Gamification tips for Uber, an ingenious new digital display experiment

Every Monday, CommerceLab brings you a roundup of all the gamification, user experience design and interactive display news that’s fit to print. (Or the stuff we liked best, anyway.) We’re off next week, but see you again in the New Year!  

According to the Vancouver-based crowdfunding site FundRazr, women created the most crowdfunding projects in 2013—and that trend is set to continue into the new year. That’s just one interesting fact about the current state of crowdfunded startups in Canada, more of which can be found in this awesome infographic.

A Simon Fraser doctoral student asks the question: “Has social media changed the way we communicate in public?” Claude Fortin’s Mégaphone project in Montreal records people’s overheard speech as they walk through an open plaza and amplifies it in both audio and text. He then recorded how people reacted over a 10-week period—and found some surprising results.

In other tech-y urbanist news: Uber, the equally beloved and derided ride sharing app, has received a lot of press lately for its demand surge pricing (the company jacks up its taxi rates whenever people are most in need of rides, like during the blizzard in New York a couple of weeks ago). But here’s an interesting take asserting that the surge pricing is really just gamification—and that focusing on good gamification techniques would help the company a lot.

For all those doing some last-minute shopping this week—or those who are unsure about braving the crowds on Boxing Day—know that you can always get what you need on your phone. And you’re not alone. New data indicates that Canadians are using shopping apps on mobile devices more than ever, whether to make purchases outright or to complement physical shopping tasks.

And finally, a roundup of the best digital signage installations of 2013 from David Haynes. Excellent stuff.