Mobile Behavior: an Omnicom Group Company

1. Check In at Starbucks

"We’re excited to be among one of the first companies to work with Facebook on their new Deals product. We’re collaborating with our friends at Conservation International to help save forests. For each check in on Facebook Places, we’ll donate $1, up to $75,000 to help protect 5,000 acres. All you have to do is stop by and check in!"

2. The iPad and Your Brand: Six Things to Know

"Marketers need to accept that every experience they create is an advert, not just the content they put into media spaces. And, as such, they must accept that this new platform requires them to provide fresh, high-quality and valuable content -- as well as the ability for an instant response to consumer requests."

3. AT&T launches new health practice: AT&T ForHealth

"This practice area is made up of many of the mHealth partnerships AT&T has inked over the years with various companies, including WellDoc’s DiabetesManager, Vitality’s GlowCaps, eCardio’s remote patient monitoring and the Wound Technology Network’s video-enabled wound treatment services."

4. The Office Music Democratizer for Last.fm and Pandora

"There have been many attempts at trying to make office music a democracy, but most involve a complex system that people ignore, or people taking turns running the jukebox. LastFM and Pandora are great solutions (they learn from what you like/hate), but they both lack an easy and public way for everyone to have their say. Our solution? Love it, Hate it, just hit the pretty button on the wall."

5. Mobile is about to be redefined by payments

"The missing link in the coming mobile revolution is the payments piece... This could be about change thanks to a company called BOKU, who have just started participating in a trial with AT&T. The system can work across platforms and is very simple from the user perspective."

6. What a Hundred Million Calls to 311 Reveal About New York

"Launched in March 2003, 311 now fields on average more than 50,000 calls a day, offering information about more than 3,600 topics: school closings, recycling rules, homeless shelters, park events, pothole repairs. The service has translators on call to handle some 180 different languages."

7. Introducing Last.fm Kinect

"Last.fm for Kinect is a light-weight version of the radio app that uses gestures to control the player. It lets you browse and play Last.fm Radio with little waves of your hand. While more intensive actions such as scrolling through artist info are still best suited to a controller, it’s really cool to have a new way to interact with Last.fm."

8. Google Instant Comes to the iPhone

"While Google Instant already speeds up searches on the desktop, this feature is even more useful on mobile devices, where typing is more arduous and instant search results could prove to be a major advantage for users."

9. Now arriving: Stickybits at the London Gatwick Airport

"The London Gatwick Airport installed giant stickybits this morning, officially one-upping our friends at Blue Fountain Media who formerly held the title for creators of the world’s largest stickybit."

10. Gartner report tells corporations to get moving on the iPad

"In a private report to clients, the Gartner research firm is urging CEOs to clear any obstacles preventing IT departments from taking advantage of the iPad."

Tweetworthy is a weekly roundup of the most shared tweets from @MobileBehavior. You can follow us on Twitter here.

1. Making the world clickable, measurable. http://bit.ly/9Tf54V

2. The iPad Project: Inspiring story of what happened when iPads were brought into the classroom http://bit.ly/a1kIS8

3. Social viewing: Why the internet is causing an increase in TV viewing http://bit.ly/9ShWAf

4. The importance of brand in the digital media environment http://slidesha.re/cX3QIi

5. Loopt Feeling Right At Home With Facebook Places, Adds Deep Integration http://tcrn.ch/cfba7M

6. With barcodes, consumers can quickly check whether the food in their fridge is affected a by product recall. http://bit.ly/dcOGRQ

7. Retrevo's "Gadget Census" visualizes Android, Blackberry, and iPhone adoption in the U.S. http://bit.ly/bVhMCc

8. Nike Grid Run to Start. "The game gets even bigger in its sophomore year." http://bit.ly/cwYuD2

9. Slap A QR Code On That Product So That People Can Like It http://tcrn.ch/bIs8Ug

10. Five Mobile Trends Redefining Health http://bit.ly/djNy14

Tweetworthy is a weekly roundup of the most shared tweets from @MobileBehavior. You can follow us on Twitter here.

Jesse Schell is a professor at the Carnegie Mellon Entertainment Technology Center, and the CEO of Schell Games. He wrote a book called "The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses" and has been involved with several innovative research projects involving mobile games. He is currently working on a few new mobile games at his studio.

In your talk at DICE, you call the iPhone a "modern digital Swiss Army Knife." Yet we see the iPad and an ecosystem of screens. What are your thoughts on the current state of convergence and how will this affect the way games are designed?

Convergence is mostly a myth. Technologies generally do not converge, they diverge. That's why it will not be strange for people to have a game console, a laptop, an iPad, and a smartphone. The number of screens in our lives will continue to increase. The cool part about this for games is that it gives us all kinds of new ways and places to create games.

As an expert on game design, you are able to see through the hype. What are Foursquare's current flaws? What about EpicWin? Will turning our to-do list into a game actually work?

Anyone curious about this should read the book "Punished by Rewards" by Alfie Kohn. Turning our to-do lists into games only works in very limited situations, and generally only for a short time -- soon, we get sick of it, and it doesn't seem fun anymore, it just seems like work.

As for Foursquare, its main flaw is that it provides little actual value right now -- it is primarily a novelty, like the Tamagotchi was. Once the world understands a novelty, the world moves on. Now, some people say, "well, soon they will add fantasy elements -- the whole world will become an RPG." But you know what? Foursquare + Fantasy = Larping. And I think you know how the world feels about larping.

Foursquare's future path most likely lies in advergaming. They will cut deal after deal with companies that are trying to make a splash with some novel new Foursquare game that has products for prizes, and it will be great fun, until the world gets bored of it. I know I sound negative, but that's just my gut reaction. Maybe the Foursquare guys will figure out something clever and find a way to become an essential part of our everyday lives -- but right now I don't see it.

We recently took note of this commentary on gaming in an Adweek Digital Special Issue:

Nicholas Christakis calls the defining paradigm of the digital age: "massive, passive data collection." Simply put, with technology invading all parts of our lives, we're leaving digital footprints of our activities. Combine that data trail with an increasingly robust social graph and what results is the ability to visualize behavior patterns -- eating, sleeping, walking and driving -- and make a competitive game out of them.

It reminds us of  the idea of earning points by brushing our teeth. What opportunities do you think lie here? Will we tire or burnout from all of these point systems? Are there alternatives?

It's all about the game design. Bad designs will wear us out, good ones will spur us to challenge ourselves. In the coming decade there will be thousands of experimental examples -- some big, some small. Most will fail -- but a few will succeed -- and their success will be because they have found a way to enrich our daily lives in a way that wasn't possible before.

Finally, what are a couple of things you have your eyes on in the mobile and tech space? What have you been thinking about?

I've been thinking a lot about augmented reality. I've been thinking about how very soon all the scattered data about us on the web will be consolidated in ways that will shock us. Someone will hold their smartphone up as they walk by my car, my house, or my person, and suddenly get information about my life, my interests, and my family. This is going to make us feel like our privacy has been violated, even though no new data is being shared -- rather, the old data that is already out there on Facebook and on the web is going to be consolidated in unexpected ways. We'll be like Adam and Eve biting the apple, and suddenly realizing that we're naked.

That, and I've been thinking about using GPS to play pac-man while I drive!

1. Gowalla teams up with Element and Paul Frank http://bit.ly/bNYsLN

2. Deals, Not Badges Will Attract Mainstream Check-Ins http://bit.ly/aTxdNf

3. 10 Cool Asian Cell Phone Features You Can't Have – Yet http://bit.ly/cq0w3X

4. The world’s slowest SMS billboard created http://bit.ly/a0MNZP

5. Mobile fireworks launch in real world http://bit.ly/9cwb2g

6. The iPad Is Already Bigger Than The iPod -- And Half As Big As The Mac http://bit.ly/deYIIn

7. Teenagers and technology: 'I'd rather give up my kidney than my phone' http://bit.ly/9oR7Gv

8. Nokia Research Center -- NRC Presents Cognitive Radio http://bit.ly/am7uKa

9. Diesel uses mobile to crowdsource "stupid." http://bit.ly/db73Za

10. Another Reason for branded “designer” QR codes http://bit.ly/cVi2qe

Tweetworthy is a weekly roundup of the most shared tweets from @MobileBehavior. You can follow us on Twitter here.

A restaurant in Sydney, Australia called Global Mundo Tapas has replaced its menus with the MenuPad app for iPads. MenuPad offers restaurants valuable digital tools and the potential to save time and avoid errors.

The app allows the restaurant to easily change its menu, shows pictures of each dish, and also communicates orders directly to the kitchen, cutting down on server error. And, just to show off, it can even recommend dishes based on the weather or your mood.

We have seen the iPad sweep into the travel industry with the InterContinental luxury hotel chain equipping its staff with iPads and The Berkeley hotel in London provides guests with iPads. Further, Jetstar, the budget carrier of Qantas Airways in Australia, became one of the first airlines in the world to announce it would offer the iPad during in-flight entertainment. These examples show the flexibility of the iPad -- its literally a blank slate for ideas -- is clearly one of its strengths.

See the MenuPad demonstrated here.

[via eater.com]

For Cannes next week, festival goers can participate in a Twitter-based game of Marco Polo. It is meant to keep people updated on popular locations and events.

Anyone who tweets @SapientNitro with #Marco will receive a reply with #Polo and a link that will take them to a microsite featuring a map and five nearby hotspots. The microsite also features a Hot/Cold meter that will show the player how close he or she is to Marco Polo himself.

When someone is "hot" enough, they will be sent a photograph of a person to tackle and receive a free iPad. It is a creative use of Twitter, bridging the classic game of Marco Polo into a digital world.

[via creativity]

4Food is a new restaurant opening in Midtown Manhattan that could be from the future. In addition to serving a Jetson-inspired menu, it builds Internet culture into its core experience, positioning itself as "an Apple store meets Chipotle."

Social networking and collaboration will play roles, as a 240 square foot display built into a wall will show both Foursquare check-ins to the location as well as Twitter updates. Customers will be encouraged to share the customized burgers they make and can even get 25-cent credits for every burger sold based on their choice of ingredients.

And these aren't any ordinary burgers, they are scooped out and filled with veggies. 4Food's mission is to make fast food healthy and eco-friendly. According to their site:

• We upgrade food that people already eat-burgers, nuggets, fries, salads and teas - transforming them into new menu items that are convenient, and almost infinitely customizable to our guests' lifestyles and cultural preferences. Our food is measurably healthier than existing products.
• Dynamic Menu Boards reduce waste and enable us to feature seasonal and occasional products.
• Advanced, web-based technologies allow us to make personalized recommendations that meet our guest's nutrition and lifestyle goals.
• Fresh, local produce is transformed into our menu offerings in the Community Kitchen Commissary-a vocational training center.
• We build with natural construction materials that are abundant and regenerative.

Restaurants want customers to share with their social graph, to lure people in "like the scent out of a bakery window," and we suspect that is the sort of place that we suspect people will love to talk about online. The physical space is designed to encourage this through place-based social media, i.e. digital screens in venues (see: Locamoda).  We'd hope there is free Wi-Fi. And did we mention they take your order via iPad?

[via eater]