Crushed under an avalanche of Angry Birds, FourSquare check-ins, and Skype chatter, the BlackBerry is finally losing its grip on the enterprise.
At least, that’s what mobile services seller iPass found in its latest survey of people who use mobile devices such as laptops and smartphones for work.
Last year, mobile workers surveyed by iPass reported that …
Booyah was one of the early leaders in the location gaming market with MyTown, a check-in game that raced out ahead of Foursquare and Gowalla, but differentiated itself with its Monopoly for the real world approach. After 4.5 million downloads of MyTown, Booyah is back with MyTown 2, a new take on gaming that incorporates more of a CityVille approach while still using the real world as a game board.
MyTown 2, a universal iOS app which hits the App Store Thursday, works the city building angle but allows you to apply it to the real world. The original game also allowed you to buy real locations but the sequel now comes with an overhead view of the world that looks more like CityVille and We Rule. It also changes some of the mechanics. Now the price of a location is based on its real-world popularity with other players, who can also own the same property, and that also determines how much money the location produces. Gamers look to expand their town’s population, which allows players to build more business and improve their economy. Check-ins are no longer necessary to buy locations, but can be used to get bonuses, boosts and special rewards.
Booyah CEO Jason Willig, who replaced founder Keith Lee a month ago, said the sequel tries to find game experiences from the first game that spoke to people and expand upon them.
It’s an interesting move for Booyah, which has moved away from location-based gaming with titles like Night Club City and Early Bird. It’s now showing it still wants to innovate on this idea of location-based gaming. Booyah was never really in competition with Foursquare and Gowalla, which provide more of a utility for check-ins. And now those companies are moving even further away from their gaming mechanics while MyTown is trying to be even more like a real game.
I think it’s interesting that MyTown has also de-emphasized the check-in, which Willig said is not central to the game anymore but can serve more like a slot machine providing extras. It reminds of what Ville Vesterinen, founder of location-based game Shadow Cities noted, that much of location games are played from home or work so games need to allow people to play without necessarily always venturing out into the real world. Will MyTown 2 find an audience? Its predecessor raced out to 3 million downloads in its first year though growth slowed after that. MyTown 2 has got an interesting take on city-building in the real world and I’m hoping it can help explore more of the location-gaming genre, which is still just getting going.
Booyah could use some more momentum to justify the almost million it’s raised from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Accel and DAG Ventures .
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It’s challenging to be the lone remote worker in a team where most of the members are located in the same office. You miss out on opportunities like impromptu meetings, informal gatherings at the water cooler, and most offline collaborative activities. The phone and the web are your only means of connecting and participating with the hub.
The good news is that many companies are now offering in-office avatars or embodied social proxies (ESPs). Basically robots that can be remotely controlled, the ESPs are a substitute for a remote worker being in the same building as the rest of the team. The ESP usually has a speaker, video screen, microphone, and camera, which allows real-time audio and video to be sent and received by both the satellite and the hub. It’s like having your own robotic avatar roaming around the office building.
We’ve previously covered these ESPs or in-office avatars here at WWD, specifically mentioning Anybots – which costs ,000 per unit. Similar products include VGo (,995 for the unit and a ,195 annual service fee) and the Texai Remote Presence System (no pricing information yet).
The costs of these in-office proxies tends to make one skeptical about whether the value they provide is worth it. Will companies get a return on their investment? And what benefits can we expect from using these things?
According to researchers from Microsoft Research and the University of California, Irvine, the continuous presence of the proxies in each team improved their social connections as well as their mutual support in work activities. The lone remote workers were easily available to participate more fully in meetings and impromptu discussions. This lowered uncertainty among colleagues and gave them a closer sense of proximity.
Other studies support this, including this recent study published by ACM Press. Researchers Min Kyung Lee and Leila Takayama noted that even though teams previously used phone and video conferencing, these proved to be too limiting because the remote workers were often left out of meetings and decision-making. With the ESP, “[...] remotely controlled mobility enabled remote workers to live and work with local coworkers almost as if they were physically there.”
The informal and spontaneous interactions probably contributed a lot to this sense of proximity. Based on the interviews with the participants, impromptu work meetings, worker availability, and planned social interactions were the top three activities that showed the most improvement. Impromptu meetings, which were usually for getting answers or sharing ideas, mostly took place in hallways and other shared spaces. This kind of spontaneity would be almost impossible with web-based conferencing, email, or chat, since workers would have to return to their workstations to conduct these types of meetings.
The researchers note that these spur-of-the-moment meetings could show commitment and build stronger social connections among geographically distributed workers.
Apart from more nuanced real-time interactions, ESPs also provided the most value during creative design tasks. According to the Microsoft Research and Univeristy of California paper, “Teams involved in creative design activities perceived a greater use value of ESPs, as they allowed the satellite members to more fully participate in the design process, inside and outside meetings.” Remote workers and on-location teams could easily participate in fast-paced design discussions. It was also much easier for both parties to communicate ideas visually via gestures, diagrams, and whiteboards.
Apart from cost, there are a few disadvantages or inconveniences to using ESPs.
The first of these is the remote worker’s difficulty simply driving the ESP. Though this is learned over time, driving was usually done simultaneously with other tasks such as conversation or presentation. In the study conducted by Lee and Takayama, sometimes it was more inconvenient to use the proxies for meetings because they had to drive it to the meeting room. Though driving in itself wasn’t difficult, it consumed a lot of time. Remote workers then had a tendency to be late for meetings.
Experiencing network delays also proved to be challenging. When the internet connection is slow or unreliable, the delays made it hard to achieve the impromptu and nuanced discussions that the ESPs were supposed to provide.
There were also cases when the quality of the machine had an impact on the perceived quality of the worker. When, unbeknownst to the remote worker, the machine was too loud, colleagues perceived the worker himself as loud and disruptive to the workplace.
New etiquette rules were also needed to foster smoother interactions between remote workers and hub teams. For example, it was sometimes seen as a violation of personal space when colleagues changed the volume, orientation, or location of an ESP without asking the remote worker’s permission. Co-located teams, on the other hand, found it rude whenever remote workers did not drive their ESP away at the end of a conversation — even if they were no longer paying attention to whatever went on around their ESPs.
Based on the studies and tests done on ESPs so far, it seems that these devices are best used when the company setup includes a hub office where most workers are co-located, while having only very few remote workers. Fast and reliable Internet connections should also be available to both the hub office and the remote workers — without it, your team won’t experience the benefit of richer real-time interactions.
It’s clear that ESPs have their benefits, but whether these benefits are worth it would depend on how your team works and the kind of work that you do.
Do you think ESPs would be useful in your company? Why or why not?
Thumbnail photo courtesy of Anybots.
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Fall TV season is in full swing, and viewers are using Twitter and Facebook more than ever to chime in on their favorite shows. Question is: Which of the new pilots got the most traction on social networks? We asked the folks over at Trendrr.com to find out, and they produced this neat little infographic for us:
Note: The data aggregates tweets, public Facebook posts and check-ins from GetGlue and Miso.
Today, word came out that NBC is cancelling The Playboy Club, which makes you wonder how the other shows with less than enthusiastic levels of social feedback will fare in the weeks to come. Of course, social feedback doesn’t always translate to ratings, as different target audiences use social media differently, but it’s nonetheless an interesting indicator.
Watch this space for a follow-up, and in the mean time, feel free to sound off in the comments: Which shows have done really well in your social networks, and which ones have tanked?
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Facebook’s Timeline, a re-imagined profile page that captures the history of a user, was the most visually stunning announcement today at the f8 conference. But the new initiative is more than just a design flourish. It’s a bigger push by Facebook to mine the opportunity in the past, giving people a lasting resource and digital diary from all their activities.
This is an opportunity that others having been looking to exploit including such services as Momento, Memolane and Proust , which help create digital timelines and personal journals based on data contributed by the user and pulled from various online sources. Google has started pushing this message home with its “Dear Sophie” commercial, in which a father documents the growth of his daughter by sending her multimedia e-mails of her. And Foursquare has been talking up this angle recently with its new lists functions, which can organize past places, and the new event check-ins, which help people document what they did when they checked-into locations.
The power of the past
The past is increasingly attractive because of the growing amount of things we do online — all this data exhaust we create. As time goes on, there’s a lot that can be done with it, and it has value when it’s aggregated and analyzed. That’s the premise behind more services like RunKeeper’s Health Graph API, which organizes a user’s health and wellness activities and let’s people see how they’re doing over time. As we look at all this information, it can be good for not just preserving memories or helping us understand each other better, but for self-improvement and awareness. We are slowly moving toward a world where everything is being documented by sensors and the next step is to organize and analyze it all, to produce what some call the quantified self.
So it shouldn’t be surprising that Facebook has moved to create a sort of automatic biography for users based on their Facebook lives that they can augment and add to. The site is home to a wealth of personal data that collectively tells a rich story about our lives yet much of it gets lost and has no lasting value to us. By creating a tool to better capture, preserve and visualize it all, Facebook becomes more than a time-killing social network, it becomes the holder of our past.
What Facebook has to gain
Now Facebook isn’t doing this just to help us cherish our memories. The more data it has and the more it understands what has emotional meaning to us, the better it can target us with ads. By letting us preserve the things, activities and apps that matter to us, it gives Facebook an even better way to tailor ads that demand a higher rate from advertisers.
“Our primary business model and it always will be, is advertising,” says Dan Rose, Facebook’s VP of Platforms and Partnerships told Wired’s Steven Levy. “Our platform makes Facebook more interesting so people spend more time on it, because I’m learning about my friends and I’m sharing things about myself and I’m discovering new things. And it also makes it possible for us to put an ad in front of you that’s likely to be interesting to you.”
But Timelines can also be an opportunity to create recommendation tools for users to suggest products they might like based on their tastes and interests. Also, creating more engaging profile pages increases the stickiness of the site and how much time people spend on Facebook.
Perhaps most fundamentally for Facebook, Timeline will give people a new reason to go into oversharing mode. By providing people a way to come back to old entries and gain insights from them, users better see the value of sharing — and the cycle is perpetuated. Maybe you’re nervous about connecting your Spotify account to Facebook. But hey, wouldn’t it be great ten years from now to know what music you were obsessed with? Before, the incentive to share was more limited to how you could impress or communicate with friends in the present time. Photos and videos could obviously be revisited but many things were lost in the past. But Timeline means there can be a point to all of this sharing: a lasting repository that helps paint a picture of your life. And it shows that if you can organize and bring meaning to the past, it can help a company find success in the future.
Can Facebook be your digital scrapbook?
I’m not sure if everyone looks at Facebook as a digital journal and certainly, there is a creepiness factor to overcome in relying on one company to be the steward of your memories. But if Facebook can win over websites and apps to integrate with its updated Open Graph, which will preserve more user activities on Facebook, it will have an even more compelling argument for being a user’s scrapbook. I just wonder if you’ll be able to export any of these Timelines. That would be a great way to lock in users and keep people from defecting. It’s not exactly easy exporting your personal data but if Facebook makes it hard to move your memories somewhere else, it could have a powerful hold on people. And it would show again why owning the past could be even more useful for Facebook.
This move to organize past activity is increasingly what Facebook needs to do, I think, as it exploits the opportunities in its own timeline. It is further exploring the opportunities in the future, by helping people better discover what to do from their friends. And it’s really pushing to make the present more engaging, by encouraging real-time interactions, something Om has called the Alive Web. And it’s capitalizing on the past by making the all of this activity useful as a digital scrapbook. Facebook still has work to do; but today the company is showing that as far as the past goes, it’s got a good chance to be a winner.
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Facebook’s big bid to take on Groupon and other deal sites is coming to an end, at least for now. The company said in a statement to Reuters that it is killing Deals in the coming weeks after four months of testing.
“We think there is a lot of power in a social approach to driving people into local businesses,” Facebook said in the statement. “We’ve learned a lot from our test and we’ll continue to evaluate how to best serve local businesses.”
It’s an interesting turn of events considering how much interest went into Facebook’s offers effort. We talked about how the power of Facebook Deals because of how social it could be, as opposed to Groupon and Living Social. But it looks like the deals business is harder than we thought, especially if it’s not unique enough.
This would appear to be good for Groupon: As it prepares for its IPO, it’s now lost one big competitor. Facebook’s exit from the space might also favor incumbents who are already committed to the model and have those relationships with consumers and merchants. And it might underscore how much manpower is needed to make something like this work.
Or does this signal some more inherent weakness in the larger deals model? It’ll be interesting to get more reasons as to the decision. Facebook also pulled back on its check-ins and is closing its Places tab on Facebook mobile in favor of a broader tagging system that allows users to add location tags to any action.
It’s still early in the daily deals business and with a lot of questions swirling around Groupon’s IPO, we still don’t know how viable this will be over the long haul. But at least for now, there’s one less competitor in the game.
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