Recording personal data isn’t new, but the ease with which data can be recorded, organized and displayed for analysis is. And it’s gaining in popularity. New websites and apps that help people monitor their habits, feelings and behaviors are being released every day. According to the New York Times Magazine article, The Data-Driven Life, over one million people are on the geo-tracking site Foursquare and over 30,000 personal tracking projects are started every month on MedHelp.

Self-improvement and self-insight
People track their data to aid in progress toward goals such as quitting smoking, losing weight or being more productive. Seeing the raw data removes some of the emotion from the process of change and can also, over time, offer personal insight into correlations between activities, moods and outcomes.

Community
With the popularity of Facebook and Twitter, people don’t seem to have many qualms about sharing their data. Many online communities are built around the exchange of personal data. For example, creating a profile on a dieting site that publishes your food intake, exercise patterns and weight loss progress for like-minded individuals to view. Or personal data can be published manually via Twitter or Facebook (tweet your breakfast) or automatically (check in at the Pizza Parlor via Gowala). The social aspect of the web actually promotes the collection of personal data. From The Data-Driven Life:

“The more they want to share, the more they want to have something to share.” Personal data are ideally suited to a social life of sharing. You might not always have something to say, but you always have a number to report.”

Where is this all headed?
In this fascinating video, Carnegie Mellon Professor Jesse Schell talks about how score keeping and tracking devices will creep further into our everyday lives (skip to the 20:00 mark if you are short on time). Sensors will get smaller, more powerful and be embedded everywhere. Just brushed your teeth? The sensor in your brush awards you 10 points. Brush twice a day for a week? You’ve earned a bonus – redeem your points for a toothpaste coupon.

But can you trust companies with this much information?  
It’s all well and good as long as they are using your data so sell you things you want. But what happens when your grocery store threatens to use your buying habits against you in a legal case? Or maybe your health insurer offers them big money for your data — could your rates go up because you buy too much junk food?

In summary
If recording your personal data benefits you in some way, do it. Enjoy the insights and benefits the modern technology can provide. Just be aware that your data may not always be private and you should be selective about what you record.

Popular personal data tracking sites, apps and devices to check out: 

• Daytum uses Google API to track and publish just about any type of data.
• me-trics is where Google Analytics gets personal.
• RescueTime is time management software for individuals and companies.
• Trixie Tracker can track and monitor your baby’s habits.
• Sleeptracker is a wristwatch-like sleep phase monitor and alarm clock.
• FitBit is a small device that tracks exercise and sleep.
• Moodstats allows you to record and rate how your day is going.
• MedHelp is a medical community and forum with tracking tools for pain, sleep, etc.
• Traineo tracks food, calories, exercise and fitness goals.
• FitDay is for tracking and analyzing your nutrition, weight loss, diet and fitness goals.
• Calorie King has detailed food, nutrition and exercise trackers.
• MotionBased is a web app from Garmin that translates GPS data into functional analysis and online mapping.
• Nike+ captures running stats (distance, pace, time and calories), which can be uploaded into the Nike+ community.
• Foursquare and Gowala are geo-tracking applications where users “check-in” at locations.
• Mint is a personal finance tracking software.
• CarChip is a device for cars that collects driving and engine performance data from the on-board computers.
• My Mile Marker tracks mileage and fuel consumption.
• The Energy Detective is an energy consumption device/monitor.

 

 

Imagine you’re in the NYC subway. You have to get across town and your train is about to leave. You sprint over to a kiosk and navigate through a complex series of screens to find the right pass. It is taking forever. You fumble as you attempt to insert your cash because it is not recognizing the magnetic strip on your credit card. Finally you receive the ticket as the last train pulls away! Enter mobile ticketing.

Check out the video above to see how mobile ticketing works in Japan. Ok, maybe not, but in all seriousness...

What is Mobile Ticketing?

Mobile ticketing refers to someone who purchases a ticket and stores it on his or her phone for later use.

What Does The Future Hold?

Juniper Research predicts that 2 billion mobile tickets will be delivered in 2010 and 15 billion by
 2015.

What Are The Benefits?

1. Reduced costs of ticket printing/mailing.
2. Improved consumer convenience.
3. Reduced infrastructure costs.
4. Increased revenue by increasing accessibility to tickets.

What Technologies Are Being Leveraged?

1. Barcode – once you purchase the ticket, you receive a barcode that’s displayed on your screen, which is scanned at the station.
2. SMS – a text message with either a redemption code or a link to a barcode is delivered to your phone.
3. Applications – an iPhone, Blackberry or Android app that allows the smart phone owners to purchase tickets.
4. Contactless RFID and NFC – similar to “wave-and-pay” systems that many credit card companies have employed. These both require the phone to have an actual chip in the phone.

Near Field Communication, or NFC, is the latest and standard and is being quickly adopted by the subway system in Japan and some European mass transit systems. NFC is certainly the future of mobile ticketing. In fact, Apple filed a patent for it to be used on the iPhone, integrated with an app that would allow you to book your entire travel itinerary via your phone!

Which Verticals Can Benefit From Mobile Ticketing?

• Mass transit
• Airline check-in
• Cinema ticketing
• Concert/Event ticketing
• Trade shows
• Consumer voucher distribution

What About Vending Machines?

Take a look, getting junk food just got a whole lot easier.

The Social Reach

What has not been touched upon is how this could allow retailers to increase revenue while making it easier for customers to share their experiences. The future of mobile ticketing is indeed bright.

Additional Links

Card and Chip Suppliers to Offer Open Transport Ticketing Standard

Juniper Research's Whitepaper: Mobile Ticket to Ride!

Expanding Mobile Ticketing Globally

Juniper Research: 15 Million Mobile Tickets by 2014

Mobile Ticketing in a Central London Station

This year’s SXSW Interactive Conference was the largest yet, with the number of attendees surpassing both the Film and Music portions of the annual Austin event. One of the trends we noticed was panel discussions about game mechanics. It turns out the same principles that go into a great game are also very effective for engaging, retaining and building a community for your users.

Two panels that concentrated on this topic were led by Stephen Anderson, an Experience Design Strategist from Dallas, and Andy Baio, CTO of Kickstarter, based out of Portland, OR. Both panelists talked about the importance of creating goals for your user that align with your business goals and encourage users to follow a desired path and become more engaged. They also discussed the power of behavioral psychology, particularly in the form of feedback loops, loss aversion, collection impulse and even guilt. Some of the examples cited included:

Gowalla & Foursquare: Both of these apps have turned everyday life into a game where you can score points or deals, achieve new levels (you’re the Mayor of your local Starbucks!) and compete against peers. These apps have become stars in what some are calling the Badgefication of the Internet. Jesse Schell offered some almost-dystopian insights on the “real-life-as-a-game” concept at DICE 2010.

Amazon Mechanical Turk: This was an example used by Baio that didn’t seem obvious to me at first. Amazon Mechanical Turk utilizes a global network of people working on HITs, or Human Intelligence Tasks for businesses and developers.

Baio had used the service before for audio transcription, but felt weird about taking advantage of cheap labor from people whose demographics and status he knew nothing about. Was he contributing to child labor abuses overseas?

His solution? Use the Mechanical Turk to help him find out. He created a task where he paid people to take a picture of themselves with a description of why they do it. What did he find out? 75% of the people are in the United States, more than 50% have bachelor’s degrees and over 60% are female.

What surprised him, though, was the reason a third of the people gave for their participation in HITs. They did it for fun! He realized that they were actually approaching it socially, similar to an MMO. It offered them tests and tasks to accomplish, they liked communicating with other Turkers and their success was measured in cash.

The Obama Campaign: No administration has leveraged the power of the social internet like the current one. During the campaign, supporters were encouraged to participate more by having ranking systems where people could level-up and see how they compared to other supporters in their state.

What Makes a Good Game Experience?* 

*This information is borrowed from Andy Baio’s presentation: Gaming the Crowd

Using Game Mechanics to Engage New Users

More and more online communities are leveraging gaming principles like feedback and goals to help guide new users through their site, making them feel more comfortable and connected to content. For example, LinkedIn provides metrics on your Profile Completeness and offers suggestions for what your next steps should be. Positioning a user’s profile in this way makes it seem more like a quest or mission rather than just filling out information.

On Mint.com’s dashboard, you’ll find this same concept applied to their Financial Fitness scoring system. It charts your personal financial fitness and provides a list of monthly tasks that will add to your Financial Fitness score. More central to the Mint model is how they display your monthly budget. At a glance, users can see where they are on budget (in the green), risk going over-budget (warning! yellow!) and where that shopping trip to Anthropologie, or picking up the tab for your friends when you went out for sushi put you over for the month (red, red, red!)

Ultimately, these kinds of principals can keep your users from feeling overwhelmed and give them incentive to stick around.

Building a Rich Online Community

While there are plenty of games that can be played solo, it’s always going to be more fun with other people involved. Community in games allows for opportunities to share, compete and achieve a level of prestige among your peers.

ThisNext is a social shopping site that leverages all the major concepts of game mechanics to build an enthusiastic global community. In exchange for things such as making quality recommendations on products, frequent contribution and reaching out to other members, a ThisNext user is rewarded with improved ranking among the community, giveaways for tagging content and ultimately prestige and VIP rewards. They even have the potential to become a Maven or an Expert Maven within the online community. What ThisNext has done is create a MMO-like system that doesn’t involve any great challenges, it just asks for a users time and commitment.

This same approach is what makes for some of the most successful Facebook apps (think Farmville or Flixster).

Game Fatigue

While applying gaming principles to interactive experiences can foster collaboration among your users or provide them with a sense of achievement, as these concepts become more popular in various user experiences, there’s a risk of burnout by users. If everything starts requiring a certain degree of time investment or carries a certain level of guilt over how much a user participates, then it could turn off users. So look closely at your business goals versus your users’ goals and figure out what makes the most sense.

 Additional Resources 

• “The Art of Game Design” by Jesse Schell
• Putting the Fun into Functional by Amy Jo Kim  
• The Art and Science of Seductive Interactions, Stephen Anderson's 2010 SXSW Presentation
• Building Web Reputations Systems

 

 

It’s been a long time in the coming, but the internet may finally be making serious inroads to your living room. The appetite for smarter media options is nothing new, but greater at-home bandwidth, smarter compression technologies and the proliferation of internet-enabled devices may finally be making it possible. People have already incorporated the internet into all aspects of their lives (business, communications, shopping, etc.) and are eager to upgrade their dated and passive home entertainment experience, too. The internet has trained users to expect live, on-demand content that is highly interactive, bundled with the ability to customize and share. Only the internet can deliver that to our living rooms.

So far it is still the Wild West when it comes to internet media solutions, and there is no clear leader or standard in the space, just lots of folks trying to find the right solution. Let’s meet the players.

Content Sources

Content is king, and it’s the abundance of rich content that is encouraging people to want to consume it in their traditional entertainment environment. When it comes to viewing online content on your TV, there's a smorgasbord of digital sources. 

Home Network Content: Before we even talk about the internet, we need look at what we already have on our laptops, PCs and home servers. Our hard drives are busting at the seams with videos (downloaded, ripped, homemade), music and photos. As more homes become networked, this content can finally be freed from our computers and consumed in more comfortable and social surroundings.

Streaming Services: Arguably the most exciting content source is streaming video from services like Hulu, Netflix, Amazon Video on Demand (VoD), YouTube, Vimeo, MTV, and many more. These sites and services serve up on-demand video whenever and wherever we want it.

Download Services: Lots of players are vying for your download dollars, and unlike streaming services (at least for now), they can generally offer much higher quality and the joy of ownership. Services like iTunes, Amazon VoD, Starz Play and CinemaNow are slowly honing in on pricing, format and device support standards.
 
Photo Sites: But video isn’t the only star of the show, the digital photography craze has also netted gobs of photo content ready to enjoy with friends and family. While many users may simply want to view photos from their home computer on their TV, the vast majority of people have embraced online sharing sites like Flickr, Facebook, Kodak Image Gallery and PhotoBucket to house and share their photos.

Audio and Video Podcasts: While streaming sites are popular for their immediacy, users and media creators have also embraced downloadable content for its high quality and portability. The web is packed with audio and video podcasts that users would love to consume on their media centers.  

Internet Radio: In many ways Internet Radio has lead the charge in getting web content onto the home media center. The early availability of content, low bandwidth requirements, and relatively simple interface requirements made it a great starting point. For years now, devices like the Roku SoundBridge and Logitech Squeezebox have made it painless to wirelessly stream services likes Pandora, Shoutcast and Rhapsody, plus thousands of independent radio stations to your living room. 

Hardware

So we’ve established that there is a plethora of content available in a number of different formats, now how to get it onto the TV. As luck would have it, there are numerous hardware options available to bring online content to your living room. 

Video Game Consoles: The latest round of gaming systems from the major players all sport an advanced array of web-enabled media options. Both Microsoft’s Xbox and Sony’s PS3 offer video on-demand services and support full web browsers, which allow users the ability to access any number of streaming sites. The Xbox also features integrated Netflix streaming and PlayOn software, which enables a more TV friendly interface to access sites like YouTube and Hulu.

Dedicated Devices: More recently, devices already associated with TV consumption or new, dedicated web devices have begun to gain traction in the market. While devices like Roku and Vudu focus more on traditional content, devices like AppleTV and Tivo offer users more variety in the types of media they can access.

Embedded Devices: Why build a whole new device when web services can be bundled into existing form factors. Major television, DVD and Blu-ray manufacturers like Sony, LG, Samsung and Vizio are all rushing to bundle in streaming services like Netflix and Blockbuster On-Demand, as well as emerging internet-enabled platforms like Yahoo’s Connected TV.

Media PCs: Let’s not forget the device that already does it all, the PC. Prices have dropped to the point where a dedicated media PC is no longer just the territory of the super rich and media geeks. We are also seeing people completely replace their TV with all-in-one units like the Apple iMac or the Dell Studio One that were designed to be your media hub. 

Software Platforms

With tons of content available and plenty of devices that can access it, the problem comes down to interface and ease of use. While computer users are accustomed to dealing with complex data, navigational challenges and inconsistencies across sites, the living room media consumer demands ease of use and consistency. Here are the major trends:

Operating System as Media Hub: Both Apple and Microsoft would love to own this emerging market and are taking unique approaches to the problem. Apple’s base solution is Front Row, a remote-friendly interface baked into their OS that gives users a 10-ft. interface to interact with primarily pre-downloaded content. Users can also step up to the dedicated AppleTV that adds connections for services like YouTube, Flickr and internet radio. Both options are tied closely to Apple’s iTunes universe.

Microsoft’s Media Center was initially launched with Windows XP as a separate version of the OS and has continued to evolve into its latest Windows 7 version. In typical Microsoft form, they take more of a do-it-all approach, including DVR functionality, streaming video from major network sites, Netflix, internet radio and more.

Media Hub Software: One of the more exciting trends is the emergence of 10-ft. interfaces for both existing services such as Hulu Desktop and YouTube XL, along with all-new universal media hub software offerings such as XBMC and Joost. While the TV-friendly versions of existing services add little new functionality, services like Boxee hint at what the future of living rooms might hold, with integrated web, local media services and tied-in social features that let friends share content. Boxee is currently still in alpha but already runs on all major operating systems as well as the AppleTV and even has an iPhone remote app available.

Internet Widgets: Yahoo! Connected TV and Verizon FiOS are taking a slightly different angle by building internet-enabled widget platforms that augment traditional media delivery rather than replace it. These new layers of content allow users to get services like weather and stocks updates or access services like Twitter, Facebook and Flickr for updates and media. 

Thoughts and Conclusions

So far much of this puzzle is still unsolved, there is a ton of players and no one is rushing to develop standards or harmonize their approaches. With that in mind, there are several things that jump out at me: 

• More opportunity to engage. As someone dedicated to creating experiences that connect people and brands, I see a huge emerging opportunity to expand the ways in which I do that. 
• Interface design and usability, important as ever. Just when you thought that mobile platforms were the hardest thing you could design for, the 10-ft. interface presents a mammoth, new set of challenges.
• Balancing uniformity and individuality. When it comes to consuming media on a television, users are accustomed to a very simple and consistent experience. So as we begin to develop media and experiences for these new platforms, we need to be mindful of those expectations. Only then can we push toward the new and innovative. 

 

In the world of social media, fantasy and reality duke it out for your attention daily — and the lines between them get blurrier by the second. Hence the branded avatar. Whether you're sick of using the same 3 profile pictures or you just want to kill a few minutes between meetings, avatar builders give you a chance to escape from all that other...escapism.

As you might expect, companies love branded avatars. The way they see it, you get to express yourself socially while their corporate logo keeps your feet firmly planted on the ground (or your head in the clouds, depending on your persective).

But people don't just go nuts over any old avatar. It has to hit that elusive sweet spot more and more companies are competing for these days. Which brings us to the battle: 

MadMen Yourself. Went from dark horse to reigning champ in seconds flat, thanks to a perfect storm of marketing hype, genuine anticipation, authentic panache and reality fatigue. Plenty going for it from a UX standpont, too: no barriers to entry, easy-to-use controls, lots of customization options, decent sharing capabilities and a generally lounge-y vibe. The pure joy of creating clone after jazzy little clone almost makes up for the overt branding or the occasional glitch (try going back to clean shaven once you've grown facial hair...OK, so maybe they did that on purpose). Plus Dyna Moe's mid-century DIY style gives it an organic allure that's hard to resist.

Yearbook Yourself 2009. If 2008 was Thriller for this franchise, 2009 was just Bad (blame MadMen Yourself). Which is a shame, because Colle+McVoy really brought it this year. You can upload images or use your webcam, rotating, moving, scaling, flipping and adjusting skin tone until your face fits your avatar (you have 5 decades' worth to choose from — each one calling out different online stores — but you'll have to re-tweak your photo as you jump from year to year). On top of that, you can create solo or group portraits, then share them via Facebook Connect and other services as neatly branded files. Confused? The funk-fueled video tutorial explains everything. 

SVEDKA Bot Builder. This slam dunk from Barbarian Group (with the assist from Oddcast) oozes style. The Bot Builder leverages 3D modeling technology to create cool avatars that are icy and detached yet freaky-looking and kinda kinky. In other words, Scandinavian (although art director Ryan McManus tells me he snuck Tom Brady's jersey number in as a customization option — USA! USA!). Facebook Connect is integrated right off the bat, allowing you to do things like upload and use profile pictures. Once completed, your animated avatar will fly, sashay or karate-chop as you see fit, and will continue to do so in your news feed or on your friends' walls. Blame it on the alcohol.  

Dell Lounge Trans-Poser. Our contender doesn't need bells and whistles; what it does, it does well. Sporting a retro look and feel, the Trans-Poser makes cutting and pasting yourself into the action at X Games 15 as easy as twisting a few knobs. But it's the little UI touches (like multiple drag-and-drop anchor points for editing) that keep you coming back to see how far you can push reality's boundaries. Every trans-posed image gets saved to Dell Lounge community gallery, where you can see, rate, comment, download and share whatever grabs you. And because we built the Trans-Poser into the Dell Lounge, it can be reskinned and repurposed to engage users on an ongoing basis. Check and mate.