Social gaming to gamification – March 14th
On a chilly Monday evening over 120 people attended our Social Gaming to Gamification panel debate with Speakers: Nicholas Lovell from Gamesbrief and Matt Maxwell from Blue Barracuda who were joined by Panellists: Brittney Bean, Sam Sethi, Odera from Groupon, and Katie Bell from Stardoll Network. We were gathered at Olswang to discuss the impacts of Social Gaming, the gamification of products and services, games mechanics and what the future holds.
Nicholas Lovell kicked off with supercharged enthusiasm describing how and how not to build a social gaming strategy and he warned – it is expensive. He suggested using some of your marketing spend, emphasized the need to understand your player, warned this is a “process, not a project” it doesn’t stop and there are unintended consequences. He suggested using the Bartle Test to find out if you / your targets are Killers, Socializers, Achievers or Explorers and save at least 50% of your budget for after Launch.
Matt expanded on the fact that everyday alot changes but the people haven’t, their motivations are the same and gamification has long existed but now we have new tools to play with.
Katie was challenged on the ethics of tweens gaming, she pointed out the fact that gaming helps you test out who you want to be and users are secure and have control over their profiles to delete/ start all over again providing a unique environment for them on Stardoll (97 million subscribers btw). Sam Sethi sugegsted children should not be given monetary rewards but achievements instead. but It was noted that games can effect behavioural change in children and society at large..
We touched on whether we harness the power of gaming to improve Health care, education, sustainability and low carbon economy services..(http://www.kiva.com mentioned as example) and for once, fraud, identity theft and security were barely mentioned.
Brittney pointed out “Gaming is supposed to be fun!” Her aim is develop games for real people to play and have fun. Should we be gamifying? Is it still fun?
Some clever spark mentioned that “Life is a Game” which lead to alot of speculation about who might be winning and in whose opinion, many of the (male dominated) audience were plumping for Charlie Sheen (definitely his first mention at @mashupevent).
Games are good for engagement and retention but not customer acquisition unless you are directing them off the game —> somewhere. Games are targetted at the time rich and cash poor.
Facebook fear reared it’s ugly head – ” are we all going to disappear down the black hole which is Facebook?” but Brands will go where the customers are. Odera believes we’re starting to design around the customer and Facebook is only the first step.
Foursquare came out badly as the audience felt it wasn’t a game … and people want access to rewards money can’t buy.
The crafty audience were point scoring and badge awarding on the twitter feed!
Photos from the night
Magicsolver demo’d their games and app along with Crowdscanner ’s networking product which attendees participated in you can see the results here and join in here
Techfluff were on site interviewing and filming See @ssethi @mattmax @Stardoll in video at http://ow.ly/4ftdY
NEXT EVENT: Our next event “Energy 2.0 – Energy goes Digital“ 31st March with @Forum4theFuture
Open or not?
Chris Anderson (TED) “Over the past few years, one of the most important shifts in the digital world has been the move from the wide-open Web to semiclosed platforms that use the Internet for transport but not the browser for display. It’s driven primarily by the rise of the iPhone model of mobile computing, and it’s a world Google can’t crawl, one where HTML doesn’t rule. And it’s the world that consumers are increasingly choosing, not because they’re rejecting the idea of the Web but because these dedicated platforms often just work better or fit better into their lives (the screen comes to them, they don’t have to go to the screen). “
Is the next evolutionary step of Social Media: “Social Media goes Open” ?
Open data is becoming integral to the social media services we have become reliant upon; streams of data are being published and made freely available, in turn, these are being embedded into whole new concepts and creating new flurries of apps/ services. We are seeing open data/ standards and open platforms enabling non proprietary aggregation – just like “The Web” itself – to this end no one will own the space in which we are social online and no one can predict the new tools which will develop from these endless possibilities. These new services will continue to challenge closed or restricted platforms and the clamour for less proprietary standards can change previously closed products and platforms.
It’s important that we understand the ramifications of what currently exists and what is becoming possible as new products and services become available more quickly.
Old style = long time specifying/ developing, testing against – fine for particular projects but more than ever organisations are turning to agile “open” development techniques: releasing more new versions more frequently, receiving quicker feedback and evolving their services accordingly as in a perpetual beta – think Google, new Startups and now larger corporations who realise money can be saved this way.
Reducing costs can be achieved with open source as there is no direct cost, no licence cost, no database cost and many open source components freely available with good support.
So the private sector is starting to recognise the benefits of both publishing and using open data sets in their applications and services to create more competitive businesses and ultimately better services.
And the public sector? They have embraced open data with the release of various sets of government data by many governments across the world. Many believe this achieves the goal of greater transparency and makes services better for the citizen.. social media has a huge part to play in this by enabling conversation, access to information and feedback. Google “Social Media and Open Data” and the top links are all government related both at local and national level.
Is everything going open?
Well, the answer is “no” when we see new products like The Daily from NewsCorp arriving on the scene, many would argue that more than ever the “open-ness” of the web is being closed down and Tim Berners-Lee recently commented “Not using open standards creates closed worlds”. This in turn has ramifications on the circumstances necessary to enable innovation.
Yet some of the most popular web services are increasingly open source – take Mozilla’s Firefox, Wikipedia, Drupla, Joomla, Wordpress, Android and more. Open source and open development are thriving using open source code to build software “lamp stack” and others, as opposed to using proprietary operating systems, platforms, coding languages and databases such as Oracle, Microsoft et al.
And now we are seeing the advent of Open Hardware, going beyond hacking to create bespoke “open” products.
mashup* Event has been holding events on “digital issues” in London since 2007, next week our half day conference is “Being Open ‘11″ where a diverse group of people will be discussing all aspects of being “Open” for good or for bad.
Speakers and Programme: http://beingopen.org
More:
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/open_source_social_media_community_collaboration_freedom.php
http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2011/jan/21/data-gov-nigel-shadbolt-government
http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2011/01/13/will-apps-unravel-the-world-wide-web
Digital Trends – February 2nd 2011 – BCS
Posted by TonyFish in Uncategorized on February 3, 2011
Last night we had the pleasure of debating the future with a lovely audience of over 70 in attendance it was an amazing evening of opinions being thrust forward, parried and put to rest. With a star panel from Amadeus, Nokia, LexusPR, Article8 and the mobile/telecom industry there was a fantastic representation across multiple sectors.
If you haven’t been to a mashup* event before, you really should! Over 50% of the audience were new and fresh last night and were very vocal 
We like a lot of digital activity around the event and 30 minutes into the evening the twitterwall started to speed up, after an hour there was no stopping the flow.
As with the usual mashup* format, two speakers warm the event up with a dedicated 5 minutes on their thoughts. First Laurence John painted the picture around investments, check-in fatigue at SXSW due to apps overload and what he is looking for in the industry with a focus around micropayments. He was followed by Gary Gale expressing his thoughts on privacy, location and how Google beat him to the announcement of geo-fencing
After which they were joined by the rest of the panel, James Poulter and Steve Kennedy joined in the conversation. Andrew Gerrard was moderator for the evening and what an excellent job he did of steering the flow of debate into the audience and back to the panel discussing privacy, data, social recommendations, location and advertising as key topical trends. A really hot subject that resounded throughout was social commerce – an area which we will cover in depth at being-social later in the year.
What were the take aways ?
We still can’t conclude the discussion on Privacy -for many it doesn’t matter, for others it’s their top priority, ultimately it may be dependant on your role in the technology world. It’s certainly key for both parties to be aware of privacy issues, even if you don’t care!
Thoughts from the panel were:
1) Privacy Matters
2) Sensor Convergence
3) Location is a feature not business.
Security came in and out of the debate, alongside privacy, but as was pointed out: it always has been an issue, always will be up for debate and will stay that way, therefore – not a trend
Lastly, will Digital Agencies catch up in the technology rush or will they keep focusing on delivering the standard offerings to the client ?
NEXT EVENTS:
Being Open ‘11 – 16th Feb – half day conference & Family 2.0 -17th Feb 6pm
#mashupevent twitter feed for the event
Write ups:
Andrew Gerrard’s crazy notes – neat system
From an audience perspective read David Gross article on Technorati.
@Ultraman – Top five trends from last night
An interview with Gary Gale by Imperica
Anymore? Ping us on twitter and we’ll post them here.
The New Social Rules – 24th November
Posted by TonyFish in Uncategorized on November 29, 2010
Last week we had an interesting and topical Mashup*Event focused on The New Social Rules with a lively panel, who brought up such areas as our childrens education, our privacy and how new technologies are making it more difficult to lie and cheat not only at work but with our partners.
With an audience of over 70 Executives, from a multitude of sectors including lawyers, investors, startups, mobile we had a vast array of thoughts and inputs so much so that we still continued to debate into the networking hour, which signifies that this subject is going to continue to open up a vast array of questions and not that many answers.
The theme was focused not just on business users but individuals as well, and caused a storm with the audience around what people say about us online and how we have limited power or authority to change the statement once its archived off in a data repository but also the fact that we have the tools to critique the statement but is that polite, or the correct recourse.
With two demos from hellotxt and minutebox, with our technical supporter peer index and Yasmo Live it was an engaging and enthralling evening of which there will be a 5 minute video showreel available in the next few weeks time.
(MinuteBox is a marketplace for you to find that advice in person, you buy and can also sell (your) advice via video chat. Essentially, MinuteBox is an eBay for online advice. Individuals are able to use MinuteBox as a gateway to access expertise in a timely and cost-effective manner, while experts can sell their time and turn their knowledge into revenue while helping others.)
Also check out the interviews with Julian Ranger and Iain Halpin from our partner Imperica, who give more insights into this enthralling subject and debate around The New Social Rules.
We created quite a noise on Twitter and below you will find the Curated stream with all the content.
Mashup TV, Pay TV, Over The Top (OTT) TV and DLNA – Where is the future for Multiscreen?
Posted by emmajell in Uncategorized on October 15, 2010
Another successful mashup* event with a full house and fabulous content. The timing of this event was ideal to cover the latest from google.tv, apple.tv, youview and other alternatives to traditional broadcasters. It was good to hear views about content ownership, ISP pipe issues, EPG vs search, Linear vs delayed and in general how TV and interactive services are advancing. The demos brought the event together by showing this is all real and happening now.
Access showcased moving video and images around devices/ screens allowing you to share content with ease.
Endurance showed how advertisers could use your browsing habits to effect live TV ads.
More blogs on the event:
David Mercer (Speaker) from Strategy Analytics
Spring debut for MHEG-IC catch-up
Unfortunately the sound quality on the video of the event has prevented us
from publishing it his time. If there is any particular info you hoped to hear please do
comment below.
As ever this event was over-subscribed – please pay for your tickets as soon
as possible to avoid disappointment..
Open Social – 8th July 2010 @ AMV BBDO
Despite a warm evening we enjoyed a great turn out last Thursday night at AMV BBDO who kindly hosted the Open Social event.
Speakers Jemima Gibbons and Matt Nash along with panellists Josh Feldberg, Mat Ryer and Nathan Guerra gave us snappy insights to many projects using Social Media fluently.
Examples such as:
The Orange Glastonbury photo http://glastonbury.orange.co.uk/ Where you can tag your friends – currently showing over 7,000 tags – What was the value? Just the pr gimmick, or are they collecting data?
Wagamama menu – liking what’s in the restaurant as you are in it and seeing what everyone else likesBakers tweet – fresh croissants – auto-tweeting when they are out of the oven ..
Zappos encourages new employees to use Twitter, is this still part of an overall marketing strategy or embracing the open social love?
Though we managed to steer clear of the banned topics of privacy and security, by assuming these would all be fixed in a foreseeable future, we kept on coming back to the Facebook Like button ( see previous event! ) There’s clearly huge frustration and dissatisfaction around the Like button .. do we want a Dislike button, a Support button, a Recommend button or simply an “I use” button ( HM has long had one of these)Or would data on how many people ignored the Like button be useful? And what does it mean to Like something in Facebook terms anyway?
As mentioned by Matt Nash – 65 million people are clicking Like every day on Facebook – but is this “Liking” products, brands and services or “Liking” a friends comment or photo?
Some people won’t use Facebook – where does that leave brands and those people?
Our social behaviour online emulates our “real”(!) lives but we recognised the difficulty of restricting our sharing of information between different groups of people.
In real life this is done fluidly and fluently, most of the time (!), but online it’s requiring some extra thought.
How exciting is Augmented Reality combined with Open Social? How can we confirm that these potential acquaintances are reliable – part of “our tribe” ?
There was a feeling that your locality will be enhanced with the abiltity to collect and share info recommending places nearby.. foursquare may be more effective on this but with it taking only 5 people to make Kings Cross a “trending” place and only 4 people at the event having “checked in” at AMV BBDO there appears to be some difficulty persuading people to adopt new social apps and participate.
Are we going to tire of adopting new social apps, maybe the early adopters won’t but will non geeks tire of having to keep up?!
For example there was a lot of noise surrounding Google Wave/ buzz? But how successful has take up been? Apparently those in the States have been suddenly adopting buzz in past few weeks – starting to use buzz to control outputs to tw/ fb/ etc Platforms v embedded - would embedded mean more fluid conversation less waiting for each individual to “join” an app etc etc
Matt felt something new was in the air and ultimately wanted to know where are the cool kids? Will the subversive counter culture provide the next best Social movement?
Josh was buzzing with ideas and visions of our future enhanced Social lives – imagining a foursquare-esque scenario when a visitor who visits an animal at London zoo would own the lion or the monkey etc And those visiting “Josh’s chimpanzee” could send updates/ photos to the “owner”.Jemima concluded that the impact ultimately of an increasingly Open Social world should be coercing companies and brands to create services and products people actually want .. maybe more sustainable.. rather than pushing an undesirable product or service.
We had Demos from Gerrard Wilcoxson promoting the Europeam Satellite Navigation Competition – Win £10000 cash, 6 months business incubation and more – full details here: http://ukesnc.com/
Kumbooka also demo’d their neat service which will “Socialise your stuff”. Gary Edmonstone, founder of Kumbooka later said “We saw a very positive response from a meeting of some of the key industry watchers.
We have turned social networking around and placed people’s stuff, their personal possessions, right at the heart of a new social network. It’s their stuff that mostly defines who they are
and with Kumbooka, they can attach digital content like photos to their camera or recipes to their food mixer and give a personal dimension to the possessions that reflect their personality.”
SLIDES
from @jemimag
http://www.slideshare.net/jemimag/truly-social
from Matt Nash @oosocial
Like me, love my data – 24th May 2010
Posted by emmajell in Uncategorized on July 9, 2010
Many thanks to speakers @ssethi, @iskandar and @benjamincohen for providing us with an informative and entertaining Monday evening. Special mention to @raffi (Twitter tech lead) and @jaggeree who joined in via skype, (albeit intermittently…!)
An extremely well informed and lively audience played a major part in the debate. Ultimately this is an on-going debate and no one was there to provide conclusive answers.
Overwhelming our audience felt a lack of trust for Facebook (not great for business) and were convinced that privacy options will keep on changing on Facebook with little prior warning. Whilst some share information freely, either unaware or unconcerned about the lack of privacy – others avoid sharing certain info e.g. geo-tagging and a few are steadily removing their profiles from online social networks.
In the infamous words of Mark Zuckerberg – Will the world truly be a better place for everyone if we know everything about everyone?
Or do we just need to be more aware of what, how and why to share …and who should profit from our sharing?
One thing for certain is the pressure for businesses to monetise and therefore different avenues will continue to explored (exploited?).
Interesting points were made regarding exploring monetising “influencers” who could potentially reap the rewards of “activating” their networks.
“Fundamentally, privacy is about having control over the flow of information, it’s about being able to understand the social setting in order to behave appropriately. To do so, people must trust their interpretation of the context, including the people in the room and the architecture that defines the setting. When they feel as though control has been taken away from them or when they lack the control they need to do the right thing, they scream privacy foul.” – Danah Boyd
Post event blogs:
Being Social ‘10 – post event catchup
We had a fabulous afternoon at the King’s Fund on Thursday 13th May in the company of many authorative voices from the world of Social Media.
@Dom_AsdaPR went down a storm with his tales of Asda’s use of Twitter – very much a “just get in there and do it”. At Asda HQ they have a board with an “Asda” twitter stream and employees are encouraged to engage with the twitter conversation whenever they have a few minutes to spare (as well as having a more formal approach obviously! ).
The subject of ROI was something which speakers, panellists and the audience referred to again and again – it’s the instant question demanded of those proposing Social Media use and there were varied responses, including analysis of the usefulness of monitoring but also “how long is a piece of string?” Will McInnes noted that the benefits are also not necessarily instantaneous and may take 9 months or more to become apparent.
In the evening we held a “Politics and Social Media” panel which can only be described as the most animated of all the debates. My takeaway comment came from @Tom_Watson who, in regard to point being made regarding the lack of take up of Social media by politicians, noted that many would-be politicians had failed to be selected as PPC’s precisely because of the way that they had used Social Media e.g. innappropriate comments on Twitter causing sufficient backlash. So whilst Social Media has yet to be adopted widely across British politics it is apparent that it has made plenty of ripples, so watch this space. My personal thought would be that for politicians social media allows a level of transparency and instant interaction which, at the moment, most are not ready for.
Blogs below:
@gabrielleNYC http://sociable.net/
@Chris_Reed from Brew Digital http://www.brewdigital.com/blog/being-social-2010-few-thoughts-0
@Paul_Clarke – Photos http://www.flickr.com/photos/paul_clarke/sets/72157623935361977/
@socialoptic http://socialoptic.com/2010/05/really-social-business-the-key-to-collaboration/
@benjaminellis http://www.flickr.com/photos/jamin2/4608742548/
@leebryant http://www.slideshare.net/leebryant/social-on-the-outside-needs-social-business-on-the-inside
@abisignorelli http://abisignorelli.wordpress.com/2010/05/18/social-media-roi/
TwapperKeeper hashtag archive #beingsocial to download at http://bit.ly/9By6rz
The Internet of Things – Rise of the Machines 4th May @BCS
The outcome of the event was that “The Internet of Things” is still coming ……!
And confusion/privacy/ security appear to be factors that hold back both adoption and growth.
Probably technology is not the issue, inter-operability and standards could
be preventing faster adoption, but this seems unlikely.
Business models are built and will be justified on future cost savings, but
during recession when cash is short the future remains the future.
Also component and usage costs are still too high, but that is more of a volume issue.
So why is it not working – maybe, like the UK government, there is no natural leader?
Post event write ups:
Phillip Sheldrake (panel moderator) @sheldrake
Caroline Tarbett – Fierce PR
Pre event posts:
From David Wood @dw2
and Nigel Whiteoak
Digital Identity – 25th March – post event
Digital Identity : The value of digital you.
Panel: Tony Fish, Nicky Hickman, Robin Wilton, Alan Moore and David Rennie
Digital Identity is still at the early stages of debate and discussion even though there is an increasing number of experts who deeply understand the issues, the overriding focus is still an argument about what “words” mean
Digital Identity is a complex issue crossing many boundaries and professional disciplines. We tend to have many persona, we are no longer owned by a Brand, we know many people to a different degree and understanding, we don’t tend to reveal all to everyone, who owns your data, people are lazy and don’t do things even though they could, value depends on giver and receiver. Identity is a negotiation and in reality we are the product that is traded.
“privacy is no longer the social norm” Mark Zuckerberg Facebook
“It’s not our data, it’s our life…” Bruce Schneier
Blog posts: Jude Umeh, BCS: http://www.bcs.org/server.php?show=conBlogPost.1597
Here is the list of words that we crossed in the conversation on Digital Identity:
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