Glob – The Indusgeeks Blog

Los Altos Hills, CA, November 29, 2010 – California based Innovation in Learning, a pioneer in the field of Immersive Healthcare Learning, Training and Collaboration and Indusgeeks Solutions a multi-award winning, global virtual worlds development and serious games company announced today the launch of their browser based, 3D, medical virtual world CliniSpace^TM ( www.clinispace.com).

Clinispace is designed to be used by  Hospitals, Healthcare Systems & Companies, Schools of Medicine, Nursing & Allied Healthcare  sectors for learning, training and collaborative purposes. Clinispace offers realistic user avatars, environments and patient bots ( Dynapatient  TM) in a multi-user environment with rich communication facilities such text chat, voice chat and document sharing. Clinispace is an end to end browser based experience with a website which allows scheduling and calendaring facilities, in addition, to providing in depth analytics and assessment capabilities.

“CliniSpaceTM is our answer to the tough challenges being faced by the Healthcare sector in creating quality professionals equipped to cope with the increasingly stressed Healthcare delivery systems. CliniSpaceTM seeks to empower healthcare professionals and students by presenting new immersive learning experiences for them on a browser based, easy to use, hosted platform. Its pay as you go model helps institutions choose a plan that suits their budget and change plans as their needs evolve,” said Dr. Parvati Dev, Cofounder and President of Innovation in Learning.

Sid Banerjee , CEO of Indusgeeks  Solutions added, “ With CliniSpaceTM we wanted to carry Indusgeek’s philosophy of anytime, anywhere learning to the Healthcare sector in partnership with Innovation in Learning. CliniSpaceTM is powered by our Metamersive^TM platform and this allows healthcare professionals using CliniSpaceTM to connect to their learning content and connections from their smart phones, browsers or desktops. We feel CliniSpace will revolutionize learning, training and collaboration in the Healthcare domain by making it personal, easy and accessible.”

According to Dr. Wm Leroy Heinrichs, co-founder of IIL, “CliniSpaceTM addresses an important gap in medical learning by making learning more experiential and immersive. Medical assets such as patients , medical environments etc. are digital in CliniSpaceTM. This helps reduce cost of distribution of learning content and makes it easy reusable. Also, collaboration between trainers and learners is easily achieved in our medical virtual world and this reduces the need for physical training facilities.”

About Clinispace : Clinispace TM was chosen as a finalist at the Serious Games Challenge at the I/ITSEC – 2010 in Florida, on the day of it’s official commercial launch!

About Indusgeeks Solutions Pvt. Ltd

Indusgeeks (www.indusgeeks.com) is a multi-award winning virtual worlds development and serious games company with offices and partners in Mumbai, Dubai, Philadelphia, San Francisco, London and Sydney. Chosen  as a finalists for Top 100 private tech companies in Asia for the year 2010 by the Red Herring Magazine, Indusgeeks is a market leader in creating rich 3D and 2D, browser based, immersive virtual environments that work on low-end hardware and bandwidth. Indusgeeks’ global clientele includes the Govt. of Dubai, Tata Indicom, The Brand Union, Gazzetta dello Sport, Mahindra Satyam, Idaho State University etc.

Contact : ashima[at]indusgeeks.com . Phone : 022- 65189407. Fax : 022- 66712967

About Innovation in Learning

Innovation in Learning Inc. (IIL) (www.innovationinlearning.com) provides products and services for virtual training environments in the healthcare sector. IIL’s products includeCliniSpace™, a 3D immersive medical environment hosted on, and accessed via the Internet; DynaPatient™, virtual patients with dynamic pathophysiology models; and clinical training scenarios, curricula and assessment tools. IIL’s principals are leaders in the healthcare simulation field, with numerous publications and recognition for their research.

Contact : parvati[at]innovationinlearning.com

Advergaming (a portmanteau of advertising and gaming) is the practice of using video games to advertise a product, organization or viewpoint ^[1]. An advergame is a custom-made game built around the attributes of a brand which the brand manager wants to convey to the audience.

The term “advergames” was coined in January 2000 by Anthony Giallourakis ^[2]. Games for advertising are sometimes classified as a type of serious game, as these games have a strong educational or training purpose other than pure entertainment.

Game Industry trade resource Game Daily identifies New York-based marketing company, Brand Games, as the pioneer of advergaming in 1995. The earliest custom video games featuring integrated brand messages were developed in the era before World Wide Web had substantial penetration and were distributed on floppy disk. American Home Foods Chef Boyardee, Coca-Cola, and Samsung brands issued the first-ever floppy-disk advergames ^[3]. Other early brands to use advergaming were Reebok, General Mills, GAP and Taco Bell which distributed games as “kids’ premiums” ^[4].

With the growth of the Internet, advergames have proliferated, often becoming the most visited aspect of brand websites and becoming an integrated part of brand media planning in an increasingly fractured media environment. Theoretically, advergames promote repeated traffic to websites and reinforce brands in the minds of the gamers. Gamers may also invite their friends to participate, which could assist promotion by word of mouth, or “viral marketing.”

You can spot them anywhere and all the time — teenagers clutching mobiles and furiously racing or scoring goals on the handsets while they wait for a train, bus or a friend. With the young segment forming a bulk of the country’s 100 million cell phone users, advergaming is set to surge. Paradox, the Reliance Infocomm-backed gaming firm based in Mumbai, recently developed a football game called Super footer for Coca-Cola ^[5]. The game is being offered free of charge to Reliance and Hutch subscribers ^[6].

Besides the FMCG sector, food and beverage brands, entertainment and media, retail, travel and tourism, telecom, education and lifestyle are the other segments that are increasingly adopting advergaming.

Brands do not primarily look at advergames for revenues. Typically, a consumer spends 3 minutes on an advergame and an advergame generates 25,000 responses i.e. 75,000 interactive minutes spent on a brand ^[7]. Brand owners cannot buy that in traditional media.

Contrary to what some may believe, games are not the exclusive domain of teenagers. In reality, men and women of all ages like to indulge in games. So advergaming can be use to target a wide variety of audience. In fact, Nielsen/Net Ratings reported that nearly 50% of the online game playing community was ages 25-49^[8]. Score Networks confirmed that finding in their own research ^[9].

The challenge, however, is to maintain game play and retain the interest of the easily bored gamers. For this, it is important that the product push is unobtrusive. The branding should not interfere with the game play, or it overwhelms the gamer and kills the whole experience.

^{[1], [2], [3], [4]} Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advergaming)

^{[5], [6]} Mr Salil Bhargava, Chief Marketing Officer, Paradox Studios, told Business Line.

^[7] Raj Menon, Chief Operating Officer, Contests2Win, told Business Standard.

^{[8], [9]} Stevens Interactive (http://www.stevensinteractive.com/index.htm)

- Farhatnaz

Sid Banerjee talking about browser based virtual worlds for business on CNBC

The Indian virtual worlds and MMOGs ( Massively Multiplayer Online Games) market is starting to look up. VWs and MMOGs have been launched in the recent months to address all ends of the market. From Chimpoo a flash based kids world to the recent announcement of Online Tales an Indian MMOG by Swadesh Animation and RZ2 games. Godrej launched GoJiyo during the IPL Season and has been consistently promoting the Online Social Virtual World across media platforms.

We believe, these are very interesting times for the industry as the gaming and interactive content business is about to explode in India. A couple of interesting trends are accelerating the demand for online multi-user environments in India ( besides the over-arching reason that the recession is receding and more money is available for such investments) :

1. The projected growth of PCs, Netbooks and other Internet Enabled Devices in India in the next 2-3 years.
2. The push by telcos to spread Broadband to Tier 1 and 2 cities in India. As also, the improving speeds and reliability of the networks.

Some general global trends like better standard graphics hardware, proliferation of social networks and casual games and general awareness about interactive content on the Internet are contributing factors.

Globally we feel handheld ( mobile, internet enabled) devices like the iPad will revolutionize the interactive media industry in the next few years.

Indusgeeks is poised to launch a few products, for the Enterprise Virtual Worlds sector, in the next few months under its flagship Enterprise brand Metamersive™.

Key takeaway from the post – get ready for an onslaught of interactive media across delivery platforms like you have never seen before!