Posts Tagged ‘motivation’

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/

Since last Wednesday (18/01/2012), developers who use Microsoft Visual Studio have a new way to highlight their skills, get recognition for the amazing work they do every day, and add some competitive fun to the development day by means of a new plugin called Visual Studio Achievements.

You can find all the information at http://blogs.technet.com/b/microsoft_blog/archive/2012/01/18/visual-studio-achievements-program-brings-gamification-to-development.aspx

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/

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

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)