RT from Tia Carr Williams: Companies Adopt Gaming Techniques to Motivate Employees – WSJ.com. From the article: “Striving to make everyday business tasks more engaging, a growing number…
A survey by Doritos (the official chip of people who are baked out of their gourds) asked a little over 2,000 people what activities they enjoy. Some of the results were refreshing, if not surprising- 49% of women who responded claim to play online video games compared to 50% of men, contradicting the stereotype that gamers are pimply teenage boys. Other results were more surprising. Of those women who reported playing online video games, 84% reported enjoying them, compared to only 70% who say they enjoy sex.
If I had to pick one skill for the majority of leaders I work with to improve, it would be assertiveness. Not because being assertive is such a wonderful trait in and of itself. Rather, because of its power to magnify so many other leadership strengths. Assertiveness gets a bad rap when people equate it […]
Saba, a human resources software company, will release a corporate social network with a \"People Quotient.\" The idea behind the metric is to assign a hard value to an employee's performance. Such Big Brother numbers are sure to cause both competition and consternation in the workplace.
As everyone knows, multiplayer is better than single player, and as the geeks among us know, there's a set of multiplayer games, like Minecraft and Urban Terror, that offer software that allows gamers to host their own servers. For games like Minecraft, running your own server means that you don't have to be subject to the rules and regulations of other hosts -- you get to invite all of your friends into your world to play, and you get to set the rules. While this can make the game experience infinitely more fun, gamers have to rent their own servers for $70 a month, be their own sysadmin, ...
Over the last year or so, we've seen an auspicious rise in the number of startups looking to tackle those seemingly intractable problems in both K-12 and higher education. One of these startups, the New York City-based ShowMe, found some early financial validation from an impressive set of investors, raising $800K last August from the likes of Lerer Ventures, SV Angel, betaworks, Learn Capital, and angel investor Naval Ravikant. Those familiar with Khan Academy -- the startup that offers an impressive web library of videos on everything from arithmetic and physics to finance and history to ...
Can playing video games make you more productive? Gabe Zichermann shows how games are making kids better problem-solvers, and will make us better at everything from driving to multi-tasking.
Games like World of Warcraft give players the means to save worlds, and incentive to learn the habits of heroes. What if we could harness this gamer power to solve real-world problems? Jane McGonigal says we can, and explains how.
We're bringing gameplay into more aspects of our lives, spending countless hours -- and real money -- exploring virtual worlds for imaginary treasures. Why? As Tom Chatfield shows, games are perfectly tuned to dole out rewards that engage the brain and keep us questing for more.
EmployInsight, a web-based platform for measuring and quantifying employees' "soft skills" in the workplace, has raised $1 million+ from Founder Collective, Launch Capital, Sean Glass, Phil Bronner, Jarrod Yuster, David Cohen, Gus Fuldner and other angels, the company is announcing today. The startup is also revealing one of its first enterprise clients, and it's a big one: the New York Stock Exchange is up-and-running on EmployInsight's first product, a hiring application called HireInsight.
