Factors Affecting the Adoption of Mobile Services

Mobile technologies are gaining more popularity and diffusing into every aspects of our life. Value Added Services (VAS) has huge impact on consumers' usage patterns and became a significant differentiator across the operators. These led to new opportunities in innovation of differentiating services. Better services will be best developed by understanding the requirements of the users. In this study, our intention is to shed some light on the process of mobile service adoption by investigating value added services especially for informative and location based services. The study started with a background research to identify factors determining the adoption of mobile services; then continued with a qualitative study, namely interview. Factors are analyzed according to proposed mobile service adoption taxonomy, which has "service aspect" and "social aspect". Ease of use (EoU) and usefulness are perceived as most significant adoption factors in mobile service usage. These factors are related to both "service" and "social" aspects. While, content and mobility are dominant factors in terms of service aspect, social influence which is a category of social aspect is more important than characteristics of users.