Power of crowdsourcing and gaming

How Companies Learn Your Secrets. S 12 Consumer Trends for 2012. Expect crowd-based problem solving to fuel endless innovations in 2012, especially as for consumers, contributing will be more effortless than ever.

The Fate of Civic Education in a Connected World. SimCity and Urban Planning/Natural Disasters. A key aspect of planning, both in real life urban planning, and in SimCity, is natural disasters.

Natural Disasters in real-life Urban Planning[edit] Many cities are constructed in places subject to flood, storm surges, extreme weather or war. City planners can cope with these. Politics - Molly Ball and Nancy Scola - The Community Organizing Geeks Who Could Revolutionize Campaign Tech. One was Mark Zuckerberg's Harvard roommate.

The other went to Jerry Falwell's Liberty University. Together, Joe Green and Jim Gilliam want to democratize the most powerful Internet organizing tools. NationBuilder.com The websites for Barack Obama and Mitt Romney look practically the same: sleek, snazzy, red-white-and-blue. 7 Gamification Predictions for 2012. Conventional wisdom has it that sales people love competition. They want a challenge, beat their friends and colleagues, and be on top of the leaderboard. And sales managers constantly use carrots and competition, because this is what “motivates" sales agents.

But is this true? We know that sales reps have to make money for the company. Depending on the product or service sold, the sales process and effort can vary significantly, from products and services which need a lot of explaining and have long sales cycles, to others that need nearly no explanations and sell quickly. . #1 Competition is the opposite of collaboration. When we consider the reason why we start companies, it’s because together we can achieve more than as individuals. Jane McGonigal shows how games make us resilient.

AUSTIN, Texas--If you want to lose weight or overcome the effects of asthma, Jane McGonigal thinks she has a solution you might not have considered: a game.

At the South by Southwest festival here this week, the world-famous game designer formally launched her latest project, SuperBetter, a project that is designed to help players attack any of a wide variety of personal challenges. It's not a quick fix. McGonigal and her team built the game with a sense of reality: nothing important happens overnight. The Gaming-For-Good Trend [Need To Know: SXSWi] As we all begin to look forward to the interactive section of South By South West in March, PSFK has identified five key trends that readers should be monitoring during the festival.

One of these trends, we have coined ‘Gaming-For-Good.’ Fueled by the ability to connect and gather players from across the world and motivate them to participate by injecting competitive aspects and rewards into structured play, games are growing up and being seen as agents of change. The ability to scale enables these platforms to prompt positive action and overcome challenges on both an individual and societal level with implications for a growing number of areas from science and medicine to education and the environment.

Whether improving health, fundraising for charity or solving previously unsolvable problems, games are encouraging personal and social good. In Virtual World, Phone Game Controls You! Social control can be done in lots of ways: laws, advertising, culture and peer pressure.

Now we can put gaming and mobile phones on the list. John Rula, a graduate student in engineering at northwestern University, and Fabian Bustamante, associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science, came up with a way to get people to go places they might ordinarily not go. The concept is called "crowd soft control," and combines incentives with mobile applications to nudge people in a certain direction. The researchers used a game, which involved "zapping" ghosts on a campus. The concept is simple: you get points for zapping a ghost when your phone's camera spots one. Snapping the photo is fun for the phone owner, but the actual photo itself can be useful for the greater good. Forget Google Glasses: Our ‘Smart Phones’ Will Soon Be Contact Lenses.

This month’s buzz award was won by Google’s secretive Project Glass, a concept in development by Google X Lab that promises to replace our smartphones with augmented reality glasses.

It’s anticipated that this exciting futuristic eyewear will be available next year in stores. News - forestry commission’s forest xplorer app comes to android. 23 APRIL 2012 NEWS RELEASE No: 15431 This news story is now over a year old and information may not now be accurate or up-to-date.

Please use our search box to look for more recent information. Forestry Commission England’s free app, Forest Xplorer, has just got even better. Not only is the ultimate guide to the forest now available on android phones, but it has an easy event finder so you always know what’s happening in your local woodland. Visitors will be able to find their local Forestry Commission forest park, search for what events are taking place across the country and download handy trail maps so that you can easily find your way around the forest. Want to stay in the forest a bit longer?