Coke Crowdsources Content, Humana Gamifies Wellness, and the Tricorder Cometh – This Week’s Best of Tech
Another week has flown by and we hope you are all enjoying your respective weekends. As you may know by now the “TopCoder Weekender” edition is a lightweight way for you to catch up on 3 important stories in tech, open innovation and the future that you may have missed during your busy week. Our pledge to you is to find a few diamonds in the rough that didn’t quite make the shortlist of dominant tech and social blogs, but probably should have. We’ve got a few great ones this week that will make you want to have a Coke and a smile, then run a few laps to burn it off, then scan your body with a sci-fi tool to measure the impact of it all! Enjoy, it’s the weekend!
Coke Crowdsources Content
Coca-Cola has long been knows as a solid content creator, even before that term was being used. Whether it was Mean Joe Green tossing his jersey to a young fan, the Christmas-time Polar Bears nudging their little ones across the CGI generated ice, or dare we remind you of the “Lawnmower Man” like presence of Max Headroom promoting “New” Coke, Coca-Cola has continuously done a great job keeping their brand top of mind the world over. Recently, they turned to crowdsourcing and co-creation to source some new content ideas, and their results were outstanding.
Humana Shouts “Game On!”
If you fancy the TopCoder Blog – and thank you if you are a subscriber (top right if you are not yet one) – then you know we talk a good deal about gamification, games that educate, the quantified self and more in and around the topics that are impacting health, wellness and education. It’s fascinating to us to see how new applications that leverage psychology and brilliant new user interfaces are affecting people’s behaviors and consumer choices. What is impressive about this article is not that Humana is simply “gamifying” a singular project, but rather that they have layered in gamification mechanisms and reward systems into a litany of initiatives. Get your game on and check it out!
Trekkies Rejoice! The Tricorder is Coming (for real)
We realize FastCo. is a pretty huge blog, but this story is special to TopCoder because we have been following the greater quantified-self space for over a year now and we had a team member from Scanadu – the company creating the world’s first “Tricorder” – at our annual Innovation Summit this past October. If you are just now hearing about Scanadu and you enjoy a good “sci-fi becomes reality” storyline, then beam this one up, and enjoy!
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