Last year, I received an email I will never forget: One of the world’s tobacco giants wanted me to consult for them. It’s not that I’m a stranger to requests from the tobacco industry. In fact, ever since I published Buyology in 2008, my email address appears to be on every tobacco executive’s Rolodex. You see, among other things, the book addressed the issue of how the use of subliminal advertising in the industry was successfully getting smokers to smoke more. The fallout was spectacular, culminating in Philip Morris being forced to withdraw their $100 million sponsorship of Formula 1. After this, you would imagine the tobacco industry would not want anything to do with me. Surprisingly, they actually wanted to know more. That was the nature of the email in question.  

Or how to create brands we love.

There are some common threads to the trends that Badgeville, Bigdoor and Bunchball see in the
gamification space:

1. The space has quickly evolved from place where they are educating the customer about gamification to earlier customer understanding in their offering
2. Frictionless installs are a necessity. They all recognize that if it is difficult to implement, then clients will not want to implement it.
3. A world beyond badges: Badges will increasingly become less and less important, and the rise of true virtual currencies will become more prominent to offer users more than vanity accomplishments in the form of badges.

So what does the future hold for Gamification?

Or, it's time to make gamification worth something.

Back when it was starting its $20 billion buying spree of companies in 2006, analysts all said the strategy would fail. There were a lot of compelling arguments why.

People said that the assets of a software company are the engineers and the engineers would go elsewhere. People argued that Oracle fundamentally didn’t know how to write good application software, and they couldn’t buy their way into changing that DNA. People argued that stitching together the disparate systems of PeopleSoft, Siebel, Oracle into Project Fusion would create a Frankensteinian mess of unshippable bloatware. I once wrote a BusinessWeek profile of John Wookey– the man tasked with Fusion in the wake of all the purchases– called “The Hardest Job in Silicon Valley.” It’s telling that he’s now at Salesforce.

Death of a suited-up business model?

Without wishing to overstate my case, everything in the observable universe definitely has its origins in Northamptonshire, and the adoption of the V for Vendetta mask as a multipurpose icon by the emerging global protest movements is no exception.

You know, we may all be living in a dystopian future...

A while back, the MIT economist Andrew Lo set out to review a couple books about the financial crisis. Those books led to a couple more books, which led — you see where this is going — to 17 more books.

State of financial confusion.

Wiseman et al. (2011) had a hunch that the ability to flip between representations is related to creativity.

To test this participants were given a simple test of creativity which involves listing as many novel uses as you can for an everyday object in two minutes.

Take for example, a chair: yes you can sit on it but that's not a novel use. You can also stand on it which is a little more novel. Much more novel is using it to build a home-made fort, burning it to fight the cold or hitting someone with it in a bar-room fight.

Creativity in terms of duck and rabbits.

Singapore’s vaunted style of pragmatic, efficient government – credited with fueling the city-state’s meteoric rise to prosperity over the last four decades – may have lost some verve, according to a new study by some of Singapore’s leading economists.

As decades of rapid and largely equitable growth in this Asian Tiger give way to a widening gap between rich and poor and slowing social mobility in a country often boastful of its meritocratic traditions, the government needs to adopt a more activist stance that better supports citizens, said the paper, penned by six economists for the city-state’s Institute of Policy Studies.

Tone down on the capitalism please. :)

An ecosystem is more than just what apps you run, or what digital goods can be bought on a device; it's also the open or closed standards you support for application development, APIs, peripherals and connectors. The way your device communicates with other devices, and the way your ecosystem communicates with other ecosystems, is a fundamental decision that every company dealing in digital goods, both hardware and software, has to make. I think there are a few equally valid approaches for a company to take when building an ecosystem, but there are some important qualifiers. Let's discuss.

In short, we shouldn't let money be our sole motivator in technological innovation.

Much as we would like to, it is not possible to please everyone completely. If all sides refuse to budge, Singapore will be gridlocked and nothing will move. Hence, we need to uphold a spirit of give and take, and actively search for creative and practical outcomes that serve the common good. And, after the final decision has been made, I hope that all parties will rally behind this collective decision.

We know, Prime Minister sir. Thanks for going down your knees 6 months back thou! :D

Do recruiters provide high school students with the images of our dead and wounded arriving at Dover and Walter Reed in the middle of the night? Do they see the images of the dead and wounded Iraqi victims of our military weapons? Do recruiters discuss the long-term effects of depleted uranium? Are these students exposed to the diverse views written in the newspapers of Europe, Asia, and the Middle East? Or are they only presented the "sanitized" and quickly changing monolithic view of this administration mimicked in our media. The ONLY purpose of the military in our schools is to recruit naive young kids to help fill the ranks. 

What exactly is the war we're in, you say?