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John Jainschigg, Virtual event, 3D, web, social media,...

I've been reading Jane McGonigal's 'Reality is Broken,' and despite my agreeing with much of her thesis, I think she omits confronting a few troublesome ideas about gamification that _some_ (by no means all) game developers find chilling. For example:

- The emotional complex she wants to evoke through gamification is the same potent combination of intense engagement, flow, esprit-de-corps, loop-reinforced sense of accomplishment (fiero) and surrender to a higher purpose that inflames all True Believers. I'm not sure how you can seriously talk about gamification at world-changing scales without thinking about how scary the present crop of True Believer games can be (e.g., Unbridled Capitalism, Globalization, the Tea Party, Al Quada, etc.)

It was almost exactly one year ago that Facebook launched Places, their location-based offering. Reading the press at the time, you would have thought it was going to be the Foursquare-killer, the Gowalla-strangler, the Loopt-beheader, etc. Nevermind that Facebook partnered with all of them for the launch — those guys were done. Fast forward to today: Foursquare recently raised a large round of funding valuing them at $600 million. And Facebook is killing off Places.

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 the modern web, Google and Facebook are the feudal lords and people are the peasants — at least when it comes to control of the photos, comments, 'likes' and other data that each person posts online.

"The users contribute their own content to you for free. You sell it back to them with banner ads put on there. And on top of that, you spy on them to gather profiling data," says Michiel de Jong, of the Unhosted project to decentralise user data.

As your friends talk to each other, they feed Facebook data about how information flows between its users. It's likely that your friends will have their own friends and will talk to them as well. Every time these first- and second-level contacts interact, it gives Facebook more pointers to where you fit within your network. To you, it's a bunch of your mates; to Facebook, it's an expanding cloud of data to be harvested.

Austrain mobile payment transaction company Dimoco has rolled out a new mobile carrier billing service in the Czech Republic.

Dimoco has thus started offering gateway billing via the billing gateways of three Czech MNOs, namely T-Mobile, Telefonica O2 and Vodafone.

Dimoco develops, operates and markets a mobile messaging and payment transaction hub.

QR code technology arrived late to North America for numerous reasons, and with Near Field Communication (NFC) fast emerging, it is a valid concern that it may not tip the adoption needle in time to establish itself as a household communication tool.

With the release of the Google Wallet, Google has been building a lot of support for NFC. This may explain why they replaced QR codes with NFC for Google Places. Another reason may be because the stickers they distributed to the retailers were intended to be permanent, in which case NFC makes more sense. They may be a bit ahead of the market on this, but if they are distributing millions of these stickers across North America, it pays to plan ahead. Following their announcement, a vast number of articles surfaced with some variation of “QR codes are dead”. This in my opinion was a bit excessive considering Google Places is the only implementation where they made the changeover.

Getting away from Google, let’s briefly look at the expected rate of NFC adoption. Smartphones have been available on this continent for at least 4 years and they currently hold approximately 33% of the market. Google’s Nexus S is one of the first phones to be available with NFC technology and it was released only this spring. Blackberry will start releasing models this fall, and Apple has yet to confirm whether they will include NFC support in the iPhone 5. It’s not unreasonable to expect NFC gaining mass adoption no sooner than 2-3 years.

In January 2011, Starbucks debuted a new way for customers to pay for coffee—through the brand’s mobile app. With 2-D barcode scanners installed in nearly 9,000 of its store locations, the coffee chain has served as a model for retailers looking to enter the mobile payments space.

Starbucks’ mobile platform builds on the success of the Starbucks Card, which has grown from a popular stored-value card to a significant method of payment in stores. Extending the program to a mobile platform was a natural opportunity to enhance the experience and allow customers to manage their Starbucks Card on the go.

Our customers told us they want a faster and easier way to pay, and Starbucks mobile payment apps are the fastest way to pay.

companies must:

Empower employees

STOP being afraid of your customer!

According to the Current Analysis report, AT&T's strengths include: Providing "custom solutions" for companies, including expanded professional services, targeted to specific business needs Offering cost-effective services to global customers, with expanding global M2M footprint Developing key relationships with platform providers to provide enhanced services for M2M customers Excellent traction with 12 million Connected Devices in Q1-11 "AT&T continues to add value to its M2M solutions," wrote Kathryn Weldon, Principal Analyst, Current Analysis. "AT&T has made a number of recent alliance announcements with application platform providers, which adds to its arsenal of solutions."

Vehicle tracking and recovery remains the major application area for wireless M2M communication in the security industry, using devices that combine GPS with GSM and GPRS technologies. The main markets in terms of units and value include tracking of passenger cars and commercial vehicles. However, there are also several emerging niche markets, such as construction equipment as well as leisure vehicles and boats.

“There is still a significant untapped potential in the residential market segment for monitored alarms,” commented André Malm, senior analyst at Berg Insight. He added that only about 25% of the 30 million alarm systems in Europe are connected to an alarm receiving centre. The latest generation of monitored alarm systems with GSM and GPRS is well adapted to the residential market as many households abandon PSTN services.

Online video is exploding, with annual user growth of more than 45 percent. Mobile-device time spent increased 28 percent last year — with average smartphone time spent doubling. And social networks are now used by 90 percent of U.S. Internet users — for an average of more than four hours a month.

Every venture capitalist, Web publisher, and digital marketer is hyper-aware of these three trends.

What replaces the declining searchable Web is a new and “fully connected” digital life. You may have heard this before. After all, the promise of the Web was to connect pages with hyperlinks. Well, this time, “connected” means much more. It means the Web connects us, as people, to each one of the individuals online; and those connections, ultimately, extend from one of us to all of us.

Mobile payments have taken off in the last few years, and are now poised to grow from $240 billion this year to $670 billion worldwide in 2015, according to Juniper Research. Fueled in part by the nascent near field communication (NFC) market, which is expected to be worth $50 billion by 2014, the overall mobile payments market is also expected to rise quickly thanks to mobile ticketing, money transfers and purchases of physical goods. Mobile payments are more reliant right now on digital goods purchases, which is expected to double by 2015 and will account for 40 percent of the market. But the faster growth will occur with NFC, which can be used in retail and merchant locations to buy physical items. Juniper said 20 countries are expected to launch NFC services in the next 18 months.

Without so much as a whisper from the retailer itself, Amazon’s Android tablet is heading our way. Rumoured to launch at the end of the third quarter in time for the holiday season, Amazon is hoping it can steal a little of Apple’s thunder and steal a little of its market share.

Apple’s closest competitor in the mobile industry is Google, a company that develops and maintains the fastest growing mobile operating system on the planet. But even Google was forced to admit that its Honeycomb operating system was not up to standard, having previously condemned vendors for creating tablet devices that ran Android builds that were specifically tailored for smartphones.

Amazon is one of, if not the world’s number one Cloud storage and service provider and is seen by many to have led the march towards the Cloud, with affordable and reliable online services that even the most bootstrapped startups could afford. Asserting itself in the hosting market has helped the company make the best of its other web-based services, namely online music downloads and its new Android Appstore.

Eyeing a shift in consumer habits, eBay has announced it is buying Zong, a provider of payments through mobile carriers, for $240 milllion.

“Commerce is changing. With mobile phones, we walk around with a mall in our pockets. PayPal helps to make money work better for customers in this new commerce reality –- no matter how they want to pay or what device they’re using,” said Scott Thompson, president of PayPal. “We believe that Zong will strengthen this value by helping us reach the more than 5 billion people who have mobile phones, giving them more choice and security when they pay.”

The Commonwealth Bank will launch tomorrow, 25 October, what it says will be "a world-first mobile app that marks a significant change to the way their customers can pay [and that] will combine a number of payment types."

In July Comm Bank introduced a revamped mobile banking app for iPhone, Android and Windows 7 and a new app for iPads and Android tablets.

"You can expect us to lead very aggressively in the mobile payments space… And we will be integrating NFC as soon as the handset vendors are ready to go."

As social media and social networks become a larger part of our online lives, the race to become the default identity platform for the social web continues to intensify, with Facebook, Twitter and Google all hoping to control — and profit from — the ways that users connect to various services. Although Facebook and Google both have massive resources to deploy in this battle, venture capitalist Mark Suster of GRP Partners argues that Twitter stands the best chance of becoming the go-to identity player for many users, and there are some pretty compelling reasons to believe he’s right.

While Facebook recently added an asymmetric feature called “Subscribe,” Suster says that Twitter is still the preferred network for this kind of behavior, and I think he is probably right: So it is now very common for news organizations to announce on the air, “to follow my updates please follow me on Twitter at @myname. Twitter has become one of our major online identities and that is becoming mainstream in ways that people aren’t really talking about. Nearly every day now I see public figures telling people their Twitter identity instead of Facebook, email or other forms of identity.

To take just one recent example, a Mexican soccer team put the Twitter handles of all of its players (and of the team itself) on the backs of their jerseys instead of their actual names, to make it easier for fans to tweet about them during games.

If keeping a food diary seems like too much effort, despair not: computer scientists at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have devised a tool that lets you snap a photo of your meal and let the crowd do the rest.

PlateMate's calorie estimates have proved, in tests, to be just as accurate as those of trained nutritionists, and more accurate than the user's own logs. The research was presented at the 24th ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology, a leading conference on human-computer interaction.

“We can take things that used to require experts and do them with crowds,” says Jon Noronha ’11, who co-developed PlateMate as an undergraduate at Harvard and now works at Microsoft. "Estimating the nutritional value of a meal is a fairly complex task, from a computational standpoint, but with a structured workflow and some cultural awareness, we've expanded what crowdsourcing can achieve."

It is interesting to see gamification now being applied in a marketing/website/community context, because many marketers and community managers have already been using these techniques to build engagement for several years.

there are many ways to incorporate game mechanics into a community and which ones are appropriate depend a lot on the make-up of your community audience and what the ultimate goals for the community are.

my belief is that you need to gradually introduce new elements into a community and make sure that any new features are fully explained and documented.