Back in 2007, Lumosity was a scrappy startup scrounging for seed money. Today, the San Francisco-based company that creates games to make your brain work better is announcing it’s landed over $32 million in new funding.
What a difference four years make.
Tim Chang of Norwest Venture Partners tells Fast Company.
“When we first invested, we were concerned this was just a niche area for people with Alzheimer’s or other cognitive problems. But Lumosity has proved there’s universal demand for this among all demographics.”
Indeed, today, over 14 million people in 180 countries either subscribe to Lumosity’s website or have downloaded one of its iPhone apps. And revenues have grown 25% every quarter since its launch.
Other companies, like CogniFit and Posit Science, also compete in this space, though none has received as large a round of funding as Lumosity. Sharp Brains, a market research firm tracking the "brain fitness space", estimates that the size of the market for digital products was just under $300 million in 2009 and will grow to at least $2 billion by 2015.
Lumosity’s website offers 40 games designed to sharpen a wide range of cognitive skills. The signup process walks you through a series of questions to figure out whether you want, for example, to improve your ability to remember names, get better at problem solving, or develop better concentration at work or while driving. It then designs a series of “courses” tailored to your particular interests.
Here are typical Lumosity games:
- Players are given a three-letter prefix and must come up with as many words as possible while a clock counts down.
- Arithmetic problems appear in bubbles, and the player has to solve them before the bubble bursts.
- IQ game challenges you to remember the locations of various tiles in a grid.
Lumosity's brain fitness applications are available for the desktop and mobile devices like the Apple iPhone.
But all of this comes at a price. Website subscriptions cost $14.95 a month, or $80 a year. And yet, plenty of people are paying.
Lumosity CEO Kunal Sarkar tells Fast Company that’s in part because brain fitness is the latest wave in the trend of healthy living that started three decades ago when suburbanites started flocking to gyms and continues today with the widespread interest in yoga and organic foods. Many people pony up the annual subscription, equating it with a gym membership, but for their brains.
Meanwhile, the neuroscience research coming out of universities over the past couple of decades has confirmed that cognitive abilities are not necessarily fixed. Just as you can beef up your body by lifting weights, the types of games that Lumosity and its competitors offer can make your brain stronger and work faster and better.
Sarkar, whose cofounder Michael Scanlon was a neuroscience graduate student at Stanford before he--in good Silicon Valley form--dropped out to help start the company says,
“There’s a growing understanding that you can affect core cognitive functioning throughout your life.”
The fact that more and more of us work in fields that rely on how well that piece of jelly between our ears functions is also part of what’s driving the interest in brain fitness. Lumosity users include everyone from traders in Chicago who use the tools to warm up their noggins before heading to the trading floor, to actors in Los Angeles wanting to get better at memorizing scripts, to pilots using them to improve their spatial abilities and reaction times.
Sarkar says,
“We don’t necessarily teach you anything, but we make it easier for you to learn new things, which is more and more important.”
COMMENTARY: This is the first time I have heard about Lumosity. Hell, I didn't even know there was a brain fitness market until today. My brain's cognitive abilities obviously need a workout, so I decided to findout more about this startup.
Here's what I know so far:
- The U.S. market in brain-fitness software generated $265 million in revenue in 2008, an 18% increase from $225 million in 2007 and up from $100 million in 2005, according to a report by SharpBrains, a San Francisco company that tracks the cognitive-fitness industry.
- Sales have been driven mostly by retirement homes, more than 700 of which now offer computerized cognitive-training programs, and by consumers doing programs on their home computers or visiting brain "gyms," said Alvaro Fernandez, a co-founder of SharpBrains and its CEO.
- It remains unclear whether brain games really do improve cognitive health. According to an April 29 article in Scientific American, while 50 studies have researched the benefits of brain training for people, only a few have explored whether game-score improvements endure or are passed on to daily living.
- A randomized, controlled trial by the Mayo Clinic reported in the April issue of the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society is the largest to yield some positive results. Researchers divided 487 adults age 67 to 93 into two groups, one which used Posit Science's brain-fitness program. The second group watched educational videos on art and history for 40 hours over eight weeks. The brain-training group showed significant increases in measures of overall cognition and memory, which translated to improvements in their daily activities, but both brain trainers and the control group exhibited improvement.
- According to Ambient Research's report dated April 2010 titled, "The US Consumer Market for Brain Fitness Applications: 2009-2014 Forecast and Analysis", The brain fitness industry has entered a wide adoption phase and competition between suppliers is heating up. There is a growing array of suppliers, some of which have been releasing second-generation productsdesigned for consumers. Suppliers have successfully created a market for new types of products that appeal to a diverse demographic on two ends of the age spectrum: young children and the elderly. Demand will eventually slow as the market matures, but for now there is a very healthy revenue growth rate. The US Consumer demand for brain fitness applications is growing at a robust five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 51.2%. A new trend in the market is that suppliers are now connecting with customers and new audiences via social media and new distribution channels. The barriers-to-entry are relatively high for advanced products, but a steady stream of new suppliers are entering the market with lowend products
- Cognitive Learning products are meta-cognition products that enable users to modify cognitive behavior (learn) by understanding and manipulating the learning process itself. Educational psychologist John W. Santrockdefined meta-cognition in 2008 as the information process that, "includes knowledge about when and where to use particular strategies for learning or for problem solving." There are three primary types of Cognitive Learning products on the market:
- Cognitive assessments.
- Cognitive and Intelligent Tutors.
- Brain Fitness Applications.
- Brain fitness, also known as cognitive fitness, is based on cognitive science, neuropsy-chology, and brain-based learning theories emerging from educational psychology and educational neuroscience. It is an instructional method that targets the neuro-physiological processes involved in learningand has little in common with traditional instructional design principles.
- In 2006, brain fitness applications were enjoying a spike in demand. Late in that same year, mobile brain trainer games appeared in the US market. During this period, there were clear distinctions between the two product types. The brain fitness industry in the US entered a wide adoption phase in late 2008-early 2009.
- A key difference between Brain Trainer Games and Brain Fitness is the supplier's purpose or intent:
- Brain trainer games are mobile or simulation and game-based products designed as entertainment products; the intent of brain trainer game developers is to provide a user with a challenging game experience.
- Brain fitness applications are based on scientific research and designed to enhance specific cognitive abilities; designers of brain fitness applications aim to spark a change in the user’s mental state, but they are also trying to achieve what is known as "transfer," where the skills learned in the experience can be extended to new situations.
I am really not into games, but I can see where younger Gen-Y's and the elderly would take to the new generation of brain fitness games. Lumosity's games definitely look like a lot of fun, and if they give you an edge in maintaining your memory and learning capabilities, definitely worth the investment.
I am definitely with that $32 million venture capital raise. Looks like the company has a big plans, and well worth following.
Courtesy of an article dated June 16, 2011 appearing in Fast Company, an article dated May 18, 2009 appearing in MSN Money, and Ambient Research's report dated April 2010 titled, "The US Consumer Market for Brain Fitness Applications: 2009-2014 Forecast and Analysis"
By some weird arithmetic, the more life stuffs itself into the valley, the more spaces it creates for further life.
Posted by: physical therapist salary | 12/13/2011 at 12:32 AM