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AbstractThe research on software startups has increased lately, focusing on describing how these companies’ unique context influences development practices. The next step for research is the creation of specific practices for these companies grounded in scientific results. An obstacle in this path is which dependent variable these novel practices should improve. A natural answer is these companies’ success. This position paper reviews the literature on new ventures and startups’ success to show that telling if a startup is successful or not is a complex issue. As a solution to this problem, this paper proposes a conceptual framework, suggesting that novel practices should improve success determinants or reduce inhibitors rather than focusing on the startups’ success. Three examples illustrate the framework’s use: hypotheses engineering, microservices, and BizDev. The identification of contributors and inhibitors for success of software startups could enrich the framework and indicate possible avenues for the creation of development practices specific tailored for these companies.

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Social media represents a large part of the content available on the Web. While the accessibility of the UIs of existing social media platforms has been improving, the same cannot be said about the accessibility of the content authored by their users. Specifically, the accessibility of multimedia content that is increasingly available given the ease of access to mobile devices with cameras. User research has revealed that accessible authoring practices are a foreign concept to most social media users, but also that they are motivated to adopt inclusive practices. Our work focuses on promoting awareness to accessible social media authoring practices and in assisting the authoring process. We have prototyped a Google Chrome extension and an Android application that can identify when a Twitter or a Facebook user is authoring content with images and suggests a text alternative for the image. By suggesting the alternative, we raise awareness to the accessible authoring process and make it easier for the user to include it in the tweet or post. Text alternatives may be suggested from different sources: descriptions entered by other users for the same image, analysis of the main concepts present in the image, or text present in the image, for instance. Our prototypes can also provide text alternatives on demand for images on any web page or Android application, not just social media. In this paper, we highlight some of the challenges faced to offer this support in different technological platforms (web and mobile), but also ones that are raised by the domain characteristics (e.g. detecting the same image, supporting different languages) and that can be addressed through AI based technologies.

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Serious Pervasive Games extend themagic circle (Huizinga, 1938) to the players’ context and surrounding environment. The blend of both physical and fictive game worlds provides a push in player engagement and promotes situated learning approaches. Space and time, as well as social context, acquire a more meaningful impact on the gameplay. From pervasive learning towards science communication with location-based games, this article presents research and case studies that exemplify their benefits and related problems. Pervasive learning can be defined as “learning at the speed of need through formal, informal and social learning modalities” (Pontefract, 2013). The first case study—the BEACONING project—aims to contextualize the teaching and learning process, connecting it with problem-based game mechanics within STEM. The main goal of this project is to provide the missing connection between STEM subjects and real-world interactions and applications. The pedagogical foundation is supported on problem-based learning (PBL), in which active learning is in the center, and learners have to work with different tools and resources in order to solve problems (quests). Teachers create, facilitate, and assess pervasive and gamified learning activities (missions). Furthermore, these quests are gamified in order to provide non-linear game plots. In a second case study, we demonstrate and evaluate how natural heritage can benefit from pervasive games. This study is based on a set of location-based games for an existing natural park, which have been developed in order to provide enhanced experiences, as well as additional information about some species that are more difficult to observe or that are seasonal. Throughout the research and development of these projects, we have encountered and identified several problems, of different nature, present in pervasive games.