We hope that you’re all enjoying the summer so far. We have a busy few months scheduled and some exciting new projects getting off the ground…we’ll be able to share those details with you with soon. For now, we’re still celebrating the successful launch of Healthseeker, our new Facebook game that helps people living with diabetes improve their lifestyles. In case you missed it, we wanted to show you the piece that CBC News Vancouver aired on their 6 pm newscast. (We are very proud!)

We’re also excited that not only the media, but that other organizations have responded so positively to  Healthseeker. We think the message is clear: the fact that games have the potential “to do good” — whether that’s to modify behaviour or incent people to act — is inspiring. As Marke Andrews’s piece about Healthseeker (Vancouver Sun) sums it up,

“as social networks and hand-held devices expand online opportunities for developers, game content has also evolved beyond car races and shoot-em-ups. Games now can actually better a player’s life.”

..and we couldn’t agree more. We’d love to hear your thoughts about what you think the potential is for games “to do good.” You can email me at victoria [at] ayogo [dot] com or leave a comment on this post.

It’s finally arrived. Our latest Facebook game called Healthseeker has launched on Facebook.

The game was designed with the goal of helping adults with specific lifestyle and nutritional challenges, in particular those people living with diabetes or who are at the risk of developing diabetes. The great thing is that anyone on Facebook can play the game and benefit from it.

What else?

We think the game is just one example of how social media and social games are transforming the way people learn through innovative education. It’s designed to use in-game incentives and socialization to modify real-world behaviours, helping people improve their lifestyles.  While there are educational games that improve learning skills and games geared towards “solving” social issues, we think that what we’re doing with incremental rewards in our games and how they’re used to positively motivate change in behaviour is really unique. We also think there’s a lot of potential in using our gaming techniques to motivate positive behaviour in other socially beneficial ways (environment, philanthropy, health).

You can watch the video to learn more about the game or just visit www.healthseekergame.org.

Here is the link to the official press release and links to a few spots in Vancouver’s tech-blog community and in the U.S. diabetes community that have already covered the game. You can leave a comment or email me victoria@ayogo.com, if you have a question.

Courtesy of Flickr's kenjonbro

To our loyal Ayogo blog readers, thanks for all your recent comments and re-tweets. It’s good to know what you’ve been up to — we really appreciate it! In terms of what we’ve been up to, we’re getting ready for a huge summer.

To start, Pet Pupz, a community-based virtual pet  app (originally a Facebook game launched on Facebook awhile back) is now available in the Apple AppStore – and therefore your smartphone and the iPad! You can download it here.

As for coming attractions…

We have an exciting announcement to share with you on June 14th and then one more later on in the month. The first announcement involves a topic on serious games and health, and coincidentally, it was also the topic of a panel Michael was recently a part of. Terry Lavender from the Vancouver Observer covered the panel at last week’s Vancouver Digital Week. I also attended the event and I was excited to see the enthusiasm for “serious games.”

On the panel, Michael spoke about game design for casual social games, and in particular about game design in games that aren’t just played for fun, but also may encourage and incentivize certain “serious” behaviours. Here is an excerpt from Terry Lavender’s post,

Why do kids willingly do chores in FarmVille (a Facebook-based game) and World of Warcraft, but not in real life, asked Michael Fergusson, CEO of local casual game company Ayogo. The answer, he said, is the appeal of competition and challenge. Ayogo is working with a large health research institute to see whether a health-based videogame can actually motivate people to develop a healthy lifestyle. But in order to work, the game has to be fun first, with the health benefits strictly secondary, according to Fergusson.

As for some cool statistics that I picked up from the conference, did you know that….

* 1 billion people see a Google page every day
* 55% of people online are women
* Social media users are more positive about brands than non-users
* There are 5 billion mobile phones in the world, compared to 1 billion personal computers and 1.1 billion televisions
* 75% of Canadians have mobile phones
* Canadians send 100 million text messages every day

Oh, catch us at Launch Party 9 on June 17th in Vancouver. Techcrunch’s Michael Arrington is just one of the celebrity judges at the event. In the meantime, please show us some love and VOTE for our video!

Courtesy of Jeremy Lim

We were very happy to be a part of the F5 Expo featuring Malcolm Gladwell last week. Michael was on a panel titled, The Secret to Success: Avoiding Start-Up Pitfalls with Ryan Holmes, CEO of Hootsuite and Danny Robinson of Bootup Labs. As you could imagine, the CEOs gave their best advice to existing and future entrepreneurs about the how to avoid the pitfalls of start-up land. In Michael’s case, he advised the audience remember that as an entrepreneur you’re going to be judged not just on how well you succeed, but also how well you fail. Besides their insightful and entertaining panel though, there were a lot of refreshing ideas floating around at the day long event, so I wanted to share some of those with you.

To start, local business consultant and author Todd Maffin’s keynote expressed the importance of keeping a healthy balance between working in a highly demanding tech environment and your personal life. For him, 16-hour non-stop days took a toll, eventually leading him to crash-and-burn. His was an inspiring story of triumph to learn from. Thankfully, Todd is back better than ever.

The rest of the day’s agenda included panels about interactive marketing mostly. The cost effective ways to market online video were discussed as well as cloud computing and search engine marketing methods. I attended a panel on mobile applications and the message was clear: understand your business objectives, know your market and THEN see if building an app fits the MO (just because everyone has an app out there doesn’t mean that you need to build one too). To me, the most interesting topic was about social media and social networks and how we can use it as a tool to innovate (questions about social media marketing and the relevance of Twitter dominated most of the Q&A period). So it was no surprise that Malcolm Gladwell’s keynote addressed social media and social networking. Michael and I had a lengthy discussion about what we thought Gladwell’s main points were and we settled on this:

I think one important point he was making was this: Social media and social networking tools are very good at making connections that spread broadly through a population. This can be very good. It has the unintended consequence that the connections so created are not very deep. For this reason, it’s good at things like finding a job, or learning about how people are changing their behaviour around climate change. It’s bad at things that take high levels of trust, like revolutions. If we want to build deep trust relationships, of the type you need for revolutionary change, then we need to recognize the limitations of social networking technologies and find ways to account for those limitations.

Personally, I also agreed with others in the audience who suggested that maybe social media is not meant to start revolutions. However, when we examine how social games with a purpose, for example, could raise millions of dollars for Haiti relief or to save the rainforest, it’s a tool that you can’t ignore. When a simple game can call to action millions of users to make a big impact to real world problem, that is something more than being an “instrument of status quo,” as it is according to Gladwell. What do you think? As always you can leave us a comment or contact us.