CodeCollision

In a Google Tech Talk, Sebastian Deterding talks about how we can apply the concept of Gamification to everyday services and sites. They define gamification as, "integrating game dynamics into your site, service, community, content or campaign, in order to drive participation". They give a few examples such as Nike Plus which tracks exercise, Mint which offers a service to set financial goals and finally in sustainability to create a game out of driving efficiently.

They also discuss a variety of interesting services that offer game design elements anyone can add to their website. They give a few examples such as: GetGlue, CubePoints, BadgeVille and Nitro. After looking at these sites it looks like they offer a variety of services to help retain users, increase loyalty and provide more engagement. A look at BadgeVille's they state that:

Badgeville is a white label Social Rewards & Analytics Platform. We make it easy to increase the loyalty and engagement of your web audience.

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Bill Buxton talks about natural user interfaces (NUI) what it means and how it would work if implemented in a product. He demonstrates how there are very fine and often missed details that go into what we do everyday. One of the things people do often is write notes and Buxton demonstrates that the process of writing a note is more nuanced then what we might initially believe. Buxton reveals with a desk sized piece of carbon copy paper that how we write has a lot to do with ergonomics how people manipulate the paper as well as the pen in order to write. I was surprised to see how how continuously a piece of paper will be moved during the process of writing on one page. As you write you unconsciously move the paper in the most ergonomic position for writing. What this example shows is that comfortable writing cannot occur with only the movement of the pen and this concept is what I believe Buxton was trying to convey in the meaning of Natural User Interfaces.

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ChromeBooks by Google are new simplified notebooks which are only able to run a web browser. In this case it is Google's own browser, Chrome. This product signifies the leap that many products are making to cloud based computing. As the notebook can only run Google Chrome, all the applications the notebook can run are limited to browser based applications such as Google Docs. Many power users will not find this useful however as a growing segment of users needs can be met purely by browser based applications this is a good product for them. The trend toward cloud based storage and computing is interesting as all the users documents will be stored online on Google's servers. This has advantages as the users documents are safe from theft or lose of the notebook and all settings and documents can be easily transferred to new ChromeBook.

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