Watching TV and doing Social Media

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Social gaming isn't just a diversion anymore

Can an online social game help fight obesity? Can it help businesses put a lid on ever-growing employee health care bills? That's the bet entrepreneur Adam Bosworth, a veteran of Microsoft (MSFT) and Google (GOOG), is making with Keas, an online service that aims to make exercising and eating your vegetables more fun -- or at least a little less painful. Despite questions about their overall efficacy, corporate wellness apps are proliferating in part because many investors are betting that the social-gaming wave popularized by Zynga (ZNGA) can be harnessed to fight obesity. Keas has raised $17.5 million from investors.
Read more at Fortune Magazine

Zombie followers and fake re-tweets

It is hard to overestimate how much the arrival of weibo has changed the dynamic between rulers and ruled over the past two years (in China). More than 250m Chinese internet users have taken to microblogs for many purposes, plenty of them purely recreational. But a popular pastime is to spread news and rumours, both true and false, that challenge the official script of government officials and state-propaganda organs.

Officials are requiring that users of the most prominent microblog service, Sina Weibo, register using their real name and identity-card number by March 16th. The other leading microblog, called Tencent Weibo, now also requires new users to register with their real name. Microbloggers can continue using nicknames as their online identities, as long as the weibo providers have their real-world identities on file.

It is unclear how much the real-name requirement will affect what microbloggers say. Indeed, it remains unclear how strictly it will be enforced, considering the booming market that already exists in microblog-related trickery. For mere pennies you can buy followers for your weibo account to make you look more popular (known as “zombie followers” because they mindlessly follow others). You can also purchase re-tweets and even comments on your posts.

Read more at the Economist

Taking the long view

Jeff Bezos impressive ability to identify and profit from the resulting disruptions means he is widely seen as the person best placed to fill the shoes of the late Steve Jobs as the industry’s leading visionary. Mr Bezos is convinced that rapid technological change creates huge opportunities for companies bold enough to seize them. “There is room for many winners here,” he says. As companies grow, there is a danger that novel ideas get snuffed out by managers’ desire to conform and play it safe. “You get social cohesion at the expense of truth,” he says. He believes that the best way to guard against this is for leaders to encourage their staff to work on big new ideas. “It’s like exercising muscles,” he adds. “Either you use them or you lose them.” Read more at The Economist

Twitter, the Startup That Wouldn't Die

Throughout its first five years of existence, Twitter always seemed on the verge of committing some excruciating form of startup seppuku. Now something freakish is happening in San Francisco. Twitter, which for years treated the responsibility of earning money as an annoying distraction, may be turning into a viable business. Read more at Business Week

Charlie Rose Talks to Zynga CEO Mark Pincus

You’ve said that play is the new TV. What do you mean by that? "For the last five or six decades, TV has been the one medium that’s connected the world, that no matter where you lived, no matter what your economic status was, you found a way to get a TV and to watch. In the couple of decades, the smartphone has the chance to be that new medium, and I think that games and play are the No. 1 thing that people are going to do." Read more at Business Week

Can Kinect Make Windows Cool Again?

The original Kinect helped make the Xbox 360 last year’s bestselling game console; Microsoft has sold more than 18 million Kinects since November 2010. It’s also inspired tinkerers to put the device to unanticipated uses, such as guiding robots and doing 3D modeling. With Kinect for Windows, Microsoft aims to coax professional developers and big companies to create apps that make Kinect as essential in the home, office, and showroom as smartphones are to those on the go. “This is a turnaround chance for Microsoft,” says James McQuivey, an analyst at Forrester Research (FORR). “A chance for them to say this isn’t about video gaming, it isn’t about Windows, it’s about the future of everything.” Almost 350 companies are working with Microsoft on custom Kinect applications, says Craig Eisler, the general manager of Kinect for Windows. The device is being used in a variety of work settings, from Boeing (BA) sales offices, where it enables virtual tours for 737 customers, to a hospital in Canada, where surgeons use its gesture-recognition ability to swipe through CT scans without the risk of touching germs on a keyboard or mouse. Read more here