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So what’s making gamification so popular today? Consider these four factors.

1. Consumers Want It

consumers are looking for new ways to entertain themselves — 40% of U.S. online adults have expressed this interest in a recent survey. What’s more, consumers want game elements everywhere. 60% of consumers play a video game online in a typical week. Consumers (especially Gen Yers) are increasingly accessing games online and on mobile devices.

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.

This agile model (which is now well known in Silicon Valley and in the software engineering world) has transformed software.  It has many benefits:  it reduces the long cycle times that create risk; it enables engineers to take advantage of the fact that requirements change quickly; and it honors the fact that people perform best when they work on small projects they can finish quickly.

Agile is also built on the understanding that people learn in small chunks - so while it may in fact take a year or two to build a highly complex website, no person needs to try to understand the entire engineering program in advance.  And as the image on the right shows, daily work becomes a part of a bigger project in a continuous, dynamic process.

Look at where Agile fits in Management and HR:

Are mobile payments the new speech recognition technologies?

One of the bigger stories in mobile this year has been the growing investment and hype behind the idea of using one’s mobile phone as a method of payment, but it’s pretty clear that the details of how any one company or organization will build a mobile-payments system are still very much up in the air.

a sizable number of people and companies believe that the smartphone can be a natural evolution of the credit card in just a few years.

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.

Governance can mean a lot of different things. In this context, it needs to be the foundation of the content plan. Not in terms of content creation but in terms of standards and processes for expanding into a certain market. For example, Company A wants to launch a Facebook page and Twitter channel in Latin America to support its operations into that region. A governance model will ensure that the regional marketing team has the following lined up before launch: A content plan to include frequency and context of Tweets, Facebook Updates, blog posts (or whatever relevant tools/platforms are used in that region) An established moderation policy A crisis communication plan An understanding and “buy in” of the measurement philosophy (everyone in the organization SHOULD be measuring social media the same way)

Content Library If it’s one thing that marketing teams in other regions lack, it’s content. The reality is that most brands do have really good content. It’s just scattered all across the internet, various internal portals and even within employees’ inboxes. Content can include videos, PDFs, spec sheets, FAQ, blog posts, infographics and the list goes on.

Community Management Without an active community manager, a content marketing plan will fail. A community manager will not only be responsible for actively posting and aggregating content; but he/she is essentially the face of the brand and should be sanctioned to solve customer problems. A proficient community manager will answer questions and provide real and “tangible” solutions to disgruntled customers. Additionally, he/she should have the authority to provide rewards to random customers simply for being customers.

Currently NFC is seen as one of the most exciting areas in our industry in terms of revenue generation: projections show up to 700 million NFC-enabled mobile phones will be sold by 2013, according to Jupiter Research. At Nokia, however, we would argue that the industry's current focus on secure NFC may be at the expense of realizing the potential of open NFC. As pioneers in NFC technology, and as a founder of the NFC Forum, Nokia believes that open NFC will have a far greater impact on consumer behavior and the NFC ecosystem than secure NFC will. Open NFC has the potential to spur a vast number of business opportunities for developers, retailers, advertisers, electronics manufacturers and others.

NFC tags, which cost only a few cents, offer huge potential for advertisers, retailers and others to reach, reward and stay in touch with their customers. These tags can be promoted at any location, including a phone retail point, a coffee shop, or even at the local supermarket, with immediate and measurable results.

Open NFC will benefit consumers on a much larger scale and get people familiar with using their device for NFC interactions, before secure NFC reaches a high level of penetration. As more and more NFC phones come to the market in 2011 and 2012, open NFC will change the way consumers interact with each other and open up a host of opportunities for developers both large and small.

“We want to build tools that change the way all the people in this room experience the real world,” said Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley at the Web 2.0 Summit today, as he described his company’s retreat from the game mechanics that first made the check-in service a success. With more than 10 million downloads, Foursquare is the category leader for location services, even as it moves away from its initial offering. Crowley said Foursquare is about much more than check-ins, and features such as Foursquare Radar and Foursquare Explorer are going to power even stronger user adoption in the future.

“We have a very narrow focus on building features that help people experience the real world,” Crowley said. “How we were able to survive the Facebook onslaught — that was a big motivating factor for the entire company.”

In spite of banner user adoption, Crowley said he can identify with newcomers who are still struggling to understand why they should use a check-in service at all. Crowley said when he first downloaded Twitter, it was 18 months before he really understood why the product was worth using, because he hadn’t discovered that “thing” which made it special.

Well now that Apple has gone and integrated the most sophisticated piece of AI to ever to see the light of the consumer market into its iPhone 4S, I thought it was time to brush some dirt off of Quora’s shoulder and shine a light on what the future of the company could hold.

Quora’s founders and their first hire—designer Rebekah Cox—created the core of the most impressive “subjective knowledge extraction” machine ever constructed.

By combining an answer voting mechanism and a reward addiction loop (upvotes are crack) with a strict identity requirement and a one-to-many follower model, Quora started solving the problem of extracting high-quality experiential knowledge out of humanity’s collective head and getting it into structured form on the internet. What’s more, Quora is also using humanity’s collective wisdom to rank it.