By SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Is it possible to marry the insights from stories—quantitative data, or data-in-context—with the qualitative world of big data? How do you scale the collection and interpretation of thousands of stories that might contain truths more pithy and authentic than you could ever mine from a survey? And could something that would accomplish that task be the solution health care executives are looking for to achieve meaningful use of health tech data and provide more accountable care? That was the discussion at Tuesday night’s meeting of Nebular Health Tech at People Fund.
Discussion leader Senem Güney, co-founder at Quantifiable Quality Care, is an organizational researcher specializing in collaborative practices and use of information and communication technologies.
She pointed out that stories are the way humans make sense of their experiences. Even in introducing themselves, attendees told little stories about how they came to be at the meeting. But stories, unlike surveys, or medical tests are not quantifiable at present. And frequently it is through stories, rather than surveys or other forms of data collection, that problems are revealed.
“My interest in all of this is figuring out a way to make what I think is really significant data that reflects that experience–the story of somebody with somebody else–to capture that in its integrity as you would tell it to someone else when you’re trying to make sense of it for yourself.”
A survey, she pointed out, might never ask the key question that unlocks a patient’s experience. And even just tagging and analyzing words from stories is a form of dissection. Once you start analyzing and quantifying the pieces of the story, Güney said, “You cut the frog and the frog is dead. The experience, as it was lived in the contextual integrity of someone’s story, is changed.”

Platforms to Collect Stories

She’s working on a platform to collect patients’ stories and then ask questions about the story such as “What does the story tell us about the nurse? That he/she was a) caring b) competent….” The responses to the questions can be quantified. But she wants to go farther in capturing experiences on a grand scale.
Güney is not alone in her pursuit of stories to effect change. Gregory Foster, project manager for the Consumers Union, talked about that organization’s platform: Stori.es, which collects stories for the purpose of affecting change. Stori.es provides a way to collect stories, sort them, tag them and filter them for use in policy or other kinds of change.
And CRG Medical has a tool called Share Our Stories, S.O.S. where people can report medical abuse and accidents.
At some point, as James Cooley of Health and Human Services pointed out, IBM’s Watson technology, which analyzes information from basic speech may be useful for mining large quantities of data from stories. But that’s not how it’s being used at present and, as Güney pointed out, it’s an enormously expensive technology. Not a practical tool for collecting stories across several populations.
Amber Lindholm, a design strategist at the Clinical Design and Innovation Center at Seton Medical Center pointed out that, in stories, it’s often one detail, one encounter that opens up the right path of inquiry or has the most impact. But participant Adam Ragsdale who works in business development IT Solutions at TRC Staffing Services Inc. was concerned that the emotional power of a compelling story could wind up trumping quantities of qualitative data that told a more accurate story.
The group plans to revisit the conversation in future meetings.
Nebular Health Tech is a new group started in April by Erin Gilmer, an attorney and health rights advocate.

By SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Tech Ranch was born on the side of a mountain, when Kevin Koym was snowboarding. He’d started about seven companies, including the very first internet banking application. He’d worked for Steve Jobs at NeXT, participated in several skunkworks projects—loose teams working without much organizational structure on innovative solutions. He’d made and lost money and he’d spent a lot of time on the bleeding edge of technology, working on what would be the next big thing…in five years.
He’d also been through a major depression and, at that moment, in 2003, had just lost a close friend. And there on the snow he thought: “I don’t want to build another fucking widget.” He wanted to make a difference in the world. And he wanted to do it by helping entrepreneurs.
What he really wanted was a hero’s journey. So he came back to Austin and sought out Betty Sue Flowers, then director of the LBJ Library, who had edited Joseph Campbell’s book The Power of Myth. Flowers listened to Koym’s story and said something unexpected. “If you are serious about this, you should go to Chile and meet Senator Fernando Flores.”
What she didn’t know was that friends—worried about his emotional state—had asked him that morning to join them on a trip to Chile.
“I almost freaked out and ran and hid,” Koym said. “But another part of me was watching over me.” And that part got him to go. So he went: “Hell bent for leather and ragefully angry” about the loss of his friend; about life without meaning.
That was the beginning of Prueba el Mundo, an entrepreneurship development program Koym co-founded with participants from Chile, Mexico, Costa Rica, Panama, and Colombia. (He also leads entrepreneur teams in Santiago, Chile and Guadalajara, Mexico.) It was also the year he helped launch Bootstrap Austin. And it was the seed that would, in 2008, become Tech Ranch. It was the start of the journey.

Internal Alignment

Speaking at Startup Grind, hosted at Tech Ranch Monday night, Koym told a story of periods of meteoric success, huge mistakes, emotional storm and eventually arriving at a place of doing what he’s meant to do. Though he’s still doing it in an “unruly,” special forces, take no prisoners way.
A graduate of UT with an electrical engineering degree, Koym had several great internships at major corporations like IBM and Motorola, but when he discovered startups, he said, he “got religion.” He worked for Pencom Software after being laid off by NeXT, then founded Praxsys, a skunkworks, early stage technology implementation and innovation consulting firm. It was during those years, when he was a golden boy of the software industry, that he hit a huge depression.
“I had my first venture–an ecommerce venture–my face was on the cover of Computer World magazine, most of the cash I have in my bank account came from that time, I was one of the fair haired boys of the Austin Chamber…and I was suicidally depressed,” he said. For Koym, that was a seed to one of the aspects of Tech Ranch that is unique: helping entrepreneurs become “internally aligned” as well as offering insights about getting customers or pivoting a business plan.
“You can do the lean startup, but if you don’t have the insides of you ready to attack and hold the customer…you need to find what’s missing in yourself, to develop that part of you for your venture. If you don’t figure out the inside you end up cheating or think you’re winning when you get funding.”
A lot of entrepreneurs are misaligned in terms of seeking money or meaning, Koym said. They have one, but not the other. They may have issues with performance or with dysfunction. As the child of a psychologist who’s dug around plenty in his own psyche, that’s one area where Koym likes to help. It’s impossible to succeed, he said, unless you have internal alignment.
But Tech Ranch requires more than internal alignment. It requires a small investment: The Ranch’s weekend program, Venture Start, is $150. Venture Forth, the eight week mainstay of Tech Ranch, is $650, but Koym said the price is going up soon. Then there’s Venture Builder for established companies.
It also requires intense passion.

Take No Prisoners

When talking about Venture Forth, for example, Tech Ranch’s main program for entrepreneurs, Koym makes it clear that it’s only for people who are committed to their enterprise, because it’s done in groups of 15 where there’s “nowhere to hide.” It’s not for “entrepreneurial tourists,” or “pretentrepreneurs.” If someone is building a business with his last dollars, he doesn’t need to try to work through his issues with a team mate who is dabbling. Koym prefers bootstrappers because they tend to “bleed” for their companies and—he’s seen a lot of this in countries like Chile and Mexico–they find solutions that people with venture backing don’t have to look for. And he promises that any teacher who is used by Tech Ranch will have “entrepreneurial scar tissue, none of this bullshit arrogance.”
“What I really want you to hear,” Koym said, “is there’s something really special about the path of the entrepreneur. There’s something really special you stand for. You have to be the pioneer. You’re the one going out on the skinny branches.”

Skyonic Corp. announced it has raised $128 million in funding to build a carbon capture and mineralization plant.
The Austin-based company raised $9 million last July and has raised a total of $48 million in a Series C round of investment. It also secured a loan of $80 million from Apollo Investment Corp. and Maxus Capital Corp. The company has also received a $28 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Energy Technology Laboratory.
Skyonic’s plans is expected to remove more than 300,000 tons of carbon dioxide when its operating. Construction begins this summer at Capitol Aggregates Cement in San Antonio.
“The funds will also help support the advancement of Skyonic’s global IP portfolio of profitable carbon chemistry solutions and other R&D and operations expenses,” according to its news release.
The new funding includes equity investments from new investors Cenovus Energy, BlueCap Partners, Toyo-Thai Corporation Public Company Limited and Energy Technology Ventures. These companies join previously announced investors Berg & Berg Enterprises, Northwater Capital Management, ConocoPhillips, BP Ventures, PVS Chemicals, and Zachry Corporation.
“The Capitol SkyMine plant will mark the first time that carbon-negative chemistry has reached the commercial stage,” Joe Jones, founder and CEO of Skyonic, said in a news statement. “Our unique, patented process means that emission problems can become emission profits. The carbon-negative products produced, which include sodium bicarbonate and hydrochloric acid, will displace the carbon-positive products currently sold. This is a crucial step towards a cleaner global manufacturing industry.”

By LAURA LOREK
Founder Silicon Hills News

The evolution of technology and the evolution of plants and animals share a lot in common.
And the genesis of big ideas might still be a mystery, but innovation, in the aggregate, can be broken down into a series of processes.
Those are a few of the big takeaways from the Santa Fe Institute’s first ever speakers event Monday night at HomeAway’s headquarters in downtown Austin.
Ross Buhrdorf, Chief Technology Officer with HomeAway, brought the nonprofit organization to Austin to talk about innovation to an invitation-only crowd made up of about 100 artists, musicians, technology and business executives, entrepreneurs, academics, investors, media and more.
The Santa Fe Institute, which has been called a modern-day Lyceum, brings together people from a wide variety of backgrounds and disciplines to address big issues like computer malware, cities and urbanization, how life began, innovation and so much more.
“No one really understands, in a deep sense, where ideas come from and how they are generated,” said Chris Wood, vice president with the Santa Fe Institute, during his introductory remarks. But the Santa Fe Institute attracts diverse, smart, curious, passionate people and they work on big transformative ideas. That’s something Austin is working to foster here, Buhrdorf said.

The Nature of Technology

The first speaker, W. Brian Arthur, a leading economist and external professor at the Santa Fe Institute, studied extensively the evolution of technology. He wrote “The Nature of Technology” which explains how technologies are made up of pieces of technology that already exist.
To explain how technologies become more complicated over time, Arthur used the example of Frank Whittle’s turbo jet engine, patented in 1930. The original model is “incredibly simple,” Arthur said. Yet 30 years later, that engine became incredibly complex.
“Individual technology is made up of building blocks,” Arthur said.
“At the start those building blocks are incredibly simple.’’

The process of adding new parts is called structural deepening and it’s at the heart of technology evolution, Arthur said.
So how does innovation work in the economy? The standard states that the economy adopts new technologies and becomes more productive, Arthur said.
“This is woefully deficient,” he said. “Technologies do not come along one by one. They come along in whole bodies of technology.’
He provided as examples: textile materials, railroads, electronics, digital telecommunications, genomic engineering and nanotechnology.
“They are not quite adopted by business,” Arthur said. “The economy doesn’t adopt the new body, it incorporates it. Each industry collides with the new technology.”
Business processes from the industry and from the new body combine to form new processes, Arthur said.
His examples included banking and derivatives, which started to evolve with the Black-Scholes Option Pricing Formula in 1973. Human processes from banking incorporated telecommunications and computing processes. And decades later, it’s still going on for better or for worse, Arthur said.
“There’s one trillion dollars worth of goods per day traded in a $15 trillion economy,” he said.
These technologies sweep right across the economy changing businesses, one after another, and they transform the industry, Arthur said.
When this body of technology collides with a new technology, the result is the economy wells up from its new bodies of technologies, Arthur said.
“It thereby forms and reforms itself,” he said. He called the process “tectonic” and resembling the shifting of the tectonic plates to create new landmasses.
“The economy is forming and reforming from the process of old technology reforming with new technology,” Arthur said.
And despite the rise of China and other nations to challenge the United States in eight primary areas of technology, the U.S. still leads the world, Arthur said.
In response to a question from the audience, Arthur defined technology “as a means to a human purpose.”
In response to another question about the abuse of technology by governments, Arthur declined to address the current National Security Agency’s PRISM program which accesses phone and computer transmissions in the U.S.
“We’re entering a Brave New World for good and for not so good,” Arthur said. “I would like for us to pause and think more about this. Just because something is possible doesn’t mean it’s desirable.”

The Cambrian Explosion

And then something related, but different, something the Santa Fe Institute defines as “Strange Bedfellows,” Doug Erwin, senior scientist and curator of Paleobiology at the National Museum of National History of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., gave a talk on the history of life and evolution. He showed slides of the adaptive radiation in Galapagos finches.
He also recently published a book, with Jim Valentine, on “The Cambrian Explosion: The Construction of Animal Biodiversity.”
Erwin posed the question on one of his slides on what drives innovation, whether in biological, cultural or technological systems.
The conclusion is there are a lot of similarities between innovation in the animal and plant world and the human one and we can learn from the processes employed by each.

Austin’s Creative Class Spurs Innovation

In a short interview following the presentation, Buhrdorf said he has visited the Santa Fe Institute many times and is on its board of trustees. At the institute, he and his wife have had dinner with Pulitzer-Prize Winning Author Cormac McCarthy and Murray Gell-Mann, Nobel Prize winning physicist who discovered the Quark. HomeAway is also one of its business network members. He thought Austin’s creative class could benefit from interaction with the institute and its professors.
“I have a passion about innovation and about science,” Buhrdorf said. “And I love the institute because they have this concept of multivariate models and cross discipline interactions. I think it’s perfect for Austin, Texas because we have this creative class that these young guys know here.”
That mix of the creative class with the big data scientists and multivariate models will yield innovative results, Buhrdorf said.
Buhrdorf, an artist, musician and an innovator, teamed up with 3-Day Startup to create the first corporate 3-Day Startup held at HomeAway last year. He’s working with them to announce something soon related to the Santa Fe Innovation talk, he said.
Austin, because of its innovative nature, is a perfect place for the Santa Fe Institute, Wood said.
“It’s a good place for us to try to make some contributions and we benefit substantiality from being pushed and goaded by the business community,” Wood said.
And in September, Santa Fe Institute is offering a two-day short course on Complexity: Exploring Complex Networks in Austin that is open to anyone to apply.

By SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

In Austin, Mike Holp has become one of those guys who seems to be at every tech event, making friends and hawking his app: Dude Where’s My Car?
DWMC lets iOS users mark where they left their cars so that if they have to park in some obscure spot—a common occurrence in Austin—or park in some huge lot at an event, they don’t have to worry about wandering for hours looking for it. But while losing your car is a drag, the most appealing thing about the app might be the developer himself. In the app world, where swagger is the culture, Holp is mild mannered, positive, plucky even. He’s so easy to like, you just want his app to succeed.
Currently, DWMC is a free app and has been downloaded by more than 8,000 people. But there’s a new pro version that uses Google maps to help you locate gas stations, restaurants, cafes and more for $2.99. Only around 30 people have purchased that version.
Marketing professional Mike Rozelle met Holp at a professional event—where Holp has become so ubiquitous—and downloaded the app afterward.
“I’ve used it several times when I was in the west 6th area where it’s hard to find a consistent place to park,” he said. One day he’d love for the app to be able to take pictures and map the location of cars near his that looked like they might hit his on the way out of a parking space.
“That would be an interesting feature to have,” Rozelle said. “I’m not sure how admissible it would be in court.”
Holp would like to beef up the app by partnering with Onstar or another company so that app users’ GPS would automatically detect when the car stopped moving so they don’t have to remember to drop a pin. He’s started an Indiegogo campaign, but it’s not doing much. In the meantime, he’s creating an app for Do512, scraping their site for what’s happening in Austin. “I figured I’d just put it out there and see what happens,” he explained.
He moved to Austin a year ago from Michigan State. Something just called him here. He shows up at everything, including being the only male to attend the Women in Technology Leadership and Entrepreneurship Forum during RISE. He was looking, he told the group of women, to push himself out of his comfort zone. That’s the kind of statement that has earned him a fan club in a short time in Austin.
As app user Mike Davis said: “Mike’s just a really good guy. I hope he succeeds.”

By SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

When Whurley of Chaotic Moon learned he was one of 100 innovators chosen to participate in British Airways Ungrounded, an 11-hour hack over the Atlantic Ocean to find a solution to the problem of unbalanced STEM in the world, he said “I literally almost cried.” Imagine what would have happened if he’d known his team—Team Altitude– was going to win, that their idea would be presented at the (DNA) Decide Now Act Summit as well as the G8 Innovation Conference preceding the G8, and that the Secretary General of the International Telecommunication Union would make a video talking about Whurley’s team’s solution.
Ungrounded Thinking was British Airway’s idea, to put 100 innovators on a plane from San Francisco to London in teams, each of which was asked to solve a problem around STEM: How to meet the growing demand for STEM workers; how to use global pools to meet the U.S. demand; how to grow STEM in emerging economies and Team Altitude’s problem—How to foster STEM among women.

The Women’s STEM Team

The night before the flight, Whurley said, four of the seven team members met for drinks to get to know each other and understand each others’ backgrounds and what they each brought to solving the problem. His team members included founders and students:
Sue Black, Founder, The goto Foundation
Kimberly Bryant, Founder & Executive Director, Black Girls Code
Lauren Hasson, iOS Software Engineer, Bottle Rocket Apps
Kelly Hoey, Co-Founder & Managing Director, Women Innovate Mobile
Cindy Padnos, Founder & Managing Partner, Illuminate Ventures
Cassidy Williams, Student, Iowa State University
They knew they would have no wifi on the plane, so before they took off the next day, Whurley said, they decided on a name, bought up domains, started social media groups and enlisted 400 women as participants. They built AdvisHer, a foundation and online community by women and for women to advise women in STEM and women interested in STEM. Men will only be welcome to advise through AdvisHer as second parties who have been vetted by AdvisHer members.
Onboard the Plane
“Some of the teams had very formalized methodologies,” Whurley said. “We really wanted an open source conversation where everybody has an equal voice. ‘Yeah, we should do that and what about this?’” The perspective of Cassidy Williams, the Iowa State student, was given weight because she’s living the problem, Whurley said. The same weigh that of Kimberly Bryant who founded BlackGirlsCode, created to introduce the world of STEM to young black women in underrepresented communities and of Whurley himself, the only male team member.
“We were very lucky to have Cindy and Kelly and Kimberly…the entire team were women who have been through this (discrimination in STEM jobs). They’re subject matter experts, they’ve suffered from not having this.”
Teams were given only paper and markers to create their projects. Then, after about eight hours, teams went around “grading” each other’s projects with sticky dots. Then the participants had about two and a half hours to sleep. When they awoke, Team Altitude learned they had won.
But it wasn’t over. They wanted the project as perfect as possible before presenting it at the G8 Innovation Conference. So after they arrived in London, they got back to work. At an unspecified date, Team Altitude has been invited to Geneva, Switzerland, to present their project—which they’ll continue to develop—before UTI.
“These weren’t just the best of the best on the plane, they’re the best of the best there are,” Whurley said. “And the best part of it was it was just we’d decide something that had to be done and it was like ‘You’re going to kick ass and do this, right?’ Every issue that came up, everybody was super awesome at solving it. These were amazingly talented, amazingly respectful people. It was literally a life-changing experience.”

It’s that time of year again when the A-List of Austin Startups gets released.
The Greater Austin Chamber of Commerce and South by Southwest Interactive announced the 2013 Austin A-List this week.
They compiled the list based on input from local investors.
This year’s list includes 19 startups spanning a wide range of industries.
The companies include Adometry, AeonClad Coatings, Caisson Biotech, Digby, Famigo, Gravitant, Invodo, Kimbia, Localeur, MapMyFitness, Mass Relevance, NOOM, Ortho Kinematics, RetailMeNot, Spiceworks, SpredFast, Tango Health, Televero and Terapio.
“The A-List has proven a successful tool with past A-List winners receiving a combined $57.7 million in investment since the October 2012 announcement. A few of these notable successes include BlackLocus’ acquisition by Home Depot as its innovation lab, and Toopher’s $2 million capital raise,” according to the Chamber.
The Chamber and SXSW Interactive revealed the list, now in its third year, at an event Thursday at Fogo de Chao.

By SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

“Wouldn’t it be great if you guys could be in a conference and wear (Google)Glass and it did facial recognition—which it doesn’t—and you could instantly look up all this information about people in the conference? How many of you would want that?” Whurley asked the crowd of more than 100 people assembled at the Austin Convention Center for the Web Leadership Day at Drupal Camp Austin 2013.
About a third of the crowd raised their hands.
“Fuck you guys!” Whurley responded. “If you can’t remember my name I don’t want to talk to you! That’s horrible social interaction!”

Glass Is Limited in Functionality

Whurley, whose company Chaotic Moon is sponsoring a Dev Camp for Google Glass this summer, nonetheless unleashed a slew of critical observations about the practicality of Google Glass in his presentation, Google Glass WTF? Among them, the battery life is miniscule, the prism is too small to use for large amounts of data—like a website, you have to move your head and hands in distinctly uncool ways to make this cool technology work on certain functions, it will probably hurt some people’s vision.
Plus, the apps that could be created, or web designs including responsive design, are very limited.
“What I think it will be used most for is ‘Boop, boop, you have a call.’ And my phone vibrates so why do I need that?”
Developers are reluctant to miss out on an opportunity to have the first apps for the next big thing, but there are too many drawbacks, right now, to qualify Glass as the next big thing.
Whurley considered that it could be used for a new, unique, augmented reality game as long as the clues were small and not a lot of data is required. It could be used for a banking app, but he fears that’s insecure.
“A lot of times we do stuff because it’s cool,” he said. “But the question is, does it have a purpose? If my website is Google maps that would work. It could give you arrows and audio cues. It could be just like your annoying GPS. (Glass) does have a video function. You can play videos. I can see having a DIY website where you’re looking at it for reference while you’re working on something…. As I tell my clients, not all things are suitable for apps. And not all things are going to be suitable for Glass.”
To be fair, he acknowledged, Google is working Glass’s shortcomings. But he advised the audience against changing anything about the way they function right now for Google Glass. Instead, just be thinking about all the new, emerging interfaces, like Thalmic Labs’ armband that allows users to control electrical devices with a gesture, or Atheer’s interactive glasses that let the wearer touch a space represented by the virtual image to affect change on the screen.

Right Now, Glass Just Makes Glassholes

And don’t just race out and get a pair, like the “Glassholes” on his recent Ungrounded flight with British Airways. There were 100 innovators on the plane. Of course, he said, there would be people wearing Glass, and “the rest of the passengers who hated them.” Once the group arrived, Whurley said, he was on a London street with one of these Google Glass wearers, looking for a restaurant where no signal was available.
“They guy’s literally like ‘Woah, woah, whoa I got this.’ And I thought, here comes a disaster…. I was waiting for it like a shark. And then he (moved to another part of the sidewalk) like he knew the signal would be better there.”
“So I stepped forward and asked these two women ‘Excuse me, we’re looking for this pub’ and they’re like ‘Yeah it’s around the corner two blocks over.’
Technology has to be useful, Whurley said. Which means it can’t encumber you with bad interfaces, it can’t require you to move in unnatural ways, it can’t make you blind…. And it has to actually make life more convenient than life would be without the technology.
Glass has some other issues, he pointed out. He’s convinced that within months after they come out, Texas will ban them during driving and the rest of the country will follow. The only exception being if you use them to show your insurance company how you’re driving.
And there are some privacy concerns. One fellow innovator on the plane was filming Whurley without asking him.
“It drove me mad,” he said. “It’s not a screen, it’s a prism. I know you’re filming me. I know what you’re looking at. I know you’re not listening to me now.”
On the other hand, some people seem to fear that Glass will be able to recognize faces and call up private information.
“There are concerns you’re going to be able to walk around and know everything about everybody. Does Glass connect to a special NSA computer? None of you have any privacy anyway so I don’t know what you’re worried about. Everybody seems to think this is magic technology that’s going to do something it can’t really do. There just needs to be a reality about Glass.”
There’s especially a limitation when you can’t get a signal. On the Ungrounded flight, there was no wifi. Yet people wore their Glasses.
“It was weird,” Whurley said. “It was like, ‘What are they doing?’ ‘Nothing!’ But they’re under the impression they look really cool right now.”

By SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Gamefication builds a framework into an experience that taps into humans’ need for competence, autonomy, and relatedness or relevance. It uses people’s craving for the neurotransmitter dopamine—connected with reward–to hook them. And it can be used for good or evil.
Wes Kay, user centered design advocate, spoke in place of Robin Krieglstein, his co-founder at the new meetup group Intersection: Psych+Tech. He gave a whirlwind explanation of the psychological power of gaming Wednesday night at MakerSquare.
He explained how every person has a desire for

• Competence—the ability to accomplish things
• Autonomy—the ability to do something by yourself, on your own steam
• Relatedness—the sense that what you’re doing matters

Hooked on Hormones, and Neurotransmitters

Good game design provides all of that and can be found in places where people least expect it. Filling out a LinkedIn profile, for example, is boring and doesn’t provide any specific sense of accomplishment. LinkedIn had to find ways to make it more engaging. So it added little feedbacks, “Congratulations! You’ve finished 10 percent of your profile.” Now there’s a sense of accomplishment for each incremental part of the task, rather than the profile holder having to wait until someone finds and uses his or her profile. People don’t fill in the profile for the praise, of course, they fill it in because they desire to be successful. But the feedback gives them little squirts of the dopamine that tell them they’re doing well and encourage them to keep going on this boring task.
The key is keeping people in the flow state, that mid-range between anxiety and boredom, where challenge and excitement lies. Filling in a LinkedIn profile, Kay said, falls strictly in the boredom zone and needs a little sense of accomplishment to bring it closer to the challenge zone. Other transactions, he said, like buying something from Amazon, are more likely to create anxiety—too much challenge. So that company has to make it easy and painless for customers to glide into the checkout section.
Other tools use gameification. Salesforce CRM tool has leaderboards that let people feel the psychological buzz and dopamine injection of status. Yelp and Foursquare do the same. The more you use them, the higher you rank. And each rise in rank brings another dopamine squirt, sense of accomplishment. And because these are social tools, it also confers a sense of relatedness.
Facebook likes, Kay said, are the cheapest and most effective source of dopamine.
A hormone that can be used in gaming for social good is oxytocin, the hormone that’s released during a hug and increases trust.
“I could walk up to you and shoot oxytocin in a nasal spray up your nose and you’re going to feel better about me when it’s over,” Kay said.
He mentioned a project Coca Cola did, putting a shell of a Coke machine in Pakistan and another in India that allows people on both sides of the border to see someone on the other side, “touch” hands, draw a heart or peace sign together. An oxytocin dump to build trust across a hostile border.

Life on the Point System

The end of Kay’s talk tackled something gaming enthusiasts rarely seem to broach: the criticisms of gaming. There is concern that gaming has zapped the ability of a generation like the millennials who spent months or years of their lives playing video games and working for badges to find intrinsic motivation.
One Baby Boomer who manages younger people complained “They’re constantly needing strokes. If I give them a task with no structure and no guidance, they couldn’t even begin to think how to do it. They’re constantly looking for that feedback.”
And more than one millennial in the audience confessed to being disappointed with the shortage of praise and feedback in “the real world.”
“I grew up playing games and you get out in the world and realize life doesn’t have a reset button or cheat codes and you’re like ‘Man, this shit sucks.”
One Baby Boomer pointed out that there are some “big problems” to solve such as how turn algae into fuel, “where you can work for weeks and months with no feedback. Are we preparing people for that? When was the last time you turned all the electronics off, stared out a window and thought about a problem?”
There’s also a limit to how much happiness people can derive from external rewards, Kay said. In a principle known as the hedonistic treadmill, as the rewards increase, the happiness generally stays the same, like with an addictive drug. So there’s some concern that as more and more companies use gaming as an engagement tool, it will cease to be effective.
On the other hand, he pointed out, like with the Coke machine and another project in Stockholm, Sweden, where the city increased the use of stairs at a train station by 66 percent by turning the stairs into piano keys—fun can inspire social good.
Intersection: Psych+Tech was founded in April by Kay and Krieglstein, senior architect at Badgeville, the leading gamefication and behavior management platform.