Game sales surpassed video in UK, says report
Sales of computer games in the UK have surpassed those of videos for the first time, new figures suggest.
Full Story: BBC
Emergent Futures Tumblelog
This is the Tumblelog of Paul Higgins and Sandy Teagle - Futurists from Melbourne and Brisbane in Australia. Go to Emergent Futures to see more or follow on Twitter at
FuturistPaul .
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Reblogged from futuramb|23 notes |# Comments
The Medical Quack: Gamification–You Have Won and Now We Know All About You - It Didn’t Cost One Cent-Insurance Companies Have Games To Find Out More About You Too– “Attack of Killer Algorithms” Chapter 11
blogspot.comThis is a good article and if you like privacy well worth the read here to find out what goes on behind the scenes with data mining and giving out all kinds of information about yourself to those that mine and sell data. This article in t…
Reblogged from fastcompany|1,009 notes |# Comments
The new SimCity will let you take control of a city’s environmental destiny:
“You start your city without any money, and you could exploit the coal seams underneath the city and start digging coal out of the ground and make a city that’s pretty filthy, one that’s built on burning coal for power, might have a lot of coal-sustained industries around it and would make me a ton of money as a player. In the long term that would sort of blight the prospects of the city.” In that coal-dependent city, there would be little natural beauty and excessive air and ground pollution, not to mention citizens suffering from coal-related health problems.
Alternatively, players could opt for other sources of energy—gas-fired power plants, solar panels, wind turbines, or nuclear power. All of these sources have their drawbacks. Solar panels, for example, take up a lot of space and produce less power for the money when compared to coal…
Reblogged from thedailyfeed|121 notes |# Comments
So awesome! Seattle’s Space Needle was turned into an Angry Birds “catapult” yesterday in celebration of the Angry Birds Space launch.
Photo by Whittle/Splash News
Stowe Boyd: Freemium Is Growing In Games
Reblogged from stoweboyd|7 notes |# Comments
The counterintuitive move of giving away apps — or games — for free seems to be gaining ground. The trick is to charge power users for more features or goods:
Game Makers Give Away ‘Freemium’ Products - Brian X Chen via NYTimes.com
Natalia Luckyanova and Keith Shepherd, a husband-and-wife…
Reblogged from smartercities|89 notes |# Comments
The Future of the City: Crowd-Sourcing & Gamification of City 2.0
By Kyle Rogler, Studio630
This summer Google will install a 1-gigabyte internet speed cable in Kansas City, which is a hundred times faster than the average broadband cable. This new asset will help revolutionize Kansas City’s technology infrastructure, but no one knows exactly how to utilize it to its fullest potential. James Moore proposes a novel idea which could generate interest back toward the city through crowd-sourcing and gamification of urban design.
Read More at ThisBigCity
Gamers outdo computers at matching up disease genes
The hope that swarms of gamers can help to solve difficult biological problems has been given another boost by a report in the journal PLoS One1, showing that data gleaned from the online game Phylo are helping to untangle a major problem in comparative genomics.
Full Story: Nature
Reblogged from reuters|114 notes |# Comments
The Middle East has one of the fastest growing communities of online gamers in the world, and demographics mean this is likely to remain true for many years.
About 60 percent of the 350 million people in the Arab world are younger than 25, with internet penetration in the region at about 70 million users — over 300 percent growth in the last five years, according to numbers from United Arab Emirates-based entrepreneurship research portal Sindibad Business. Internet penetration is expected to reach 150 million users by 2015, said the portal’s founder Bahjat Homsi.
Such statistics are encouraging the rise of a small but dynamic video game development industry in the Arab world. At least six Arab game firms, most in Jordan, received funding from local investors in the last two years.
Read more: Demographics, local tastes fuel Arab video game industry
Reblogged from smarterplanet|46 notes |# Comments
How Three Businesses Scored Big with Gamification | Entrepreneur.com
Ready or not, gamificationReady or not, gamification is taking the business world by storm.
For anyone unfamiliar with gamification, it’s the application of game-like elements such as challenges, points, badges and levels to business and other nongame websites. An estimated 70 percent of the top 2,000 public companies in the world will have at least one gamified application by 2014, Stamford, Conn.-based research firm Gartner Inc. predicts.
Patrick Salyer, CEO of gamification platform Gigya, believes there are two keys to success with gamification. “One is making sure that all gamified elements are inherently social,” he says. “That is, don’t restrict engagement to the internal site community. Award points for activities that reach users’ social [networks] to bring in referral traffic.”
The other is to focus on rewarding activities that create value for your businesses. “For example, award points and badges for behaviors like subscribing to your company’s newsletter, checking into your store or sending coupons to friends,” Salyer says. “Gamification is not about haphazardly throwing badges across your site.”
![smarterplanet:
How Three Businesses Scored Big with Gamification | Entrepreneur.com
Ready or not, gamificationReady or not, gamification is taking the business world by storm.
For anyone unfamiliar with gamification, it’s the application of game-like elements such as challenges, points, badges and levels to business and other nongame websites. An estimated 70 percent of the top 2,000 public companies in the world will have at least one gamified application by 2014, Stamford, Conn.-based research firm Gartner Inc. predicts.
Patrick Salyer, CEO of gamification platform Gigya, believes there are two keys to success with gamification. “One is making sure that all gamified elements are inherently social,” he says. “That is, don’t restrict engagement to the internal site community. Award points for activities that reach users’ social [networks] to bring in referral traffic.”
The other is to focus on rewarding activities that create value for your businesses. “For example, award points and badges for behaviors like subscribing to your company’s newsletter, checking into your store or sending coupons to friends,” Salyer says. “Gamification is not about haphazardly throwing badges across your site.”](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m0u3ol3acn1qzs4rbo1_400.jpg)
Kara shows us the future of video games
Quantic Dream, creator of the Sony PlayStation game Heavy Rain, has shown off what is going to be possible in the future for video games at the Games Developers Conference in Germany.
Full Story: Pocket Lint
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