background preloader

Power of crowdsourcing and gaming

Facebook Twitter

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. In 2012, count on the crowdsourcing trend to continue to shake up business processes and spawn endless innovations. After all, being given a chance to contribute, or to be a part of something bigger than themselves, will be forever popular with people. However the reality is that most consumers- while they might want to contribute- find that it’s too difficult or too much hassle. Which is why you can expect to see more IDLE SOURCING initiatives in 2012: products and services that make it downright simple (if not effortless) to contribute to anything, from pinpointing roads in need of repairs to finding signs of extraterrestrial life.

Two IDLE SOURCING examples that show the way: 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. If the dangers can be localized (for flood or storm surge), the affected regions can be made into parkland or greenbelt, often with lovely results. Another practical method is simply to build the city on ridges, and the parks and farms in valleys. Extreme weather, flood, war or other emergencies can often be greatly mitigated with secure evacuation routes and emergency operations centers. These are relatively inexpensive and unobtrusive, and many consider them a reasonable precaution for any urban space.

Many cities also have planned, built safety features, such as levees, retaining walls, and shelters. Some planning methods might help an elite group to control ordinary citizens. Natural Disasters in SimCity[edit] 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. But peel back a layer, and there's a difference -- the fundamental difference, in fact, between how Democrats and Republicans use technology. Obama's site was custom-built starting in 2008 by the consulting firm Blue State Digital. In short, Team Obama has home-grown its tools, while Team Romney has bought commercial products and taped them together. Now, two visionary geeks want to change that. "For grassroots organizing, the biggest difference is in the smallest races.

" Campaign-tech industry insiders agree that NationBuilder is a potential game-changer, though they caution that it's too soon to tell if the software will catch on as widely as its backers hope. 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. . #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. . #2 Only a handful of people compete. If you’ve used competition in the past, have you also crunched the numbers?

Jane McGonigal shows how games make us resilient | Geek Gestalt. 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. But commit to taking on challenges, and a game like SuperBetter can help just about anyone tackle issues that have cowed them for years. For McGonigal, SuperBetter is not just an intellectual exercise.

And return from the injury she did, not only to her blossoming career as a leading designer of intricate social, multiplayer games but to writing--she penned the bestseller "Reality is Broken"--and to launching a startup built around her new creation. That's really cool. 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. One pertinent example of this trend that continues to come up in our research is ‘Using Gaming To Leverage Collective Manpower.’ 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 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. The ghosts are displayed first on a map, and then, when the player gets close enough, the augmented reality functions on newer phone models show the ghost on the phone's screen. Each time a ghost appears, the player snaps a picture, and zaps the ghost. It isn't just good for mapping and making 3-D models, either. Forget Google Glasses: Our ‘Smart Phones’ Will Soon Be Contact Lenses | Think Tank.

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. But Google Glasses are Sony’s Walkman compared to what’s expected to be consumer-ready in the next 5 to 10 years: Project contact lens. You wake up in the morning, rub your sleepy eyes. As you’re getting ready to face the day you put in your contact lens, which will make the Internet and all your files, playlists, GPS, favorite apps, and addicting games literally available with the blink of an eye. Scientists are already at the animal testing phase of the technology that will make this possible. Making this technology functional, comfortable, and safe is the work of Babak Parviz, a bionanotechnology expert at the University of Washington, in Seattle.

For IEEE.org, he writes: 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? Also new for 2012, you can now get back to nature with Camping in the Forest sites or, if you would prefer a bit of luxury, find Forest Holidays cabins on the app too. And don’t forget about the award-winning handy tree identifier! Pam Warhurst, Forestry Commission Chair, said: Notes to Editors: