Tom Hume: Selling New Mobile Phone Features
Tom Hume: Selling New Mobile Phone Features
Twitchr is a fascinating sounding 'game' that uses constructivism to teach features and use of a mobile phone...which is exactly the approach I was pushing with Vodafone a few years back, except I'd come up with the idea of teaching photoblogging - inroduce the camera, MMS, email photos etc. same ideas on the underneath - fun, gentle and highly engaging activities that introduce the device features to a new customer, but have real, standalone benefit to the phone's new owner, not just thinly veiled 'edukayshun'
The game sounds lovely -
" watch the migration patterns of birds as they hop from player to player, even write your own software to interface with the TwitchrSphere!
Once you're online, your phone becomes part of a massive digital environment: numbers of the various species rise and fall over time, new species can be introduced, and old ones become extinct. This gives rise to all kinds of emergent behaviour: don't want a breed to become extinct? Disconnect your handset from the world and you can become a rare bird breeder, catching otherwise-extinct varieties and releasing them back into the wild via Bluetooth!"
And it's great to see a 'learning game' get developed using gaming techniques, rather than the blunt 'win and learn' opportunity based stuff I've seen in the past (the most brutal learning game being pacman with every pill offering a 'learning interaction' - ugh)
Twitchr was built for Nokia as an R&D project (link was via Matt Jones, who works in Nokia's user-experience team) - interesting that Nokia are developing these (although not suprising) as it's the services (3G etc.) that really need to be used for the networks to make money...they need to educate their customers on all the social uses of their new device...
I've signed up for their beta - maybe the trackback will push me into acceptance? :-)
And the company behind it, Future Platforms, looks pretty interesting - and great to big photos on a website again :-)
