At 449 mn units, mobile sales decline worldwide: Report

Mobile phone sales world wide has slowed down during second quarter of 2012 as customers delay buying decisions due to a challenging global economic environment and big announcements from phone makers round the corner.  Research and advisory firm Gartner’s new report says that the worldwide sales of mobile phones reached 419 million units in the second quarter of 2012, a 2.3 percent decline from the second quarter of 2011.

Smartphone sales accounted for 36.7 percent of total mobile phone sales and grew 42.7 percent in the second quarter of 2012.”The challenging economic environment and users postponing upgrades to take advantage of high-profile device launches and promotions available later in the year slowed demand across markets,” said Anshul Gupta, principal research analyst at Gartner in a statement.

According to the report, Samsung’s mobile phone sales remained very strong — up 29.5 percent from the second quarter of 2011 (see Table 1), and managed to extend its lead over both Apple and Nokia quarter on quarter. In the second quarter of 2012, consumer demand for the Apple iPhone weakened as sales fell 12.6 percent from the first quarter of 2012, but grew 47.4 percent year on year.

Nokia’s mobile phone sales declined 14.8 percent in the second quarter of 2012. Nokia is battling fiercely with white-box and new emerging device manufacturers to defend its feature phones sales. Nokia succeeded, to a certain extent, in winning feature phone market share as its sales grew quarter-on-quarter. While posting sequential growth in the feature phone market, Nokia’s Lumia devices continue to struggle to find a place in consumers’ minds as a replacement for Android.

In the smartphone OS market, Android improved its lead with an increase of 20.7 percentage points in market share in the second quarter of 2012. While Apple’s iOS market share slightly grew year over year (0.6 percent), it declined 3.7 percentage points quarter on quarter, as users postponed their upgrade decisions in most markets ahead of the upcoming launch of the iPhone 5.

Mobile Phone Sales Report (2012)

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Microlending service, Kiva launches in India

Microlending service, Kiva is launched in India enabling lenders to make loans of as small as $25 to Indian borrowers across sectors. The non-profit orgaization is working with field partners including:

- Odisa based People’s Forum : People’s Forum is dedicating Kiva-funded loans to expand and launch finance programs for widowed women, disabled individuals, and families affected by leprosy, in particular. These demographics are usually neglected and seen as “high risk,” making them perfect recipients for Kiva’s patient capital.

- Mahashakti Foundation, also based in Odisha, provides clients with an array of services from business training and microcredit to community development, fair price pharmacy services, food security, support for farmers, and loans for clean water and sanitation infrastructure.

- WSDS is a well-established nonprofit based in Manipur. The organization is distinguished by lending to women over age 55, which is unusual for microfinance institutions in India. It also offers clients credit to purchase solar lamps.

RBI Guidelines?

With more than 32% of India’s population falling below the international poverty line and 68% living on less than US$2 a day, the country is in dire need of responsible, affordable sources of capital. But Kiva loans are subjected to number of regulations used by the Reserve Bank of India to control foreign funding of Indian institutions. These regulations require that loans made to non-government microfinance institutions have a minimum term of 3 years.

Kiva has figured out a way to work with these rules. Their Field Partners will simply hold on to loan funds for the minimum 3-year term before sending repayments back to lenders. The borrower you select will probably repay beforehand, in which case your funds will be recycled to help other local borrowers — maximizing your impact before your funds are returned.

So the impact of this workaround is that Kiva will not provide regular repayment updates during India loan terms like it does for other Kiva loans. Instead, lenders will receive loan status details with their eventual repayment. Watch the introductory video from Kiva’s President Premal Shah:

On an average, 81% of Kiva borrowers are women and the repayment rates stand at 98.97%. The service, so far as disbursed loan worth $338 million globally.

Recommended Read: The Story of Milaap, A Micro-lending Platform

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Now, You can customize your shirts online on Bombay Shirts

Did you know that there are atleast 6 types of shirt collars, 9 types of cuffs and well, several options of pockets, pleats etc ? Bombay Shirt Company, a Mumbai based startup lets you customize your shirts the way you’d like to and the site itself is designed in a way that it will make you fall in love with the customization process.

Shirts : Options of Collars

Shirts : Choice of Fabric

In terms of customization, you can select the fabric and associated designs (like collars/cuffs etc) and the pricing is based entirely on the fabric that you choose (and not on the shirt size etc). Importantly, you can totally personalize your shirts with monograms (initials) and place them where it best reflects your style.

An interesting concept, but given that these are all ‘made-to-order’ products, scaling up is surely an interesting beast to manage! But given the target audience, i.e. individuals who have a creative streak and a desire for individuality, Bombay Shirt could be the next aspirational brand for men out there.

What are your thoughts? Do startups like Bombay Store end up defining their customer segment by the sheer value (and pricing) of their offering?

[This startup coverage is part of Pluggd.in’s 65 startup special series, which is supported by Nexus Venture Partners. If you are a product startup, submit your details here.]

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Tencent: 400 Million Chinese Used Its Streaming and Social Olympics Coverage [INFOGRAPHIC]

Now that the London Olympics are all over, Chinese web giant Tencent (HKG:0700) has put together an infographic that shows all the sporting chatter and hits from across its social media and news portal users. All added up, Tencent reckons that 400 million people accessed its Olympics coverage, which was focused around its 2012.qq.com news site that the company dubbed its sporting “Tea House” during the event.

Aside from all that news to read, Tencent played host to Olympics TV streams, and lots of social media talk about the Games on its QQ forums and Twitter-like Tencent Weibo. But, as we reported earlier this week, rival microblog service Sina Weibo won the hypothetical gold for getting more traffic during the event.

Nonetheless, Tencent’s users across all its services actually won out. Of all those, 77 percent of posts were made from a PC, with just 23 percent from a mobile. The most talked-about sportsperson during the Games was Kobe Bryant, betraying the Chinese obsession with basketball. Surprisingly, no Chinese athletes made it onto the most-discussed list. One oddball entry is South Korean swimmer Pu Taihuan, who was up against local hero Sun Yang in the 1500m freestyle swimming. Though Sun won the gold, a bit of a beef between the two men propelled Pu to social media notoriety for a while.

One consolation for Tencent in its rivalry with the Sina Weibo service is that the former has a greater number of sports stars among its verified users. Here’s the whole infographic:

For more fun graphics like this, check out previous entries in our infographic series.

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Abratable puts a twist on web restaurant reservations, offers mass bookings and loyalty points

Online restaurant reservation site Abratable has the unfortunate distinction of starting almost a year after its competitors Chope and Reserveit.sg. SingTel, which recently acquired restaurant portal HungryGoWhere, has also ventured into this space.

This means that Abratable, which is based in Singapore, will have to pull all stops and differentiate itself sufficiently from its competitors, catering to a different clientele. It has gone about it in a very interesting way.

Founded in May 2012 by Ankur Mehrotra, a former banking executive with Standard Chartered Bank and the International Monetary Fund, Abratable, I was told, is funded by a group of “prominent bankers in the city”.

So, unsurprisingly, the service caters to high-power executives who want an easy way to set up client meetings, power lunches, or group events. And unlike its competitors, Abratable offers the ability for users to reserve tables for 40 people or more at some of its 42 restaurants. This makes the service ideal for seeking locations for company dinners, networking events, or after-event parties.

Executives who want a more discrete location to discuss sensitive or confidential matters have the option of reserving a private room with Abratable, again something that the competitors don’t have at this moment.

Another unique feature of Abratable is its Dining Miles, which sounds reminiscent of frequent flyer miles offered by airlines. It works the same way actually: Members of the site can accumulate points and exchange them for perks and discounts.

It seems that the company has done just enough to separate itself from the pack and enter the conversation as a credible choice for online restaurant reservations. Their challenge now would be to continually iterate since the unique features they have can be replicated by other companies.

Like any late entrant to the market, Abratable can still succeed with constant innovation and sensitivity to market demands and opportunities. It will also need to execute fast to catch up with its rivals and expand to other markets in Asia.

It does need to work on its lacklustre site design, however. For a service targeting professionals and executives, Abratable doesn’t ooze the sophistication of a Singapore Airlines — it comes across more as the equivalent of a lesser, mid-range airline. Singapore startups in general have been poor in design sense, so Abratable might want to consider hiring a quality designer to stand out from the pack. A mobile app is long overdue too, considering how mobile devices have become so ubiquitous among professionals.

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ComScore: In Asia, Japan Watches Most Online Videos

Research firm ComScore has some interesting metrics about how the world watches online video, claiming that in the month of June 1.2 billion people around the world watched online video from their computer. This comprises 83 percent of the worlds online population.

The firm says that on average a typical viewer watches 159 videos in June. But how does this global average compared to Asian nations? Among the countries measured, Japan had the highest rate of 242 videos per viewer. It was followed by Hong Kong which had a rate of 180 videos per user, and Singapore which had a rate of 157 videos per user in June (see chart below).

I should note that Korea was not included in comScore’s report. But given that the nation has the world’s fastest broadband speeds by far, I would not be surprised to see users there watching even more videos than Japan.

Disappointingly, ComScore’s data does not account for mobile devices (like many of their reports), so you can imagine that in countries with high mobile penetration (like Japan) that video is increasingly enjoyed by many on their handsets as well. And while these figures are hardly definitive, it is a good indication of how online video is being adopted in the region.

[Download image version of this chart]

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Favorite business advice from Rebeca Hwang of YouNoodle

(Credit: Keith Allison)

When I was student at MIT, I learned an important lesson from one of my personal heroes, Amy Smith. Amy invented the “screenless hammer mill” when farmers in Senegal were struggling with the process of separating rocks from grains when making flour. Expensive screens broke all too easily and were hard to replace in poor remote rural villages. Her invention, which was recognized by the Lemelson-MIT Student Prize, looked at the existing problem at a new angle. Instead of screens, she used air flow to separate unground grain and rocks from flour. By applying simple aerodynamics, she eliminated the need for screens altogether and increased grinding rates by 60 times.

This story has served me well in my startup career. Whenever I get stuck on a problem, all I need to do is stop fixating on my current solution and redefine the problem instead. Amy looked at the problem from a different perspective, which lead to a solution outside of the box. Similar stories can be distilled into useful pieces of advice that have also helped me along the way:

1. Accept the fact that you are inherently lucky. There is a story about a research experiment that involved two types of subjects. One group self-declared themselves as unlucky; the other believed that they were very lucky in life. Both were given newspapers with pictures on it. The task at hand was to count the number of pictures from cover to cover. The unlucky group took on average two minutes to flip every page and count the total number of pictures on the newspaper: 27. The lucky group noticed on the second page a large note saying “Stop reading here, there are 27 pictures on this newspaper.” So they stopped and reported the number within 10 seconds of being assigned the task. So many times we fall into the trap of focusing too narrowly on our daily targets that we miss the opportunity to notice the more creative answers right in front of us. The luckiest people are constantly stimulating the brain with a certain level of randomness through serendipitous encounters, conversations and insights. They are able to focus on a target without shutting down their ability to see beyond that target. They can turn their “blinkers,” which block peripheral visibility in horses, into “visors,” which give selective views — while still allowing the horse to focus on the race.

2. Don’t take advice from golfers if you want to play baseball. Jeff Hoffman, a member of the founding team of Priceline and the most amazing storyteller, makes a point that’s invaluable for startup founders. Sometimes, we think that all smart people are able to provide great advice — and this may be true, to a certain extent. But the real truth is that if you wanted to become a professional baseball player, you wouldn’t seek advice from a golfer. Yes, the swings might present similarities, and you might even be using some of the same muscles. However, I doubt the Tiger Woods of the golf world would seek putting advice from the Willie Mays of the baseball community. This is a good thing to remember when we choose our investors and assign Board seats.

3. Your personal happiness is worth working for, professionally. There is so much content out there about the ‘how’ of entrepreneurship, but we sometimes forget about the ‘why’ of this particular career choice. My favorite writer is Jorge Borges; despite all his literary accomplishments, his deathbed regret was that he did not manage to find happiness in life. I think of this often when I have one of those excruciating “bad startup days” (a much more unpleasant experience, and yet as unpredictable as “bad hair days”). Some days, I genuinely wonder why I put myself through this torture, and then I tell myself that in order to be happy, my road to self-actualization involves creating legacy, and the path to impact is tortuous. The truth is that unhappy people are less creative, productive and more likely to be unlucky. I frequently ask people to share with me the first image that comes to mind when I say “happy moment.” This could be reading a book in a coffee shop, a good conversation with a close friend or a challenging run at the gym. I then ask the question: “How many times per week do you have happy moments?” I am shocked to hear that more often than not, people tell me they can’t remember the last time they had one of those! I believe — and Chip Conley and Tony Hsieh would concur — that successful startups have happy people, which is a requirement for happy customers and happy investors. Creating a startup culture where happiness is a core value is very important. What’s the worst that could happen, anyway? You might fail to launch a product, but you will still walk away with happiness– it’s not so scary after all.

This post was originally published on YEC.

About Rebeca Hwang

Rebeca Hwang is a Co-Founder and CEO of the San Francisco-based startup, YouNoodle, which gamifies innovation through competitions. She is a Board member for Cleantech Open, Imagine H2O and BASES. Recently listed by Forbes as one of their 20 Inspiring Young Female Founders To Follow On Twitter and was named one of the World Economic Forum’s Young Global Leaders.

The Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) is an invite-only nonprofit organization comprised of the world’s most promising young entrepreneurs. The YEC recently published #FixYoungAmerica: How to Rebuild Our Economy and Put Young Americans Back to Work (for Good), a book of 30+ proven solutions to help end youth unemployment.

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Favorite business advice from Rebeca Hwang of YouNoodle

(Credit: Keith Allison)

When I was student at MIT, I learned an important lesson from one of my personal heroes, Amy Smith. Amy invented the “screenless hammer mill” when farmers in Senegal were struggling with the process of separating rocks from grains when making flour. Expensive screens broke all too easily and were hard to replace in poor remote rural villages. Her invention, which was recognized by the Lemelson-MIT Student Prize, looked at the existing problem at a new angle. Instead of screens, she used air flow to separate unground grain and rocks from flour. By applying simple aerodynamics, she eliminated the need for screens altogether and increased grinding rates by 60 times.

This story has served me well in my startup career. Whenever I get stuck on a problem, all I need to do is stop fixating on my current solution and redefine the problem instead. Amy looked at the problem from a different perspective, which lead to a solution outside of the box. Similar stories can be distilled into useful pieces of advice that have also helped me along the way:

1. Accept the fact that you are inherently lucky. There is a story about a research experiment that involved two types of subjects. One group self-declared themselves as unlucky; the other believed that they were very lucky in life. Both were given newspapers with pictures on it. The task at hand was to count the number of pictures from cover to cover. The unlucky group took on average two minutes to flip every page and count the total number of pictures on the newspaper: 27. The lucky group noticed on the second page a large note saying “Stop reading here, there are 27 pictures on this newspaper.” So they stopped and reported the number within 10 seconds of being assigned the task. So many times we fall into the trap of focusing too narrowly on our daily targets that we miss the opportunity to notice the more creative answers right in front of us. The luckiest people are constantly stimulating the brain with a certain level of randomness through serendipitous encounters, conversations and insights. They are able to focus on a target without shutting down their ability to see beyond that target. They can turn their “blinkers,” which block peripheral visibility in horses, into “visors,” which give selective views — while still allowing the horse to focus on the race.

2. Don’t take advice from golfers if you want to play baseball. Jeff Hoffman, a member of the founding team of Priceline and the most amazing storyteller, makes a point that’s invaluable for startup founders. Sometimes, we think that all smart people are able to provide great advice — and this may be true, to a certain extent. But the real truth is that if you wanted to become a professional baseball player, you wouldn’t seek advice from a golfer. Yes, the swings might present similarities, and you might even be using some of the same muscles. However, I doubt the Tiger Woods of the golf world would seek putting advice from the Willie Mays of the baseball community. This is a good thing to remember when we choose our investors and assign Board seats.

3. Your personal happiness is worth working for, professionally. There is so much content out there about the ‘how’ of entrepreneurship, but we sometimes forget about the ‘why’ of this particular career choice. My favorite writer is Jorge Borges; despite all his literary accomplishments, his deathbed regret was that he did not manage to find happiness in life. I think of this often when I have one of those excruciating “bad startup days” (a much more unpleasant experience, and yet as unpredictable as “bad hair days”). Some days, I genuinely wonder why I put myself through this torture, and then I tell myself that in order to be happy, my road to self-actualization involves creating legacy, and the path to impact is tortuous. The truth is that unhappy people are less creative, productive and more likely to be unlucky. I frequently ask people to share with me the first image that comes to mind when I say “happy moment.” This could be reading a book in a coffee shop, a good conversation with a close friend or a challenging run at the gym. I then ask the question: “How many times per week do you have happy moments?” I am shocked to hear that more often than not, people tell me they can’t remember the last time they had one of those! I believe — and Chip Conley and Tony Hsieh would concur — that successful startups have happy people, which is a requirement for happy customers and happy investors. Creating a startup culture where happiness is a core value is very important. What’s the worst that could happen, anyway? You might fail to launch a product, but you will still walk away with happiness– it’s not so scary after all.

This post was originally published on YEC.

About Rebeca Hwang

Rebeca Hwang is a Co-Founder and CEO of the San Francisco-based startup, YouNoodle, which gamifies innovation through competitions. She is a Board member for Cleantech Open, Imagine H2O and BASES. Recently listed by Forbes as one of their 20 Inspiring Young Female Founders To Follow On Twitter and was named one of the World Economic Forum’s Young Global Leaders.

The Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) is an invite-only nonprofit organization comprised of the world’s most promising young entrepreneurs. The YEC recently published #FixYoungAmerica: How to Rebuild Our Economy and Put Young Americans Back to Work (for Good), a book of 30+ proven solutions to help end youth unemployment.

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Xiaomi’s Next-Gen Phone Specs Leak, Will Have Better Retina Display Than iPhone 4S

With hours to go to the much-anticipated launch of China’s hottest homegrown smartphone, likely to be called the Xiaomi M2, the crafty crew at Micgadget got to the Beijing launch event venue way ahead of time and snapped photos of the canvas banners being unloaded. Those reveal what look to be the official stats for the phone. Some highlights? Xiaomi is saying that its new phone’s screen is so hi-res that it surpasses the iPhone 4S, it’ll be rocking Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon S4 (APQ8064) chip, and it’ll be running the very latest v4.1 (aka: Jelly Bean) iteration of Android, of course with its usual MIUI overlay.

Here’s the first official image of the new quad-core beast. Its rear looks a bit too much like the Meizu MX 4-core with its white plastic rear dominated by a large and centrally-positioned camera. There’ll likely be some fallout and social media bitchin’ over that similarity later:

An 8MP camera will be on the back, with a 2MP webcam upfront:

The screen will expand from the 4-incher on the Xiaomi M1 up to 4.3-inches. No specific resolution is mentioned, but it’s clearly stated that the screen will hit 342PPI, making it more pixel-rich than the iPhone 4S (326PPI) and the new Samsung Galaxy SIII (306PPI):

Xiaomi says it reached nearly $1 billion in revenue in the first half of 2012 just on the strength of its one model of phone, so there’s a lot riding on its successor.

Hit the link for a few more sneaky snaps. Our own Willis Wee will be at the Beijing launch event which kicks off at 2:30pm local time.

[Source: Micgadget]

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Weibo Reach Puts Serious Analytical Tools Right at Your Fingertips

Sina Weibo is a powerful communication tool. But it doesn’t offer much in the way of analytics. Enter Chinese startup Weibo Reach, which takes your tweets and produces awesome visualizations of their spread throughout the web, in addition to a bunch of other analytical data about how they are passed along.

Weibo Reach offers a “regular version” and an “advanced version.” The regular version is free; the advanced version is not yet available but presumably will cost a little money in return for more advanced services. After trying out the regular version, though, I have to say I’m pretty damn impressed.

Signing up was a snap; all I had to do was click a button, authorize the Weibo Reach app, and then we were off to the races. I don’t have a lot of followers on weibo, but I picked a recent post I made about the trailer for my documentary film (shameless plug!) to see how that post had been spread. As you can see from the image below, the results were pretty damn thorough!

As you can see, Weibo Reach arranges everything into a neat-looking infographic of sorts, which contains all kinds of data. I can see, visually, how my tweet was spread. I can see a demographic breakdown of the people who spread it, and a list of which users were the most influential in moving my tweet forward. I can see breakdowns of the geographical locations of my re-tweeters, the overall sentiment of discussion about my tweet, the rate of real users to adbots, and even more. If this is the regular version, I expect the advanced version of Weibo Reach is going to be pretty damn impressive.

Of course, my uninfluential tweeting and low follower counts don’t lend themselves to any particularly cool visuals. But it’s worth noting that when Weibo Reach tracks tweets that are retweeted and discussed much more often than mine, the results can look pretty awesome:

If you’re a weibo user, it’s definitely worth checking out Weibo Reach just for kicks, and if you’re a corporate user, you should be looking at this service very carefully. Even the regular version offers significant value, and the advanced version sounds promising.

It’s great to see that China is finally starting to crank out really cool (and well-designed) apps and services for weibo (see also Weibo Bridge, which I talked about last week). Weibo Reach is really impressive, and I hope very much that it catches on!

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Ride public transport like a boss and get rewarded

Singapore has one of the most efficient public transport networks in the world with a Mass Rapid Transit (MRT) network of under and above ground lines linked with Light Rail (LRT). From all accounts it’s a well-utilised service but there are still issues, as in most major cities, with congestion during peak hour periods.

However, encouraging citizens to use public transport is a major issue for urbanized areas around the world.

Mr Lew Yii Der, Group Director of Corporate Planning and Research at Singapore Land Transport Authority (LTA) said earlier this year “Even as we expand the rail network and bring in additional trains to enhance rail capacity, it will take some time for these improvements to fully come on stream. Travel demand management is an area LTA has been actively exploring as it encourages more optimal use of public transport capacity.” Part of this exploration has been the launch of a Singapore-based project to study trends associated with travel on public transport. But more interestingly the study is also looking at how incentives and game mechanics can reduce congestion during peak periods.

Insinc with commuting congestion

Insinc (Incentives for Singapore’s Commuters) is a joint collaboration between the National University of Singapore, Stanford University and LTA to study the effects of incentives and web-based interaction on public transit commuting. Since January, the program has rewarded commuters for traveling outside of peak periods. Participants register their EZ-Link card so that each journey earns credits (1km = 1 credit) while shoulder-peak travel (6.30am-7.30am and 8.30am-9.30am on weekdays) earns bonus credits (1km = 3 credits). The study is the first of it’s kind in Singapore but has well-established roots in several projects that have successfully encouraged behaviour change.

Pedometers, Indian traffic jams and campus parking

Professor Balaji Prabhakar, Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Stanford University is head of the Insinc study and his ground-breaking work on traffic congestion has been well documented in publications such as the Economist, NY Times and Wall Street Journal.

Prabhakar’s academic expertise allows him to appreciate the complex relationships inherent in public transport networks. However, he is quick to point out that such networks are all around us. “Societal networks don’t have to do with computing or communications, they’re all the other networks we use on a daily basis. Technology and economics interplay strongly and humans are also in this loop. We are components of the network, so our decisions matter, while we are in the system. Whether we choose to take the MRT, a bus, bike or car, it affects the load within the system… The key issue is supply and demand but how do you make them meet? Price can be used, as economics suggests, but could we also use incentives? That’s the purpose of our work.”

The study of incentives to encourage behaviour change led Prabhakar and his team to turn to the world of video games and gamification (using game elements in non-game contexts). Last year the team collaborated with global management consulting giant Accenture US to develop Steptacular, a pilot study that encouraged employees to get fit through the use of pedometers, earning and then redeeming credits for rewards. Results indicated “high enrollment, frequent engagement with the system, and an improvement in the average steps per user per day”. Even professional game designers from RedOctane, developers of legendary video game Guitar Hero, have commented on the design and noted similarities with well-known gaming phenomena such as “level grinding” and the “Easter eggs of random rewards”.

But it was a visit to Bangalore and getting stuck in peak hour traffic that revealed to Prabhakar the potential intersection between societal networks, tracking behaviour and creating feedback loops to modify future behaviour. A resulting study involving 14,000 users, successfully shifted 25 percent of peak hour congestion, resulting in the removal of eight buses from the existing fleet. The most telling result was that the financial savings from those extracted buses was more than enough to cover the incentive rewards used in the program.

Calculating the Odds

Capitalizing on previous studies, Insinc uses several game elements and mechanics to encourage behaviour change. Commuters earn credits and bonus credits depending on how often and when they travel. Additionally, the number of “decongestion” trips determines the commuter’s “level” within the program. This is where things get interesting. Insinc commuters can exchange their accumulated credits for cash (credited back to their EZ-link card) or win larger prizes by playing simple games of chance on the Insinc website. As the player “levels up” they gain access to boards with increasingly higher stakes to win larger amounts.

Insinc utilises elements from common graphical user interfaces (GUI) found in game designs to communicate odds and chance. As Prabhakar says, “This idea of visually explaining things to people, where it becomes self-explanatory, is one of the things we’ve taken very seriously. It underlies a lot of the game design that we’ve been doing.” A recent addition to the game tool set has been the “Magic Box”. These weekly offers are designed to encourage specific behaviour within small groups of users allowing the developers to trial different types of incentives and measure their effectiveness.

We’re all part of the network

When modifying behaviour one needs to take into account the overall ecosystem that surrounds the individual. A range of factors including work, study and family commitments can affect the timing and frequency of public transport habits. Obviously it’s not possible for everyone to travel earlier and in fact, it’s not even desirable. For example, if everyone started traveling earlier you would have only just shifted the congestion: same problem, different time. Consequently the aim of the study is to encourage just a proportion of commuters to alter their behaviour and only then, by just a few days in the week by 20 to 25 minutes.

Although Insinc has been in operation for little over six months it has already produced some impressive results. Around 22,000 commuters have registered for the program with over SGD180,000 paid out through the system to date. But has the study been able to modify the public’s commuting behaviour? The answer is yes: of those commuters who have participated in the program, almost ten percent of their peak period travels have shifted to the shoulder-periods.

Hardly surprising then that LTA recently announced that the study will be extended a further 18 months to study the effectiveness of the scheme over a longer term and across a wider cross-section of commuters, anticipating the addition of 40,000 new users. As of August 1, Insinc will be opened to commuters with NETS Flashpay cards, senior citizens and student concessions (universities, polytechnics and Institute of Technical Education.)

The gamers reading this article will probably be wondering: if you’re going to introduce game elements why not introduce an element of strategy? Prabhakar notes that it’s a question of skill versus chance. In the case of Insinc, the use of game mechanics provides an engaging interface while the element of pure chance simply provides a random reward redemption option. The point is not to beat the system but to work with it. “There are more interesting things we can do with social elements,” Prabhakar says, “for example where friends can play together. That makes it more engaging.”

Earlier this year Prabhakar launched a three-year project based at the Stanford campus in California aimed at reducing the congestion of cars arriving and departing campus during peak periods. Known as CAPRI (Congestion and Parking Relief Incentives) the study uses RFID technology to monitor car movements and then reward drivers who traveled during off-peak periods. Given the success of previous projects, stakeholders will be eager to track the results of the project.

The use of game elements in Insinc has provided concrete results of how incentives rather than disincentives can successfully modify behaviour when it comes to public transport adoption. However, I believe the program’s success also demonstrates a rapidly growing trend. This type of system, one that provides the user with access to her own data, is becoming prevalent due to the advances in mobile technology and sensors as well as the increasing appetite of users’ to track, reflect and modify their behaviour. It’s self-awareness guiding self-improvement. And if we can harness this powerful idea to change our public transport commuting habits… imagine what else we can change.

Natalie is co-founder and Engagement Designer at Hummingbird Interactive, a Singapore-based gamification and motivational design consultancy. She blogs at www.recognitionpattern.com.

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Ride public transport like a boss and get rewarded

Singapore has one of the most efficient public transport networks in the world with a Mass Rapid Transit (MRT) network of under and above ground lines linked with Light Rail (LRT). From all accounts it’s a well-utilised service but there are still issues, as in most major cities, with congestion during peak hour periods.

However, encouraging citizens to use public transport is a major issue for urbanized areas around the world.

Mr Lew Yii Der, Group Director of Corporate Planning and Research at Singapore Land Transport Authority (LTA) said earlier this year “Even as we expand the rail network and bring in additional trains to enhance rail capacity, it will take some time for these improvements to fully come on stream. Travel demand management is an area LTA has been actively exploring as it encourages more optimal use of public transport capacity.” Part of this exploration has been the launch of a Singapore-based project to study trends associated with travel on public transport. But more interestingly the study is also looking at how incentives and game mechanics can reduce congestion during peak periods.

Insinc with commuting congestion

Insinc (Incentives for Singapore’s Commuters) is a joint collaboration between the National University of Singapore, Stanford University and LTA to study the effects of incentives and web-based interaction on public transit commuting. Since January, the program has rewarded commuters for traveling outside of peak periods. Participants register their EZ-Link card so that each journey earns credits (1km = 1 credit) while shoulder-peak travel (6.30am-7.30am and 8.30am-9.30am on weekdays) earns bonus credits (1km = 3 credits). The study is the first of it’s kind in Singapore but has well-established roots in several projects that have successfully encouraged behaviour change.

Pedometers, Indian traffic jams and campus parking

Professor Balaji Prabhakar, Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Stanford University is head of the Insinc study and his ground-breaking work on traffic congestion has been well documented in publications such as the Economist, NY Times and Wall Street Journal.

Prabhakar’s academic expertise allows him to appreciate the complex relationships inherent in public transport networks. However, he is quick to point out that such networks are all around us. “Societal networks don’t have to do with computing or communications, they’re all the other networks we use on a daily basis. Technology and economics interplay strongly and humans are also in this loop. We are components of the network, so our decisions matter, while we are in the system. Whether we choose to take the MRT, a bus, bike or car, it affects the load within the system… The key issue is supply and demand but how do you make them meet? Price can be used, as economics suggests, but could we also use incentives? That’s the purpose of our work.”

The study of incentives to encourage behaviour change led Prabhakar and his team to turn to the world of video games and gamification (using game elements in non-game contexts). Last year the team collaborated with global management consulting giant Accenture US to develop Steptacular, a pilot study that encouraged employees to get fit through the use of pedometers, earning and then redeeming credits for rewards. Results indicated “high enrollment, frequent engagement with the system, and an improvement in the average steps per user per day”. Even professional game designers from RedOctane, developers of legendary video game Guitar Hero, have commented on the design and noted similarities with well-known gaming phenomena such as “level grinding” and the “Easter eggs of random rewards”.

But it was a visit to Bangalore and getting stuck in peak hour traffic that revealed to Prabhakar the potential intersection between societal networks, tracking behaviour and creating feedback loops to modify future behaviour. A resulting study involving 14,000 users, successfully shifted 25 percent of peak hour congestion, resulting in the removal of eight buses from the existing fleet. The most telling result was that the financial savings from those extracted buses was more than enough to cover the incentive rewards used in the program.

Calculating the Odds

Capitalizing on previous studies, Insinc uses several game elements and mechanics to encourage behaviour change. Commuters earn credits and bonus credits depending on how often and when they travel. Additionally, the number of “decongestion” trips determines the commuter’s “level” within the program. This is where things get interesting. Insinc commuters can exchange their accumulated credits for cash (credited back to their EZ-link card) or win larger prizes by playing simple games of chance on the Insinc website. As the player “levels up” they gain access to boards with increasingly higher stakes to win larger amounts.

Insinc utilises elements from common graphical user interfaces (GUI) found in game designs to communicate odds and chance. As Prabhakar says, “This idea of visually explaining things to people, where it becomes self-explanatory, is one of the things we’ve taken very seriously. It underlies a lot of the game design that we’ve been doing.” A recent addition to the game tool set has been the “Magic Box”. These weekly offers are designed to encourage specific behaviour within small groups of users allowing the developers to trial different types of incentives and measure their effectiveness.

We’re all part of the network

When modifying behaviour one needs to take into account the overall ecosystem that surrounds the individual. A range of factors including work, study and family commitments can affect the timing and frequency of public transport habits. Obviously it’s not possible for everyone to travel earlier and in fact, it’s not even desirable. For example, if everyone started traveling earlier you would have only just shifted the congestion: same problem, different time. Consequently the aim of the study is to encourage just a proportion of commuters to alter their behaviour and only then, by just a few days in the week by 20 to 25 minutes.

Although Insinc has been in operation for little over six months it has already produced some impressive results. Around 22,000 commuters have registered for the program with over SGD180,000 paid out through the system to date. But has the study been able to modify the public’s commuting behaviour? The answer is yes: of those commuters who have participated in the program, almost ten percent of their peak period travels have shifted to the shoulder-periods.

Hardly surprising then that LTA recently announced that the study will be extended a further 18 months to study the effectiveness of the scheme over a longer term and across a wider cross-section of commuters, anticipating the addition of 40,000 new users. As of August 1, Insinc will be opened to commuters with NETS Flashpay cards, senior citizens and student concessions (universities, polytechnics and Institute of Technical Education.)

The gamers reading this article will probably be wondering: if you’re going to introduce game elements why not introduce an element of strategy? Prabhakar notes that it’s a question of skill versus chance. In the case of Insinc, the use of game mechanics provides an engaging interface while the element of pure chance simply provides a random reward redemption option. The point is not to beat the system but to work with it. “There are more interesting things we can do with social elements,” Prabhakar says, “for example where friends can play together. That makes it more engaging.”

Earlier this year Prabhakar launched a three-year project based at the Stanford campus in California aimed at reducing the congestion of cars arriving and departing campus during peak periods. Known as CAPRI (Congestion and Parking Relief Incentives) the study uses RFID technology to monitor car movements and then reward drivers who traveled during off-peak periods. Given the success of previous projects, stakeholders will be eager to track the results of the project.

The use of game elements in Insinc has provided concrete results of how incentives rather than disincentives can successfully modify behaviour when it comes to public transport adoption. However, I believe the program’s success also demonstrates a rapidly growing trend. This type of system, one that provides the user with access to her own data, is becoming prevalent due to the advances in mobile technology and sensors as well as the increasing appetite of users’ to track, reflect and modify their behaviour. It’s self-awareness guiding self-improvement. And if we can harness this powerful idea to change our public transport commuting habits… imagine what else we can change.

Natalie is co-founder and Engagement Designer at Hummingbird Interactive, a Singapore-based gamification and motivational design consultancy. She blogs at www.recognitionpattern.com.

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