Archive for the ‘News’ Category

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)

Really interesting article on gamification of start ups:

Beyond Badges: 3 Smart Ways to Gamify Your Startup

About the author:

Rajat Paharia is the founder and chief product officer atBunchball. You can follow him on Twitter @Bunchball and read his blog

According to the article the main questions for gamification are:

1. What Is Your Core Experience?
2. Know Your Business!
3. Know Your User

Patent number 7,945,653 titled Tagging digital media has been accepted and assigned to Facebook. Here’s the critical first independent claim: “A method comprising: receiving from a device of a first user a selection of an item of digital media, wherein the item of digital media is stored in a database; receiving from the device of the first user an identification of a person associated with the selected item of digital media; responsive to receiving the information identifying the person, sending a notification to a device of a second user that the person has been identified in connection with the item of digital media; and enabling the identified person to reject the identification, wherein the identified user is different from the first user.”

You can find the whole blog entry at http://www.bnet.com/blog/technology-business/facebook-gets-broad-patent-on-digital-media-tagging/10693

This week at Google I/O, Google is making the Google Prediction API generally available. One really interesting feature is the automatic flagging of content.

The Google Prediction API can be used by almost any app to recommend the useful, extract the essential, and automate the repetitive. For example:

• Recommend a new movie to a customer.
• Identify most important customers.
• Automatically tag posts with relevant flags.

For example, Ford Motor Co. Research is working to use the Prediction API to optimize plug-in hybrid vehicle fuel efficiency by optionally providing users with likely destinations to choose from, and soon, optimizing driving controls to conserve fuel. Because the API is a cloud-hosted RESTful service, Ford has been able to access its computationally-intensive machine learning algorithms to find patterns that rank potential destinations based on previous driving paths. Ford will be demonstrating their work at the API’s I/O Session.

For more info see:

http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2011/05/google-prediction-api-helps-all-apps-to.html

bynd.com has done some research to try to understand the difference between what people are saying online compared to the actions of early adopters and the views of the rest of the US population when it comes to their mobile check-in habits. The results have been published as an article in Mashable, including an infographic pointing out the motivations behind this new habit.

You can find the article here: http://mashable.com/2011/05/04/social-location-apps-study/

published an article and an infographic about why people do check-in