Place as Adoption Moderating Factor Usage Implications for Mobile Data Services

This paper explores the role of place as potential moderating factor for the usage process of mobile data services. Mobile networked technologies are forming a multimedia mixed environment offering rich applications and services, called mobile data services. But the low diffusion of mobile data services in European societies asks for more investigation in order to explain the users´ behaviour within mobile networked environments. Although the last two decades new user adoption models have been proposed, these cannot successfully be applied in the area of mobile applications and services because of their low explanatory power across different contexts. Thus there is a need to introduce new moderating factors to increase the explanatory power of adoption models within mobile networked environments. The results presented here suggest that place influences usage of mobile data services and for that reason there is a need to explore its moderating role in the usage process.