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Every summer, fifty fifth graders converge on Manhattan for a week-long game design camp called Mobile Quest and magic happens.

A game is a complex system. It is a miniature world, in many ways analogous to the world we live in. The game occurs in a space or setting. It has its own physical laws or rules. It engages people or players, who generate outcomes by making choices and taking actions. Learning occurs largely by trial and error, and through this learning a clear goal or goals emerge. There is a sense of progress, a system of feedback, incentives, reward, punishment, reputation. The only difference is that the game world has been 100 percent designed, and it is an experience players can choose to walk away from. This means game designers must capture and retain players' attention and interest quickly.

Wednesday at the Social Good Summit, ABC News correspondent Juju Chang announced a new Facebook game aimed at educating people about maternal health.

The game, which is a piece of the larger Million Moms Challenge initiative launched earlier this week by ABC News and the UN Foundation, is called 1000 Days and guides players through a series of educational mini games that teach about things such as proper diet, breast feeding and government regulations.

users are presented with opportunities to connect with outside organizations in the maternal health space for additional information.

Research group Gartner issued a special report on Thursday, noting that Apple will have a "free run" in the tablet market this holiday season as rivals continue to lag. The group sees worldwide media tablet sales as on track to reach 63.6 million units this year, a 261.4 percent increase from 2010.

Gartner predicts Apple will hold on to a dominant 73.4 percent of the market this year, though down from 83 percent in 2010. Android is expected to remain in second place, with the firm assuming that no other platforms will manage a 5 percent share of the market in 2011.

By the end of 2015, the company's tablet share is expected to slide to 46 percent.

But points and badgest are a very basic “carrot” approach. Pink says that in the main carrots and sticks don’t work except for basic repetitive tasks where there is little intrinsic motivation.

For anything involving knowledge or creativity, what matters is: Autonomy – deciding how and when to do things Mastery – the reward in gaining a skill and learning Purpose – the sense that the task is part of a greater goal.

What concerns me is that points and badges are none of the above, they are just  extrinsic motivation.

In 2010, $8.1 billion was spent globally on smart technology in cities in the US, and within the next five years, that number is projected to jump to $39.5 billion, greatly expanding the capacity for smart city projects around the world. Currently, there are 102 smart cities in the world. Europe has the most at 38, with North America following closely with 35. Asia has 21, the Middle East and Africa combined have six, and South and Central America have two. The “smartness” of a city is determined by these aspects: economy, environment, government, lifestyle, transportation and community.

Local data Alec Muffett is working on a scheme called the Mine Project. This aims to give consumers a local place to store their credentials and sensitive data, so they can choose which services they want to expose the data to.

"I believe the structure of the internet encourages individuals to host their own data. In some ways, it's a little unfortunate that everyone thinks it's easier to have a big company do it on their behalf, but it's entirely understandable," he says.

"It's a karmic cycle," he says. But sooner or later it is going to swing the other way, and people should prepare for an age when their data is once again their own, he argues.

Payments company PayPal wants to make sure that it stays in the conversation when it comes to mobile payments.

In the last couple of weeks we have heard from innovations coming out of MasterCard and Intuit. PayPal is one of the leaders in mobile payments, especially on the peer-to-peer front.

PayPal is predicting that mobile payments is going to boom come time for the holiday shopping spree

Summary: Mobile payments are expected to pick up rapidly in the next year, but don’t expect NFC technology to be at the forefront just yet.

Mobile payments is a hot topic at the moment, but there’s actually quite little going on in comparison when it comes to actual activity. There are hardly any smartphones enabled with NFC technology, nor are most of the digital wallet programs set up and running extensively yet.

this field is expected to rapidly change within in the next year, according to a group of panelists assembled at GigaOM’s Mobilize 2011 conference in San Francisco on Monday afternoon. The mobile payments spectrum could (and should) look vastly different at this time in 2012.

Author: Sheryl Grant

Is there some core definition or badge-ness to explain what makes badges unique?

If badges are like degrees, diplomas, grades, or currency -- which many of us have collected and displayed and benefited from -- what's wrong with them? Why are badges worse or better? If badges are visual signs of rank, reputation, membership, and identity, and are just another way to show affiliation, why are they different than, say, titles, clothing, hair, language, accents, bumper stickers, friends, or an alma mater?  

Here are the 'Nine Commandments' of ROWE:

We do not post office hours or core hours. Our employees know where to be when they need to be there. We don't dictate it. Everybody has complete control over how they spend their time. All the time.

We do not track time for our exempt/salaried workforce. We track work getting done.

Are defined hours of work an anachronism that’s holding us back? Or is the freedom to work whenever we want something still reserved for a select few, and/or a trap that causes us to work more rather than less?

Flexible work is something that seems increasingly popular with programmers and other online workers, for reasons that Zach Holman of the software repository GitHub described in a recent post on the GitHub blog, entitled “Hours Are Bull****.” Holman said that for most of the staff who work on the service, there are no defined working hours whatsoever — everyone is on their own schedule and they work whenever they need to in order to solve the problems that need to be solved. As he puts it:

Hours are great ways to determine productivity in many industries, but not ours. Working in a startup is a much different experience than working in a factory. You can’t throw more time at a problem and expect it to get solved. Code is a creative endeavor… We want employees to be in the zone as often as possible. Mandating specific times they need to be in the office hurts the chances of that.

In South Africa, the continent’s strongest economy, mobile phone use has gone from 17 percent of adults in 2000 to 76 percent in 2010. Today, more South Africans – 29 million – use mobile phones than radio (28 million), TV (27 million) or personal computers (6 million). Only 5 million South Africans use landline phones. Nielsen’s recently released Mobile Insights study in South Africa, which examined consumers’ usage of and attitudes toward mobile phones, networks and services, reveals a number of interesting insights such as: -- Nokia rules: More than half (52%) own that company’s handsets, followed by Samsung and BlackBerry, and 56 percent of those currently using other brands indicated their next handset would likely be a Nokia. -- SMS text messaging is practically ubiquitous among South African mobile customers, and is used by almost 4.2 times more people than e-mail. More than two-thirds (69%) of consumers prefer sending texts to calling, in large part because it is less expensive, and 10 percent believe texting to be a faster way of communicating.

Those freaked out by facial recognition technology have fresh fodder: a study from Carnegie Mellon University in which researchers were able to predict people’s social security numbers after taking a photo of them with a cheap webcam.

For those participants who had date of birth and city publicly available on their account, the researchers could predict a social security number (based on the work from their 2009 study). The researchers sent a follow-up survey to their student participants asking them whether the first five digits of the social security number their algorithm predicted was correct. One problem with this part of the study was that “60% of the CMU students were foreign and don’t have social security numbers,” said Acquisti. Though researchers were still able to tell them all about their interests and favorite movies based on what they got from their Facebook profile pages.

NFC tag scans for connection sharing, social networking and marketing are increasing at a rate of 22 per cent per month, according to new research carried out by Kimtag. Kimtag, a UK based connection hub, analysed the visits to 10,000 selected Kimtag connection pages over a six month period ending in August 2011. The company compared QR Code, NFC tag, direct and referral hits from visitors around the world. 

During the research, Kimtag regarded a successful visit as a user reaching and fully downloading a Kimtag connection page via an address assigned specifically for NFC tags and then subsequently visiting a connection such as a social network or website.  The research revealed that the number NFC tag scans grew by an average 22 per cent month on month. Over the whole six month period, NFC scans increased by over 170 per cent.

Phil Coote, Kimtag’s CEO, commented, "The research illustrates that while a lot of the current focus within the NFC industry has been on payment systems, the use of NFC to empower the new ‘internet of things’ is likely to play an equally important role in it’s growth." 

Gamification is a hot space, and Got Badge? is a new entrant.

The phrase “Pic or it didn’t happen” might be something you’ve heard before. Basically it means, you can’t say you’ve done something unless you’ve taken a picture of it. It’s the honor system that Got Badge? works on for claiming badges.

Badges are broken up into categories, ranging from “Lifestyle” to “Geeky” to “Fun”. Got Badge? is super simple, super fun, and kind of addicting really.

The Internet has a short attention span. According to research by link-shortening service Bit.ly, click rates drop by half after about three hours for links posted on Twitter, Facebook, and regular Web pages (direct). For hot news stories, the dropoff is even faster -- within the first five minutes, those links get half the clicks they'll ever receive. YouTube has a much longer half-life -- around 7 hours. That's probably because watching a video requires more time and concentration, and can't be done as easily at work.

Instead of thinking about the buttons on a phone or a laptop, manufacturers and designers need to think about what will happen when computers are embedded in everything and connected all the time. Instead of computing confined in a box on a desk or in the hand, computers will be everywhere pulling data from a variety of places.

Of those three elements the patient input screen is likely gathering the least important information and must convey complicated information simply.

How will a machine know when someone waving their hands while they talk to a friend becomes someone trying to tell a computer to do something? Of course, when a device can watch us and interpret our movements and commands effectively it essentially gives computers the illusion of humanity. That’s the illusion Rolston apparently is trying to create.

NFC still isn’t too common in the US, but it looks like it’s going to be a standard feature for all future mobile devices. Manufacturers have been slowly implementing NFC functionality into their phones and tablets recently, so it’s no surprise that Microsoft today announced that Windows 8 will ship with native support for NFC. For those not in the know, NFC (Near Field Communications) is a method of communication that two mobile devices can use to communicate with each other just by being in each other’s presence. It can be used for a whole range of functions such as making payments, to collecting information. Today at the BUILD conference, Microsoft also demonstrated the usage of NFC on its Windows 8 tablet. Using an NFC-enabled business card, the demonstrator could simply collect the website address from it by pointing the corner of the tablet towards the card and tapping the notification. It sure beats launching a QR code scanner or manually typing it in. Check out the video after the break:

In working with thousands of clients, IBM has established that businesses and the world at large have become more interconnected and certainly more intelligent. Just to toss out a few factoids – data is growing at 6 trillion bytes per second, IP traffic will accelerate in 3 years to over a trillion gigabytes, and as of 2010, there were an estimated 30B RFID tags across the global ecosystem. Almost 162 million smart phones were sold in 2008, surpassing laptop sales for the first time. Soon there will be one trillion connected devices in the world, constituting an “Internet of things.” This environment provides both the individual and the organization the opportunity to adapt their thinking and actions to address the challenges of the new world.

Clouds are now seen as an element of a transformative process. Organizations spend time looking at their business processes and deciding which ones to change for competitive advantage as they move into the cloud. More efficient workflows that incorporate “outsiders,” such as customers, contractors, and suppliers can be created.

The ability to allow outside partners to connect to a legacy application via the cloud is an important consideration.

In the next decade, we’ll see more change in the commerce landscape than in the past 100 years combined.

Mobile

by 2020 and each consumer will have approximately seven devices connected to the Internet.