~ A record of places on the web I want to remember ~
Technology – Bill Davidow – What Happened to Silicon Values? – The Atlantic
Apple controls our virtual landscape, bounded by iTunes to the north, the iPhone to the south, the iPad to the east, and the iPod to the west, giving it increasing power to deprive customers of choice. It exercises that power aggressively. Google appears to have a culture that condones shamelessly violating consumer privacy. How else can you explain a company that bypasses Apple’s iPhone privacy settings in a reported attempt to strengthen advertising revenues?
It is hard to believe that Dave Packard or Andy Grove would ever tell a group of entrepreneurs that he did “every horrible thing in the book to just get revenues right away,” or brag to trade publications that his company used behavioral psychologists to design “compulsion loops” into products to keep customers engaged. But Mark Pincus, the founder of Internet gaming giant Zynga, has done just that.
When corporate leaders pursue wealth in the winner-take-all Internet environment, companies dance on the edge of acceptable behavior. If they don’t take it to the limit, a competitor will. That competitor will become the dominant supplier — one monopoly will replace another. And when you engage in these activities you get a different set of Valley values: the values of customer exploitation.
‘Active’ Video Games Don’t Make Youths More Active – NYTimes.com
But exergames turn out to be much digital ado about nothing, at least as far as measurable health benefits for children. “Active” video games distributed to homes with children do not produce the increase in physical activity that naïve parents (like me) expected. That’s according to a study undertaken by the Children’s Nutrition Research Center at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, and published early this year in Pediatrics, the official journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics.
Are You Using Gaming for Learning? – Chief Learning Officer, Solutions for Enterprise Productivity
Games are ubiquitous online, and they’re not just for kids. With the right mechanics and strategy they can significantly increase learning engagement and retention for adults.
According to Xerox research, consumers see about 3,000 media messages a day, pay attention to 52 and only remember four. With those stats, odds are slim that learning messages will make it to the employee’s final four. For this reason, many learning organizations are embracing gaming as a way to break through the clutter.
Gaming is prevalent online, and elements of it can increase the likelihood that learning will be effective when paired with adult learning principles and gamification research.
An April 2011 press release from technology research organization Gartner said half of all organizations that manage innovation processes will gamify them by 2015. In 2010, Scientific American reported in its article “Innovations for a Bright Future: Better Living through Gaming” that gaming is one of 10 world-changing ideas. In 2009, Tom Chatfield of The Observer reported that games outperformed Hollywood movies as the primary source of global entertainment. Essentially, gaming is here to stay, and it has implications for the workplace.
