Archive for July, 2011

Wired.com released in June a very interesting article about how online companies are using game mechanics and psychological and sociological techniques to influence their users. You can find the whole article here: http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/06/ff_gamed/

Google News added a feature that could encourage users to read more: collectible badges. “The U.S. Edition of Google News now lets you collect private, sharable badges for your favorite topics. The more articles you read on Google News, the more your badges level up: you can reach Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum, and finally Ultimate. Keep your badges to yourself, or show them off to your friends,” informs Google.

While this feature could encourage users to visit Google News more often, the main purpose is to find people that know a lot of things about certain topics. “Your badges are private by default, but if you want, you can share your badges with your friends. Tell them about your news interests, display your expertise, start a conversation or just plain brag about how well-read you are,” suggests Google.

Instead of manually adding your favorite topics to your profile, you could add Google News badges. It’s one way to show your expertise and it could be useful if Google plans to integrate Aardvark with Google+ and launch a social Q&A service.

You can read the whole blog entry at http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2011/07/google-news-badges.html

Durham, NC – So much for tagging photographs with names, locations and activities yourself – a new cell phone application can take care of that for you.

The system works by taking advantage of the multiple sensors on a mobile phone, as well as those of other mobile phones in the vicinity.

Dubbed TagSense, the new app was developed by students from Duke University and the University of South Carolina (USC) and unveiled at the ninth Association for Computing Machinery’s International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications and Services (MobiSys), being held in Washington, D.C.

(more…)

According to Gartner’s latest press release about their predictions for the gaming industry, the gaming ecosystem is undergoing major technology and business model transitions that will last beyond 2015. Gartner, Inc. estimates that worldwide spending on the gaming ecosystem* will exceed $74 billion in 2011, up 10.4 percent from 2010 spending of $67 billion. By 2015, spending will reach $112 billion.

You can read the whole press release at http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1737414

CollabReview is JAVA based and can be integrated into existing wikis. It offers users the possibility to leave feedback and visualizes the feedback about articles you have read.

In addition the system collects data about the activity of users contributing to an article. Based on this data the system weekly calculates the most important user. User can level up and compete with each other through ranking mechanisms.

For more details see:

http://www.fit.fraunhofer.de/presse/11-06-10.html

(German only)