a very broad interaction among a wide rank of authors coming from different surroundings means a great enrichment to all participants and gives ground to the success of the conference. Finally it led towards an interesting choice of three invited and twenty-five contributed papers, which are published in this book. All papers were carefully reviewed by the international program committee. Participants from twelve countries contributed to the scientific program and established a fruitful discussion atmosphere.

The 5th International Conference on Intelligent Environments (IE'09), held at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia, Castelldefels, Barcelona, Spain, provides a multidisciplinary forum for researchers and engineers from across the world to present their latest research and to discuss future directions in the area of Intelligent Environments. This volume forms the combined proceedings of five workshops held at the IE'09. Included are the proceedings of the: Workshop on Digital Object Memories (DOMe'09); Workshop on RFID Technology: Concepts, Practices and Solutions (RFID'09); Workshop on Artificial Intelligence Techniques for Ambient Intelligence (AITAmI09); Workshop on Ethical Design of Ambient Intelligence (EDAmI'09); Workshop on Smart Offices and Other Workplaces (SOOW'09).

The national information infrastructure (NII) holds the promise of connecting people of all ages and descriptions-bringing them opportunities to interact with businesses, government agencies, entertainment sources, and social networks. Whether the NII fulfills this promise for everyone depends largely on interfaces-technologies by which people communicate with the computing systems of the NII. More Than Screen Deep addresses how to ensure NII access for every citizen, regardless of age, physical ability, race/ethnicity, education, ability, cognitive style, or economic level. This thoughtful document explores current issues and prioritizes research directions in creating interface technologies that accommodate every citizen's needs. The committee provides an overview of NII users, tasks, and environments and identifies the desired characteristics in every-citizen interfaces, from power and efficiency to an element of fun. The book explores: Technological advances that allow a person to communicate with a computer system. Methods for designing, evaluating, and improving interfaces to increase their ultimate utility to all people. Theories of communication and collaboration as they affect person-computer interactions and person-person interactions through the NII. Development of agents: intelligent computer systems that \"understand\" the user's needs and find the solutions. Offering data, examples, and expert commentary, More Than Screen Deep charts a path toward enabling the broadest-possible spectrum of citizens to interact easily and effectively with the NII. This volume will be important to policymakers, information system designers and engineers, human factors professionals, and advocates for special populations.

IN DETAIL The Windows Communication Foundation 4.0 (WCF 4.0) is a .NET-based application programming interface for building and running connected systems. It enables secure and reliable communication among systems within an organization or across the Internet. This book deals with the difficult issues faced by a .NET developer while working with WCF. WCF 4.0 is a communications infrastructure that unifies a broad array of distributed systems' capabilities in a composable, extensible architecture that supports multiple transports, messaging patterns, encodings, network topologies, and hosting models. This book is a collection of focused real-world recipes and covers basic recipes on topics such as working with contracts to more advanced topics such as extending WCF runtime. By the end of this book you will have valuable information that helps transform the potentially unproductive habits of .Net developers who work with WCF. This book will take you through many concepts starting with complete support for contract-related design for WCF service development. You will learn to use WCF's built-in feature for building various service endpoints. Service hosting and configuration are important areas for building WCF services, especially at the service deployment stage, and are detailed in this book. You will find it easy to work with WCF client proxy generation and metadata publishing and discovery when you go through recipes such as customizing auto-generated service proxies. The author then discusses the exchange of data in WCF service operation features, related to WCF data serialization. You will discover some useful tips for security in WCF service development and built-in features for developing concurrency control for your services built upon it. One big plus is that you will learn to extend the existing WCF framework to achieve advanced functionality. You will find a dedicated chapter for RESTful and AJAX-enabled service development. Moving on, you will find several useful WCF service interoperability cases, which are important for a distributed service development platform. Towards the end of this book you will find some handy and useful diagnostic methods for troubleshooting. Extend and secure the WCF framework and develop robust SOA applications with ease APPROACH The recipes in this book are easy to understand and follow as the author discusses real-world scenarios. The range of topics covered in this book will bring out the forward-thinking WCF developer in you. It is not a comprehensive reference to the whole of WCF, but a practical guide that boosts proficiency when working with the various features of WCF. The examples are supported by relevant background information for ease of understanding. WHO THIS BOOK IS FOR If you work with Windows Communication Foundation 4.0 and you want to be efficient when working with WCF features such as interoperability, proxy generation, and security, you will find this book very useful. With this book you will be able to find quick and handy solutions for various kinds of service development scenarios using Microsoft Windows Communication Foundation 4.0. To follow the recipes you will need to be comfortable with .NET Framework, C# programming, and the basics of SOA and how to develop them.