Adoption of u-commerce in Croatia -a preliminary study Abstract. U-commerce (ubicomp) is defined as combination of e-commerce, m- commerce, e- commerce using interactive digital television as communication media, voice commerce and silent commerce. Each u-commerce element uses positive characteristics of other elements and modifies it according to newer and sophisticated customer needs. This article describes preliminary study conducted to investigate u-commerce understanding and usage among enterprises in Croatia. Questionnaire preparation and construction as well as study pursuit are described. Study results indicate that degree of u- commerce knowledge and usage is relatively low. In order to answer customer’s needs enterprises should familiarize more quickly with new technologies like u- commerce. Keywords. U-commerce, adoption, Croatian companies 1 Introduction Ubiquitous or pervasive computing is rapidly progressing since the first conceptualization two decades ago. Ubiquitous computing has enabled new e-marketing paradigm that goes beyond traditional e- commerce [12]. New type of e-commerce is called „u- commerce“. U-commerce has ability to interact and to transact anywhere and anytime, with anytime and anyone. Therefore u-commerce is pervasive and becoming a part of everyday life [9]. U-commerce is going to be next wave in digital commerce, after e- commerce and m-commerce. It is important to stress that u-commerce is addition of current types of commerce, and not their replacement. For users and business u-commerce brings two principal benefits: (1) increased convenience and (2) more personalized services [4]. U-commerce can provide higher degree of personalization, which can bring additional values to the customers but can be one of major drivers in customer relationship management [5]. There are many attempts to develop and implement u-commerce systems. These systems are diverse in nature. They are based on devices that recognize speech, gesture or physical interactions. Owning their complexity they are very difficult to evaluate. Relatively little prior empirical research exist on users willingness to use u-commerce systems and weather users perceive that technological benefits meet their needs. In order to design and develop u- commerce system there is need to investigate are users interested in using this kind of system. The research issue is to which extent u-commerce has penetrated in Croatian enterprises. This paper is presenting the results of preliminary study of u- commerce adoption by Croatian enterprises. The remaining of paper is organized as follows. Section 2 presents theoretical framework and literature overview. In section 3 research issues and methodology are presented. Section 4 gives preliminary results of survey. Zvonimir Sabati b , Renata Mekovec b , Damir Novotny a a T&MC Group, Technology & Management Consultants, Grada Vukovara 284/D, Zagreb, Croatia damir.novotny@tmc-holding.com b Faculty of Organization and Informatics University of Zagreb Pavlinska 2, 42000 Varaždin, Croatia {zvonimir.sabati, renata.hudek}@foi.hr Proceedings of the 21st Central European Conference on Information and Intelligent Systems 257 Varaˇ zdin, Croatia Faculty of Organization and Informatics September 22-24 2010