Posts Tagged ‘incentives’

If you could plan your diet so that you got paid every time you chose a salad over a burger, would you chose the salad?

IBM “Master Inventor” Michael Paolini believes being rewarded in real time for improving one’s habits is exactly what will affect human behavior and help people become healthier. One of the inventors of a new IBM patent “Providing consumers with incentives for healthy eating habits”, Paolini says the “method, system, and program” was created so that it can be implemented in a variety of ways to accommodate groups with very different needs – be it your health insurance company, your gluten-free diet group, or your employer. But in order for the program to work, use of the system must be voluntary and trust has to first be established.

You can read the whole article at http://www.foodandtechconnect.com/site/2012/01/23/new-ibm-patent-allows-licensees-to-incentivize-good-eating-habits/

Achivy adds some fun and gamification to your social life. Add Twitter, Tumblr, Foursquare, Gowalla , Flickr, Stackoverflow, Klout and many other applications to your profile to see how many achievements, badges,scores you have and follow your progress. You can keep up with your friends, and see the other people’s achievements and activities – achivies.

Achivy provides you to see your and your friends’:

• Achievement “badges”
• Achievement levels and scores
• Top and recent users for all applications
• Progress bars and analytics to see how close you are to complete your tasks that encourages you to earn new badges
• Challenge with your friends
• You can even have some gifts and join loyalty programmes.

They will be releasing their API (http://achivy.com/c/api) soon

Gamification start-up Badgeville is celebrating its one-year anniversary with an ambitious new effort that looks to build a social network out of any website. Badgeville’s Social Fabric technology allows a website to quickly add a host of real-time social features that charts user behavior, updates users on their on-site activities and allows people to follow any piece of content or fellow users.

Kris Duggan, CEO of Badgeville, said that with Social Fabric, social sharing goes up 100 percent, and user generated content increases by 50 percent. Page views also go up 20-30 percent. Websites can start to enjoy some of the engagement that has made Facebook so sticky.

You can read the whole article at http://gigaom.com/2011/09/12/badgeville-turns-any-website-into-a-social-network/

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