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SOLITUDE is out of fashion

Most of us now work in teams, in offices without walls, for managers who prize people skills above all. Lone geniuses are out. Collaboration is in. 

there’s a problem with this view. Research strongly suggests that people are more creative when they enjoy privacy and freedom from interruption. And the most spectacularly creative people in many fields are often introverted, according to studies by the psychologists Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Gregory Feist. They’re extroverted enough to exchange and advance ideas, but see themselves as independent and individualistic. They’re not joiners by nature.

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.

Social networking is a daily activity for most of us. Anyone paying attention knows that sites like Facebook and Twitter have hundreds of millions of users and are extremely popular. But one thing I think we all forget from time to time is that these social networking sites are businesses. They do have employees and they do have costs. So I ask again, how do social networks make money?The short answer is that they don’t, not on their own at least – at first. There are a few different ways social networking sites earn money, with more on the horizon. This article aims at uncovering a few of these methods and answering the questions that many of us are asking.Read more at www.makeuseof.com 

People Don't Care about PCs...the Buzz is All About Mobile To paint an image of the very large scale of the mobile ecosystem, Jacobs talked numbers: There are 1.3 billion 3G connections worldwide, and there will be 2 billion more connections by 2015. Mobile data use will increase 10 to 12 times over the next four years. There are over 120 HSPA+ mobile networks and 180 commercial EVDO networks offering mobile broadband. There are 200 LTE networks planned, 20 of which have launched now.

Mobile Unleashing the "Greatest Wave of Creativity in History" And what is that? Only that mobile is going to unleash the "greatest wave of creativity in history." Dr. Jacobs said he knew that sounded like a "heady" proposition, especially because many mobile developers are just trying to build an app people like, he says. "But your app could reach hundreds of millions of users!" Now is the time to "think and act globally," Jacobs said. "Mobile is now the dominant computing platform, and it's never going back."

Augmented Reality Demoed as Marketing Tool AR, or augmented reality, was also at the forefront of today's keynote, with a sobering presentation from John Batter, Co-President of Production, Dreamworks Animation SKG. He produced data showing the decline of DVD sales over the years.

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.

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.

With millions of potential voters using mobile devices, strategists would be remiss to write off QR codes as a risky early-adopter consumer trend untranslatable to the political space.

“One of the exciting things about 2012 is that we have the opportunity to close the loop between online activities and real-world events,” he adds. “We’re seeing individuals rely on their phones, and QR codes present an optimal framework for that. There’s an opportunity for campaigns to reach out to mobile-savvy individuals and transmit a message that will lead to an activation.”

There is great potential in branding candidates, fundraising and collecting supporters’ data using QR technology.

A recent video released by Hidden Creative has caused some discussion over augmented reality among netizens. The video explains that augmented reality technology is the way of the future. Users are able to use their cellphones or digital device to scan their surrounding and find out live information on the spot. The video also demonstrates how augmented reality can also overlay objects in a real-life space to help users with renovations by virtually rearranging furniture or configuring the colors virtually. Nevertheless, although most reactions to the video have been quite positive and enthusiastic, some bloggers are little bit more skeptical as to whether augmented reality is here to stay. Comments from Digital Urban included: “We maybe wrong but waving your phone around simply does not feel like the future to us”, “Augmented reality often just seems to be cool rather than actually good enough to be useful” and also “The way AR is presented here is not a step forward, it’s a step backward actually”.

Exclusive - Tinkercad, a startup that aims to introduce browser-based 3D printing CAD to the masses, has landed $1M in seed funding from True Ventures, Jaiku founder Jyri Engestrom, Delicious founder Joschua Schachter, Eghosa Omogui and Taher Haveliwala.

The company’s mission is to ‘reach and teach’ a wide audience on the use of CAD software and creating ‘fun and meaningful’ things like jewelry, toys, car parts and whatnot, using 3D printers.

Kai Backman, Tinkercad’s co-founder and CEO, explains that one only needs a browser and a couple of minutes to use its browser-based software and have a 3D project ready for printing.

As the number of smartphone users continues to grow at an incredible rate, the challenge facing many retail brands is to continue to find ways of utilising smartphone technologies to effectively connect and engage with consumers. In recent months many retail brands have focused on smartphone features that integrate with social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Foursquare, to not only create something new and unique as part of the consumer journey, but to also take advantage of the fact that through successfully integrating social media with the overall brand experience, the likelihood of fans and customers “sharing” branded content and increasing brand visibilty in the social space is also increased; something that more and more companies are continually striving to achieve across multiple social media and online PR campaigns. Interestingly, something that an increasing number of people are now starting to talk about when looking at the ways smartphones are shaping consumer and brand day-to-day lives, is Near Field Communication technologies (NFC) and the possibilities that they present.

In short, Near Field Communication technology enables smartphone users to gain instant access to digital data from another NFC enabled handset or NFC tag simply by placing or waving their phone next to the NFC tag. Much like scanning a QR code or connecting via Bluetooth, the tag then sends content automatically between the handset and the tag - be it a Foursquare-style check-in at a record store or access to an exclusive in-store promotion.

Although at first this may not seem all that different to what we have seen recently with the introduction of QR codes, the possibilities we are seeing for NFC technology are far greater. So much so, that we're not only seeing an increasing number of smartphone brands integrating the technology into their latest handsets, we are also starting to see large named brands such as Google, Visa and MasterCard getting involved at what is a very early stage.

A freely accessible index of 5 billion web pages, their page rank, their link graphs and other metadata, hosted on Amazon EC2, was announced today by the Common Crawl Foundation. "It is crucial [in] our information-based society that Web crawl data be open and accessible to anyone who desires to utilize it," writes Foundation director Lisa Green on the organization's blog.

The Foundation explains the scope of the project thusly. "Common Crawl is a Web Scale crawl, and as such, each version of our crawl contains billions of documents from the various sites that we are successfully able to crawl. This dataset can be tens of terabytes in size, making transfer of the crawl to interested third parties costly and impractical. In addition to this, performing data processing operations on a dataset this large requires parallel processing techniques, and a potentially large computer cluster. "Luckily for us, Amazon's EC2/S3 cloud computing infrastructure provides us with both a theoretically unlimited storage capacity coupled with localized access to an elastic compute cloud."

The Foundation is an organization dedicated to leveraging the falling costs of crawling and storage for the benefit of "individuals, academic groups, small start-ups, big companies, governments and nonprofits." It's lead by Gilad Elbaz, the forefather of Google AdSense and the CEO of data platform startup Factual. Joining Elbaz on the Foundation board is internet public domain champion Carl Malamud and semantic web serial entrepreneur Nova Spivack. Director Lisa Green came to the Foundation by way of Creative Commons.

Whether Newsstand was Apple’s strategy all along, I don’t know, but I think it might have been. The app is the unit of distribution for newspapers and magazines, not the “issue” or the “article”. This puts more work on the publishers’ shoulders — they need to design, create, and maintain software, not merely publish content — but it gives them more control over the reader experience and more potential for creativity and differentiation.

Why not the same thing for TV channels? We’re seeing the beginnings of this, with iPhone and iPad apps like HBO Go, Watch ESPN, and the aforementioned Bloomberg TV+. Letting each TV network do their own app allows them the flexibility that writing software provides. News networks can combine their written and video news into an integrated layout. Networks with contractual obligations to cable operators, like HBO and ESPN, can write code that requires users to log in to verify their status as an eligible subscriber.

Why not the same thing for TV sized displays? Imagine watching a baseball game on a TV where ESPN is a smart app, not a dumb channel. When you’re watching a game, you could tell the TV to show you the career statistics for the current batter. You could ask the HBO app which other movies this actress has been in. Point is: it’d be better for both viewers and the networks1 if a TV “channel” were an interactive app rather than a mere single stream of video.

An ad agency, several musicians, and an app developer have collaborated on Lucozade Energy’s latest campaign, creating drink bottles that launch videos through an augmented reality (AR) smartphone app.

Billington Cartmell, a UK ‘thinking brands’ agency, led the project to join artistic expression with an interactive brand experience. Using a the unique ability of the Aurasma app to map and track cylindrical objects, the agency asked seven of the UK’s biggest musicians to design a Lucozade bottle which when viewed through Aurasma leaps to life with video and animations.

A great deal of exclusive content was created for this campaign, and most of it is accessible only through the AR-enabled app. The animations that play from the bottles in the app are really only teasers, directing users to a website with documentaries and behind-the scenes video.

Perhaps the saddest thing about Facebook (note: I do think there are good things) is that most users seem utterly unware of the way Facebook is changing things; unaware of FB’s ever-changing Privacy settings; little idea about how expansive the recent f8 announcements could be (in fact I’d say a huge percentage of users don’t even know what the heck f8 is or what its impact may have); and perhaps wholly uprepared when their profiles and their data are streaming out in the open publicly. Most users are using FB strictly to post pictures and update their status in the literal way in which FB was designed - no sense of re-purposing the software in broader ways. On one hand, it’s great that we can all share our experiences with each other; on the other hand it’s worrying that more users aren’t educated enough about the fundamental nature of these media to make smart connections back to their own lives.

Furthermore, if Facebook becomes the primary place where people congregate, purchase, publish and share, it will become imensely important that users are proficient and savvy and creative in using it *for* their interests as citizens and not against them. The smallest tweaks in any software can have major implications in their use. Imagine if Facebook had a Hate button. I agree with Scoble: I hope we never see something like that. …But I have a feeling, there’s a Hate button hidden deep within our collective social experience and dynamics just waiting to surface its ugly head in the not-too-distant future. Recommend on Amplify                

In his short treatise On Bullshit, the moral philosopher Harry Frankfurt gives us a useful theory of bullshit. We normally think of bullshit as a synonym—albeit a somewhat vulgar one—for lies or deceit. But Frankfurt argues that bullshit has nothing to do with truth. Rather, bullshit is used to conceal, to impress or to coerce. Unlike liars, bullshitters have no use for the truth. All that matters to them is hiding their ignorance or bringing about their own benefit. Gamification is bullshit. I'm not being flip or glib or provocative. I'm speaking philosophically. More specifically, gamification is marketing bullshit, invented by consultants as a means to capture the wild, coveted beast that is videogames and to domesticate it for use in the grey, hopeless wasteland of big business, where bullshit already reigns anyway. Bullshitters are many things, but they are not stupid. The rhetorical power of the word "gamification" is enormous, and it does precisely what the bullshitters want: it takes games—a mysterious, magical, powerful medium that has captured the attention of millions of people—and it makes them accessible in the context of contemporary business.

Motivating Gen Xers

Room to grow. Offer Gen X employees clear statements of goals

Opportunities to make choices. Since this generation has become accustomed to "fending for themselves," provide options--options for task selection, options for challenges, options to formulate new processes, and options to develop creative yet appropriate conclusions.

In Disneys Fantasia, Mickey Mouse as the Sorcerer's Apprentice brings to life everyday objects such as brooms and buckets to help him with his tasks of cleaning - what starts as a good idea ultimately ends with terrible results as he fails to be able to control them.Whilst Mickey may have gotten out of his depth, this thinking of everyday objects being brought to life isn't just a fantasy.

Obviously not in the literal sense we see in the Sourcers Apprentice (although that would have been great!), but more in the sense that previously in-anmiate objects can now start to record their activities. Termed the "Internet of Things" this was discussed in part by a talk at DICE by Jesse Schell about gamification and how this may extend into everyday items and tasks. (The video is really worth watching if you haven't previously seen it)

What Jesse discussed in terms of earning points for brushing your teeth has now been enabled by start-up Green Goose. Using a combination of intelligent stickers or product add-ons, Green Goose claims to be able to track any activity, from cleaning your teeth to drinking a class of water.