June 18, 2007
Whew . . . Our busiest months ever
Our blog has been mostly silent, but we've had our busiest few months ever.
After we hosted an event on Mobile Persuasion for 280 people (www.mobilepersuasion.org), we published a book on this topic with 20 authors. (www.mobilepersuasion.com)
Then we hosted an academic conference on persuasive technology for 170 people. (www.persuasivetechnology.org) This was followed by a weekend at my home in wine country for 45 people, mostly from Europe.
Along the way my lab completed two experiments on mobile persuasion and launched some new lab projects. I spoke at a few conferences and companies. And I started planning a new course for fall.
Oh, yes: We also submitted a couple papers for publication and are now running the election for Persuasive 2008 (www.persuasive2008.org)
So you can see we've been busy. And we haven't kept you informed. We'll step back and cover some of what we've done. It has been perhaps the most interesting period in our lab's 10-year history. But we've done a poor job documenting this in blog form.
Posted by BJ Fogg at 05:43 PM | Comments (0)
October 21, 2005
...and some pointers to relevant articles
And immediately after we emailed that list out, here's an email we got from another Lab member, Steve Wilhelm.
Hello, Great list! Hope these articles and companies help.Motivate people to exercise: Los Altos-based Champion Worlds - http://www.companionworlds.com/ and Mountain View-based Nutrihand http://www.nutrihand-inc.com/Solutions.html
Persuading to use the right modality: NY Times article, "Meet the Life Hacker's" http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/16/magazine/16guru.html
How to price an item: Nomis Solutions price optimization solutions for financial products http://www.nomissolutions.com/solution.html
Mobile text to speech: RealSpeak, Text to Speech for SMS and Mobile eMail from Nuance. http://www.nuance.com/realspeak/mobile/.
Ads with your friends' faces: Security system that uses pictures of faces instead of passwords, http://www.realuser.com/technology/about_passfaces.htm
- Steve W.
What else could you ask for!
Posted by Ramit Sethi at 10:23 AM | Comments (0)
What we brainstormed this week at Lab
This week at Lab meeting, we took a few minutes to brainstorm some ideas for what we want to persuade. We broke it down in 2 categories: mobile and general persuasion.
It's in draft form, but it will give you an idea for what some of us are thinking about.
GENERAL PERSUASION
-Keep computers healthy (viruses, etc). Not the technical part, but how to represent happiness of a computer
-Persuading to use the right modality (AIM vs. email)
-Persuade people to be part of a user community
-Persuade people to authorize the use of their data for personal data (simulation? Companies find this valuable, of course)
-Ads with your friends' faces
-Increase use of homework by surfing
-A list of top 100 items that make a Web site good (more than just credibility, but for businesses)
-Also for businesses, how to price an item (1 product, 2 free, or 50% off?)
-Do citizen activities online like pay taxes
-Motivate people to exercise (compete against someone else in gym, bball hoop that motivates you to play by yourself)
-Fridge that persuades you to eat healthier (MIT/Michael ex: fridge knows what's good/bad, what's enough fiber)
MOBILE
-Increase voting (like Philippines , Madrid/Eta)
-Calorie counter, make better decisions (like MyFoodPhone)
-Mobile location-based persuasive games
-Being more involved in a social network—balancing how many events/info to share
-How to capture location-based info (how to frame it, prisoner's dilemma of only wanting to enter info when there is already a lot)
-MySpendingLess Phone—set your budget
-Blackberry (connect between mobile phones, text to speech)
Stay tuned to see what we come up with...
Posted by Ramit Sethi at 10:20 AM | Comments (0)
July 30, 2005
Current and Ongoing Projects
BuddyBuzz
Over the course of the lat year the lab has begun to develop an alternate means of reading text on mobile devices based on a system initially developed by the U.S. military. Known as Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (R.S.V.P.), the application cycles single words or small blocks of text on the screen of mobile phones allowing hands-free reading without the need for the user to scroll the text. As readers become more comfortable using the system, they can easily adjust the speed at which the text is presented. Over time, studies have shown that the system allows readers to not only increase the speed at which they read, but also improve reading comprehension and retention. The team has patented the technology, developed content partnerships with Reuters and CNET and is working on securing funding to further develop the application for potential commercial use.
Check out a recent article in the San Jose Mercury News about BuddyBuzz.
Mobile Jokes Project
In our increasingly mirthless world, it's sometimes difficult to know what's funny. Relief is on the way. Our lab is creating a free service that will play jokes for you over the phone - any phone. Waiting in line? Stuck in traffic? Need to appear busy? Just call in, listen and (we hope) laugh. However, the project isn't just fun and games, it's hard research. Once callers listen to a joke, they're asked to rate it. Once we have enough ratings, we'll start to analyze the data to determine which jokes are funniest to people in general, which jokes college students like, what jokes do women prefer, and more. You get the idea.
So what's the point? First, we're exploring how humor can persuade callers and/or reward them for specific kinds of behavior. The second purpose is to create a new system for evaluating content. Our first evaluation system was deployed on the web last year and it's proved extremely useful. As a result, we've decided to extend this evaluation to capture data from mobile phone users.
When our joke engine service is ready, we'll send out the phone number.
We'll have more updates from other team members in our next newsletter!
Posted by Gregory Cuellar at 01:11 PM | Comments (0)