Open Intelligence / Web 3X (Social + Mobile)

Ze Frank: Star.me is a cross between a social network and a social game that provides a playground for people to have more fun with their friends. We are in the midst of a major shift in media industry where social engagement is the new currency and real interactions are replacing impressions and clicks. That’s what I have been focused on for years, play and participation, and star.me is a distilled version of that thinking. Plus it’s super fun

Star.me boasts 20,000 users and is “growing fast!”, there have been 117,000 mini missions answered, 70,000 stars sent, and 84% of all users have contributed content. That’s engagement.

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.

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.

What if those new jeans you've just bought start tweeting about your location as you cross London Bridge? It sounds far-fetched, but it's possible - if one of your garments is equipped with a tiny radio-frequency identification device (RFID), your location could be revealed without you knowing about it. RFIDs are chips that use radio waves to send data to a reader - which in turn can be connected to the web.

"The IoT challenge is likely to grow both in scale and complexity as seven billion humans are expected to coexist with 70 billion machines and perhaps 70,000 billion 'smart things', with numbers infiltrating the last redoubts of personal life," says Gerald Santucci, head of the networked enterprise and RFID unit at the European Commission.

Too much trouble The problem with apps, and by this I mean native apps that must be downloaded to your phone, is that they are just becoming too much trouble to organize and maintain. It's just not realistic to have an app for every store you go to, every product you own and every website you visit. This creates an ever increasing set that must be curated, organized and culled. It's a common task we all perform, removing old and unused apps every few months, effectively garbage collecting our phones. Very organized folks relish the opportunity to tidy their burgeoning app menagerie but most can't bother and their home pages scroll into a receding haze of choices.

Movie posters with radio tags such as RFID or NFC will allow me to get an interactive version of the poster on my phone to show me more information 

Any consumer item, such as ketchup or milk bottles, also with radio tags, will allow me to not only get more information on these items just like the poster, but also track usage and even offer to purchase replacement items

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.

When trying to piece together the devices that we use to connect to each other, it’s easy to see that it’s going to take a piece of paper the size of Texas to feature them all. Even if we manage to do so, we will be far from connecting them all in whatever way they use the Internet. So what do we do? Well, we do it anyway, and on a computer of course. Intel put together a really interesting infographic that lines up all the devices (breeds) that we use to connect to each other. For the first time (I guess), we can get a clear view of how the technological infrastructure was built and to what extent it reaches out. As you can see, the numbers represented get multiplied with each major technological milestone, and it’s easy to see that we’re heading for something really interesting in the future. Whatever it will be that will beat the Internet will be major, and even though I can’t imagine what that will be right now, it’s still exciting to know that we always come up with something to beat the previous technology. What do you think will be the next big thing in technology that will top the Internet?

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?  

Broadcom, the radio chipmaker is making a big bet on mobile payments finally hitting its stride with its latest Near Field Communications chip.

Craig Ochikubo, VP of the business unit that oversees NFC at Broadcom believes it’s finally time for mobile payments to shine.

NFC can be used to authenticate a device more easily than a Bluetooth pairing, so if someone wanted to share a video file from his phone to his television set, all he would have to do is swipe the phone against an NFC reader and ship the file over using a Wi-Fi or other large data rate protocol.

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.

Earlier this year, the World Health Organisation (WHO) classified radiation emitted by mobile phones as a possible cancer risk, with a similar threat to lead and the banned pesticide DDT. And the European Commission also issued a warning saying that individuals should be protected from low-frequency radiation emitted by cell phones, masts and Wi-Fi systems.

Mr Stein, the chief group executive of Samworth Brothers

began suffering the effects of low-frequency radiation six years ago when he experienced pain when using his mobile phone. “I began getting weird sensations in my ear if I went near a computer or TV, any electrical equipment with a microchip” he said. “I took the view that I was a freak and kept quiet, but it was difficult because I couldn’t drive a modern car with computers on board.” Mr Stein’s research eventually led him to the diagnosis that he is electro-sensitive, a condition he shares with several thousand people in the UK. Electro sensitivity is caused by the thousands of magnetic fields that surround us, from mobile and cordless phones to other wireless devices, including car sat-nav kits. The symptoms include sleep problems, headaches, tinnitus and earache, chest pains, loss of memory, poor concentration and depression.

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.

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.

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

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.

At most companies, going AWOL during daylight hours would be grounds for a pink slip. Not at Best Buy. The nation's leading electronics retailer has embarked on a radical--if risky--experiment to transform a culture once known for killer hours and herd-riding bosses. The endeavor, called ROWE, for "results-only work environment," seeks to demolish decades-old business dogma that equates physical presence with productivity. The goal at Best Buy is to judge performance on output instead of hours.

Best Buy did not invent the post-geographic office. Tech companies have been going bedouin for several years. At IBM (IBM ), 40% of the workforce has no official office; at AT&T, a third of managers are untethered. Sun Microsystems Inc. (SUNW ) calculates that it's saved $400 million over six years in real estate costs by allowing nearly half of all employees to work anywhere they want. And this trend seems to have legs.

Another thing about this experiment: It wasn't imposed from the top down. It began as a covert guerrilla action that spread virally and eventually became a revolution. So secret was the operation that Chief Executive Brad Anderson only learned the details two years after it began transforming his company. Such bottom-up, stealth innovation is exactly the kind of thing Anderson encourages.

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.

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.

Judith Cherry, Head of Research and Insight at the UK-based organization Opportunity Now and author of the report “Out of Office: Solutions for an Agile Future” [PDF] explained, “We’re moving the debate away from flexwork – because we’ve come to the understanding that we’re all flex workers. What we’re doing now is “agile working.”

The distinction is important, she said, because agile working is about more than working from home, or using mobile devices. It’s a whole new system of management.

She explained, “Technology allows us to work after hours, across time zones, at home, at the airport – we can manage this, so how come it is so hard to let people work three days out of the week? The psychology of work has not caught up with the technology.”

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: