Nintendo Shares Jump on "Grey Matter" Games

Bloomberg reports today on the 85% sales increases at Kyoto-based Nintendo. (OTC:NTDOY) The Guardian touches on the eightfold increase in quarterly profits based on games targeted the middle-aged and 'greying' plus the hit game Nintendogs (TM)....

What's in google anagram

More on anagrams as we boil again in California. It's the global warming kicking in, or maybe just the fact that it is summer and there are only 3 kinds of weather here in the Bay Area. (1) cold and foggy - like Mark Twain called it (2) sunny, but with a cool nearby marine layer of air that has just moved off the water, with a temperature of 56-58 degrees (it does not vary much at all, day or night from 56-58 degrees) or (3) high pressure zone in which case it's just like Redding or Sacramento, which without the ocean nearby it would be.

Let's look at Google.

What words could have been inside Google and built its brand awareness without our realizing it?

1. Lego
2. Go Lego! (a perfect match)
3. Eggo, like leggo my eggo
4. ole, like OLE at a bull fight or the technical term
5. goo
6. egg
7. O, egg
8. Leg
9. Oleg
10. logo
11. log, like captain's log, stardate...
12. geo

that's all we can think of for now. But the puzzling richness of the word may be part of its appeal and meaning in math

Aging Brain Test

Aging Brain Test.

What is the Age of Your Brain?

This is the kind of exercise - combining IQ, reaction, and memory - that can create wonderful self-knowledge.

Look for this exercise - in the near future....for now, try the straight reaction time test

Pinball Adds fun to Brain Exercise

Try our new pinball game....adding fun to brain exercise.

Use the left and right arrow keys (just like our memory tests) and the down arrow, just like our brainspeed test...

Have fun...

100 more games are backstage but they are coming, stay tuned.

Prey LAN Party in S.J. Gets you Tix for TRITON

Prey LAN Party..,will be at the SJ Convention Center in August. If you sign up through Newegg.com, you get a free shot at TRITON. Newegg.com sure gave away a lot of stuff at E3...lucky catch

Brain Games: Why Sell Sugared Water When You Can Change the World

Brain Games Can Lead to New Brand Preferences....

Why sell sugared water when you can change the World? Brands Live in the Mind.

Ries and Trout's "Positioning: The Battle for Your Heart and MIND" is a kind of catechism in M.B.A. marketing classes. Notice that the WORD mind is in the title. What does that mean?

An awful lot, actually.

Researchers at the University of Chicago have shown that Consumer preferences for a brand can be increased over the competition by techniques used to manipulate memory, in research published today in Applied Cognitive Psychology.

The study's primary investigator Antonia Kronlund, now at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business, based her findings on participants' responses to two experiments. The first experiment found that when participants had to solve an anagram before seeing a target brand, they were more likely to claim to have seen the brand before. Participants also had higher preference ratings for the brand relative to competing brands in the same product category.

The second experiment showed that when participants had to solve an anagram before seeing a target brand, they were more likely to claim to have known the brand in high school, and to prefer it over competing brands.

Quick Note: If you have a social-networking hub of some ilk (pre-launch) encode its name in an anagram that you surreptitiously get in front of your 'target audience'thereby allowing you to pole-vault the entrenched competition such as myspace...,ha-ha

"It's the actual contrast between seeing the anagram in its initial, versus its solved form, that we believe creates this preference effect. That is because the anagram in its initial form appears to be non-fluent--participants have never seen anagrams such as GANECY before.

Once solved, however, the solution is processed with high fluency. Think of the "aha" experience one would feel when realizing the solution is AGENCY. We believe that this surprising fluency, arising from the disparity, gets misattributed to brand recognition and preference," says Dr. Kronlund.

In the US, impulse buying reportedly generates over $4 billion annually. These findings take important further steps to understanding the subconscious processes that underlie brand recognition and preference.

"Our research demonstrates that certain problem solving techniques, which pose a challenge to the consumer, trigger a response that makes the target brand seem highly fluent, or familiar. This process consistently translates into increased recognition of the brand, and more importantly, higher preference towards the brand over the competition. Such techniques can be used by marketers in magazine layouts, in store displays--the possibilities are endless," says Dr. Kronlund.

It's time to start printing up those anagram flyers....

Star Troop Reaction Test

To play this game, click on the picture below and click again on it and the test will pop-up. This test requires you to click on the red dot as soon as it turns yellow. What happens when the dot is bigger? You'll see - it's related to how humans have evolved to respond to nearby threats....

New BrainSpeed Test

Speed Up Your Brain.

There will be a new BrainSpeed test.

You will be able to see it at brainspeed.com.

Natrol is the developer of BrainSpeed, which can be purchased at

or

Drugstore.com

The Joystiq Review of Prey

Joystiq has the review of PREY, advice - get it on PC. In fact, get it online.

Listen to the Inner Space

Here's a chance to learn more about the game prey, which involves a Native American living in Oklahoma and his chance to help his people and also save the earth from an approaching alien mothership which has been abducting people. The lesson, based on Cherokee folklore and oral tradition, is to listen to your inner voice in order to perceive reality and take right action
Prey.

You can can now get the game online and start playing, as of just a few minutes ago...the game people have been waiting for since 1999, featured at both E3 2005 and 2006 with lots of hoopla...made available through the technical breakthrough of Triton, the advanced streaming technology from DiStream which takes streaming from the pokey speed of a rocket to warp factor 8, (Scotty will be calling the bridge and telling them to slowdown - original ST joke) and now it's available as one of the top game releases of 2006 or any year.


Get your feet wet with our Prey Test

note: we have an interest in Distream, the co. that developed the lightning fast Triton Player, they have enough bandwidth to light up all the Western states...

Researchers Are Teaching Robots to Develop Their Own Language

Researchers from Sony and elsewhere are working to give robots linguistic and cognitive skills that grow and develop spontaneously over time, without communication rules from humans. more...

Insect IQ Pitted Against Human IQ in New Game

Wim Van Eck has made fiction into reality. His submission to the 2006 International Conference on Entertainment is a version of Pac-Man that relies on the actions of crickets - in real time - to control the "ghosts" that threaten you're Pac Man character. The crickets are viewed by motion dectection cameras and their actions are fed into the "motion" algorithm for ghosts.... more

Ads in Games, Ads in Casual Games, Ads in Tests

If you've taken the 1940's stars test, you probably noticed an ad for Lux Soap featuring the classic actress Betty Grable.





Inserting ads in media is a big deal, especially since it came to games in a big way this year, with Microsoft and Intel getting into the fray.

What do you say to Clark Gable holding a classic glass bottle of Coke, airbrushed into the photo with Vivien Leigh? That would give the brand resonance.

You can see ads in the baseball test we just developed, along the right field stands.

In the World Cup test(s), the ads for MasterCard and McDonalds are plainly visible.

It's just another arena.

Pac Man on the Fourth of July

Try the Cognitive Labs featured version of Pac Man, courtesy of Paul Neave.

First, please register.

Nintendo Expands on Brain Theme with Touch Generations

Games for Non Gamers or Gamers who gave up games for like, two decades...
But now want to maintain and train the brain....like you can do here.