Seriosity gives you a job in a virtual world
 |
Business Week points to a new secretive Palo Alto company called Seriosity that is trying to make grunt work more attractive by having employees perform their tasks in a virtual game.
The mention comes inside of an article about Linden Lab’s Second Life, a fairly well-known online virtual world where people can go inside and do anything you can do in real life: dance, hangout at a bar, build homes and even trade penises (so we’ve heard).
And the growing interest in virtual worlds has some people coming up with new ideas:
Why not use gaming’s psychology, incentive systems, and social appeal to get real jobs done better and faster? “People are willing to do tedious, complex tasks within games,” notes Nick Yee, a Stanford University graduate student in communications who has extensively studied online games. “What if we could tap into that brainpower?”
In other words, your next cubicle could well be inside a virtual world. That’s the mission of a secretive Palo Alto (Calif.) startup, Seriosity, backed by venture firm Alloy Ventures Inc. Seriosity is exploring whether routine real-world responsibilities might be assigned to a custom online game. Workers having fun, after all, likely will be more productive. “We want to use the power of these games to transform information work,” says Seriosity CEO Byron B. Reeves, a Stanford professor of communications.
We’ve pinged Seriosity for more details.
Next Story: YouOS to offer Web operating system; Ektasis answers with VC backing
Previous Story: Genius tracks your Web behavior for sales people, launches with $5M
About the Author, Matt Marshall
Matt launched VentureBeat in September of 2006, with the realization that no one else was covering the entrepreneurial and tech innovation scene with the velocity or depth that he was. Prior to founding VentureBeat, he covered venture capital for the San Jose Mercury News from 2001 to 2006. In 2002, Matt was awarded "Journalist of the Year" by the Northern California Society of Professional Journalists. Prior to working at the Merc, he was a correspondent for the Wall Street Journal in Bonn, Germany from 1995 to 1998, and a writer for the Washington Post in 1994. Matt holds a PhD in Government and an MA in German and European Studies from Georgetown University. In addition to VentureBeat, Matt is also the Executive Producer of DEMO, the leading launchpad event for emerging technologies.
