Gaming/Entertainment/Media
Tech startups combine gaming and healthcare
Source: Timothy Hay, WSJ, Thursday Decemeber 29th 2011
A group of technology start-ups is taking its cue from social gaming, in hopes of relieving companies, doctors and patients of some of the pain involved in managing health care.
The new businesses, staffed mainly by health-industry veterans, have adapted common social-gaming features to help companies motivate their employees to get fitter or to encourage doctors to keep in touch with their colleagues and patients online.
One of the start-ups, Keas Inc., whose clients include Pfizer Inc. and Novartis Inc., offers a gaming platform that allows groups of employees to compete with one another at exercising, eating healthily and taking better care of themselves.
San Francisco-based Keas originally aimed to offer consumers alerts, messaging and personalized information to help them lose weight and adopt healthier habits, but that plan didn’t work out.
“We tried to give people constant feedback about their health, but for a lot of people, more bad news and negative feedback just didn’t work,” said Adam Bosworth, the company’s chief technology officer. “If you keep giving someone negative feedback, they will eventually change the channel to the game channel. One day we decided to become that game channel.”
Keas now sets up contests in which co-workers compete by walking to the office more often or eating more vegetables. It says it has 80,000 active users, more than $16 million in venture capital and a growing list of customers. Quest Diagnostics Inc. said more than 80% of its employees who participated in an employee-wellness pilot program with Keas reported improved health.
Other start-ups are pushing doctors to step up their game with features found in social games like Zynga Inc.’s Farmville or on social-networking sites like Facebook or Foursquare.
HealthTap Inc., of Palo Alto, Calif., runs a website that doctors can use to build an online profile, gaining public exposure by answering health-related questions from consumers. The more questions a doctor answers, the more points the doctor wins and the more prominently he is featured on the site, potentially attracting more patients. Patients, meanwhile, can sign up as followers of a particular doctor or of other patients on the site and can indicate if they like or dislike various bits of content.
HealthTap says more than 6,000 doctors, as well as institutions including Harvard Medical School and the Cleveland Clinic, are actively answering users’ questions on its site.
“We’re not building a game here, just adding subtle game mechanics to make it more fun for doctors,” said HealthTap Chief Executive Ron Gutman.
Audax Health Inc., a Washington-based start-up with $16.5 million in funding, said it plans to offer a gaming platform designed to enable large insurers to offer incentives to their members—such as reduced premiums—in return for adopting healthier habits.
Doximity Inc. and WellnessFX Inc., two start-ups that have gained some traction among health-care providers, are in the process of incorporating gaming features.
Doximity, based in San Mateo, Calif., provides a secure messaging platform that doctors can use to answer treatment questions from colleagues, and to become acquainted with other doctors, to whom they can refer patients. Because of strict privacy laws, doctors often discuss cases by fax, since regular email isn’t considered secure enough.
Chief Executive Jeff Tangney said Doximity has grown more quickly over the past several months since it added some game-like features. By expanding their network of friends and followers on Doximity, a doctors can earn a “Top Doctor” badge on the website, a potential magnet for referrals. Doximity soon plans to let users “follow” one another, he said, as they can on other platforms.
San Francisco-based WellnessFX, which analyzes blood and urine samples, also provides a secure online forum in which doctors can confer with their patients.
WellnessFX is considering adding game features to the mix to keep doctors and patients engaged, according to Chief Executive Jim Kean. “We’re working on badges and leaderboards,” he said.
More people watching online video via their game consoles
Thanks to the greater availability of Netflix, Hulu, and similar services, streaming videos via a game console has grown in popularity over last year, says a new study from Nielsen.
Surveying more than 3,000 people in the U.S. in October, Nielsen found that video streaming now accounts for 14 percent of all time spent on Microsoft’sXbox 360, 15 percent of time spent on the Sony PlayStation 3, and 33 percent spent on the Nintendo Wii
Gamers make their wish lists
Source: Nielsen, September 29, 2011
Which video game titles top gamers’ wish lists this year? Nielsen’s Top 20 Games to Watch reveals the most anticipated games of the 2011 holiday season, with Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 the most coveted among active U.S. gamers. The list was developed by examining a variety of consumer measures from Nielsen’s Video Game Tracking survey, including the top five titles active gamers are considering for purchase.
To help narrow the focus of this analysis, Nielsen filtered the field to those titles releasing on at least one of the three major consoles (Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, Wii) during the timeframe of late August to late November. This year’s list underscores the various interests of gamers—as well as the strength of video game brands. All but one of the Top 20 titles stem from a franchise, with brands such as Madden NFL and The Legend of Zelda dating back more than 20 years. Deep Silver’s Dead Island represents the lone new IP included on this year’s list.
Activision’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, an expected juggernaut for this holiday season, is desired by more than one quarter (27%) of active gamers. Microsoft’s Gears of War 3 and EA’s Madden NFL 12 follow closely behind; both titles were selected by nearly one out of every five (19%) active gamers. Apart from Gears of War 3 for Xbox 360, other platform exclusives expected to resonate strongly with consumers in the coming months include Nintendo’s The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword for Wii and Sony’s Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception for PS3.
Nielsen’s Top 20 Games to Watch is supplemented by information from NM Incite, a Nielsen McKinsey company, which analyzed the primary elements driving consumers’ online conversations around each title. Recent consumer buzz shows that those anticipating Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed: Revelations are excited for the return of multi-player functionality to the franchise, while gamers looking forward to Warner Bros Interactive’s Batman: Arkham City are speculating on the villains they’ll face in the new title. Fans of EA’s FIFA franchise are hoping for more pro and career mode options in the upcoming iteration, and those addicted to Microsoft’s Dance Central are rejoicing in the news that they’ll be able to import tracks from the original title into the sequel.
Why Behavioral Targeting is the Future of Mobile Marketing
While behavioral targeting is nothing new in the online world, it’s still something of a novelty for mobile. Mostly because we still lack the scale, tehcnology and inventory to do this effectively. However, the growing trend of using behavioral targeting techniques continues to gain traction across the entire spectrum of mobile, not just advertising. Simple demographic profiling, which is how media is traditionally purchased, seems flat and one dimensional when looking at mobile users. Take the retail sector for instance. In our experience, retailers don’t care so much that their target may be men 25-34, they care about why they walk into a store, scan a product with a barcode scanning app and then buy the product in the store itself. That type of behavioral understanding, which addresses the “why” vs. “who” approach to shoppers is the core of why behavioral targeting so effective.
A new contender in mobile gaming
Sony introduced its next-generation gaming device, the PlayStation Vita, which is expected to go on sale before the madness of the 2011 holiday shopping season.
The new device is aimed at competing with the likes of Apple’s iPod Touch and the plethora of smartphones and tablets on the market. After the device was first unveiled in January, the show on Monday revealed other details, including the name and basic price.
Priced at $250 – or $299 for the 3G version – the Vita is Sony’s latest effort to control as much of the mobile gaming market as possible, a difficult feat given the stellar competition posed by the likes of Apple and Nintendo.
Similar to Apple’s initial iPhone carrier strategy in the US, Sony revealed this week that AT&T will be the exclusive carrier for the Vita.
The PlayStation Vita boasts a quad-core processor as well as quad-core graphics to go with dual analog sticks and front and rear-facing cameras.
Although Sony believes it is offering “competitive” pricing on the Vita, more than a few analysts believe that Sony has attached a dauntingly high price tag to make the Vita truly capable of reaching mass-market appeal.
“That’s fine for core gamers who want to play games all the time, but it’s too expensive for the mass market,” Dan Ernst, a Hudson Square research analyst, tells Yahoo Finance.
The global games market is projected to reach $65 billion this year, an increase from $62.7 billion last year.
The mighty video game console if falling
It’s been almost 20 years since America was wow-ed by the first hard-core gaming stations such as Play Station and Nintendo. After dominating the market for decades and making their way into 1 out of every 2 U.S. homes, consoles are facing serious competition. The market is apparently reaching a cap. The main reason: the advent of social and mobile gaming. Gamers are abandoning their big-box gaming consoles and big-ticket $40/game price tags for the the more portable and less expensive ($5/game price tag) benefit of mobile devices and tablets. Furthermore, this seems to have direct parallells to the laptop revolution, where we see fewer and fewer people opting for an unportable desktop PC in favor of laptops and tablets. Seems like this is a natural evolution. Read more.
