Bloom iPhone app adds stylistic photo editing, iTunes music catalog streaming and more inspirational content to inspire people to focus on what’s important in life 

Seattle, WA, April 27, 2012 – Advancing its use of photos, music and captions to remind people to do the important things in life they would never think to put on a to-do list, Mindbloom (www.mindbloom.com) today announced the latest version of its iPhone Bloom app.  The new version of Bloom now offers more ways for people to use rich media to schedule purposeful interruptions throughout their day to keep their life on track, including stylistic photo editing, iTunes music catalog streaming, and new pre-loaded inspirations across all areas of life.

“With the hectic and busy nature of our lives today, it’s not always easy to stop, breathe and stay focused on achieving our personal goals,” said Mindbloom founder, Chris Hewett, a former executive producer for Monolith Productions who developed blockbuster hits such as No One Lives Forever, Tron 2.0, and F.E.A.R. “With Bloom, we’ve found a new way to use rich media to inspire people to stay engaged, enhance their life and take a quick break from a hectic day to focus on the big picture of life in a highly inspiring way. It truly is a new approach to intentional living, where people challenge themselves to keep their personal productivity goals top of mind.”

The Bloom app transforms an iPhone into a source of inspiration by helping people turn their favorite photos, music and captions into “Blooms,” which are mini digital inspiration movies and reminders to help people take small steps towards growing the life they want. Blooms can serve as personal private reminders to motivate action or can be shared publicly on Facebook, Twitter or email to inspire or encourage friends and family. Users can quickly and easily view, schedule, share and create Blooms using the iPhone’s camera roll or Mindbloom’s gallery of inspirational photos across all areas of life. In addition, public photos from any website, including Facebook, Picasa, Instagram and Pinterest can easily be uploaded to Blooms by simply adding the photo to the iPhone’s camera roll. Bloom also integrates with the Mindbloom Life Game, a browser-based application that uses a dynamic social gaming environment with an engaging tree metaphor to inspire people to decide what’s important, discover what drives them and take meaningful action across all areas of life–health, lifestyle, career, creativity, relationships, finances, and spirituality. Bloom seamlessly connects to Mindbloom Life Game or can be used independently.

New Bloom capabilities include a layer of personalized digital inspiration with creative photo editing from Aviary, including fun tools for lighting, adjustments, and cosmetics.  In addition, users can now add any song from the iTunes public music catalog to their Blooms, giving people the opportunity to add the perfect song for inspiration. A snippet of any song can be added to Blooms for free, or users can download the entire song for a fee. Mindbloom also added over 40 new pre-loaded Blooms to its Marketplace with suggested photos, captions and music to help jumpstart intentional living.

Launched in November, Bloom has been downloaded over 250,000 times and has a 4.5 star rating. Bloom is available today as a free download in the iTunes App Store.  Check out the video to see how it works.

– Consumer-friendly interactive Life Game from Mindbloom helps make life improvement fun, simple and effective –

HARTFORD, Conn. & SEATTLE, Apr 11, 2012 (BUSINESS WIRE) — Collaborating to help individuals deeply engage in their personal wellness efforts, Aetna (NYSE AET) and Mindbloom (www.mindbloom.com) announced today that they have made the premium Mindbloom Life Game available to all of Aetna’s members, as well as Aetna employees.

The Mindbloom Life Game blends the principles of behavioral science with social gaming to offer a fun, simple and effective way for Aetna to inspire people to live healthy, productive and balanced lives. The premium Mindbloom offering includes all the benefits of Mindbloom’s popular consumer Life Game, plus access to more music, an expanded gallery of images, and unlimited personal media storage.

“A significant amount of total health care costs stem from lifestyle choices such as lack of exercise, failing to eat properly and smoking,” said Dan Brostek, head of member and consumer engagement at Aetna. “Mindbloom cannot only help users manage specific physical conditions but can also help them monitor areas often correlated to health outcomes but considered ‘unmentionables’ in the current health care system such as stress related to jobs or caregiving, relationship conflicts, unhealthy sex life or financial issues.”

Aetna users also will have access to Mindbloom’s inspiration reminder mobile app called Bloom*, which launched in November and has already garnered more than 250,000 downloads in the iTunes Store. The Bloom* app can help users keep what’s important top-of-mind while on-the-go and remind users to make healthy choices, stay connected with others, manage stress, strengthen their spirit, save money, advance their career, and enhance their creativity.

Helping People Improve Their Lives
Marvina Hirni, 47, for instance, suffers from Fibromyalgia and recently turned to Mindbloom to help manage her chronic disease. Hirni experiences debilitating pain, and simple tasks often become challenging. She uses Mindbloom to create and record her daily progress, which she then shares with her doctor.

“Fibromyalgia sometimes prevents me from stepping outside or even making a phone call to a friend. But after using Mindbloom, I’ve learned to appreciate the smallest accomplishments in life, record them and find strength to deal with my symptoms,” said Hirni. “It sounds simple because it is but Mindbloom has been an incredibly powerful, yet enjoyable experience when having to manage this disease.”

Since its official debut in September 2011, Mindbloom’s Life Game for consumers has organically grown to more than 50,000 registered users who have successfully followed through on more than 1.5 million commitments to improve their quality of life. Utilizing gamification techniques, Mindbloom has been able to successfully inspire its users to define what’s important, discover what motivates them, and take meaningful daily actions in all areas of their life. Members visit the site an average of nearly 4 times per week with an average engagement time of 14:41 minutes per visit, where they grow and maintain a virtual “life tree” and a forest of their family and friends, earn virtual rewards and most importantly make progress in their real lives. To date, Mindbloom Life Game users have followed through on more than 60 percent of their commitments to unlock rewards, new levels and content.

“After a decade designing an award-winning computer game like F.E.A.R., I found a more important purpose for my craft — engaging people in the quality of their lives in ways that are highly dynamic, extremely effective and very fun,” said Chris Hewett, co-founder and executive producer of Mindbloom. “Our collaboration with Aetna takes our social game to a new level, and brings more people new ways to prevent or manage disease and improve overall wellness.”

For an overview of how the Mindbloom Life Game works, visit http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ezZxHCYezqM or check out the Bloom app at http://vimeo.com/31439840.

About Mindbloom
Mindbloom is a Seattle-based interactive media company that’s out to make life improvement accessible to everyone. By harnessing next-generation engagement techniques and focusing users on personal growth, Mindbloom has created a fun, simple, and effective way for people to improve the quality of their lives. To start living a healthier and more balanced life, visit: www.mindbloom.com . You can also find Mindbloom on Facebook at www.facebook.com/mindbloom or on Twitter at @mindbloom.

About Aetna
Aetna is one of the nation’s leading diversified health care benefits companies, serving approximately 36.4 million people with information and resources to help them make better informed decisions about their health care. Aetna offers a broad range of traditional, voluntary and consumer-directed health insurance products and related services, including medical, pharmacy, dental, behavioral health, group life and disability plans, medical management capabilities, health care management services for Medicaid plans and health information exchange technology services. Our customers include employer groups, individuals, college students, part-time and hourly workers, health plans, health care providers, governmental units, government-sponsored plans, labor groups and expatriates. For more information, see www.aetna.com .

Mindbloom and Life Game are trademarks of Mindbloom, Inc. Apple, the Apple logo and iTunes Store are trademarks of Apple Inc., registered in the U.S. and other countries. Other products and company names mentioned are the trademarks of their respective owners.

Mindbloom finds young adults four times more likely to embrace healthcare gamification trends over baby boomers with men leading the pack

Seattle, WA, December 22, 2011 – Just as young adults (ages 18-34) have thumbed their nose at television in favor of the Internet for news, landlines in favor of cell phones and CDs in favor of digital music, Mindbloom® (www.mindbloom.com) sees a trend of young adults embracing online and mobile apps for personal growth over self-help books and life coaches. Discovering that nearly 65 percent of its users are young adults, Mindbloom found that youzng adults were four times more likely than baby boomers to use its Life Game® mobile and Web app, which is designed to inspire people to define what’s important, discover what motivates them, and take meaningful daily actions in all areas of their life.

“With young adults embracing technology so rapidly, is it any wonder that they’re the first ones to embrace an alternative form to personal growth over what their parents and grandparents choose?” said Mindbloom founder, Chris Hewett, a former executive producer for Monolith Productions who developed blockbuster hits such as No One Lives Forever, Tron 2.0, and F.E.A.R. “These young adults are the first digital generation, and they have a growing appetite to apply interactive entertainment for everything from health and fitness to spirituality.”

In the U.S. alone, the self-help industry is an estimated $14 billion market, with an estimated $3 billion of that being spent on books and other media and another $3.8 billion for personal coaching. A recent study by Latitude Research titled The Future of Gaming: a Portrait of the New Gamer found that 2/3 of survey respondents would like games to help them achieve their personal goals (e.g. be healthier, more productive, etc.). Mindbloom believes it can meet those needs by developing a new frontier for wellness that takes a deeper approach by focusing on the science behind behavioral change – integrating gaming technology, art, and human psychology to make personal growth more effective. Mindbloom officially launched its Life Game in September and has successfully grown to more than 36,000 active users with a focus on intrinsic gaming mechanics, personalization and social media integration. As part of this effort to change the wellness market, the company also recently launched its digital mobile inspiration app called Bloom* in November, which has had over 175,000 downloads in the iTunes App Store.

In a reverse of social games being dominated by older women (average age 43), more than half (52 percent) of Mindbloom’s Life Game users were men in 2011, with 85 percent of all users being under the age of 44. By putting the principles of behavioral science behind social gaming to inspire people and help them achieve their personal health and wellness goals, Mindbloom has attracted a younger audience and helped its members follow through on more than 1.2 million commitments in 2011.

Throughout 2011, 80 percent of users focused on their health as their number one life priority by committing to simple actions like drinking more water, getting more sleep, and walking topping the list. Relationship-focused commitments like calling parents, spending time with close friends or saying ‘I Love You’ followed health-related activities with about 70 percent interest from both sexes. But from there, men and women’s areas of life interests varied broadly with women focusing next on their lifestyle, creativity, career and finances and men focusing on their career, lifestyle, finances and creativity, in relative order of importance.

The biggest variance on which area of life was most important centered on careers, where more than 70 percent of men used Mindbloom to support career goals compared to 58 percent of women. Both aimed career actions to limit complaining and negativity at work, however men were more interested in expanding their professional network (i.e. adding a LinkedIn connection) or being inspired by experts or other professionals. Both sexes listed spirituality as their least area of interest, but women were more likely to use Mindbloom to encourage prayer or journaling in their lives (48 percent versus 41 percent).

As people start to think of the next year’s goals and 2012 New Year’s resolutions, a survey of Life Game users shows that health will once again be the top area of focus, however only for women. According to the survey of more than 300 Mindbloom users, career (22 percent) will take over as the most important area for men, followed by relationships (18 percent), spirituality (15 percent), finances (15 percent), health (14 percent), lifestyle (13 percent), and creativity (3 percent). For women, after health (28 percent) being number one, other key areas of life include career (18 percent), relationships (14 percent), spirituality (12 percent), a tie between creativity lifestyle (10 percent), and finances (8 percent). For a complete summary of how men and women compare and contrast their goals for 2012 check out the Infographic.

For quick video introductions to how Mindbloom’s apps work, click here for the Life Game or here for Bloom.

About Mindbloom:
Mindbloom is a Seattle-based interactive media company that’s out to make life improvement accessible to everyone. By harnessing next-generation engagement techniques and focusing users on personal growth, Mindbloom has created a fun, simple, and effective way for people to improve the quality of their lives. To start living a healthier and more balanced life, visit: www.mindbloom.com. You can also find Mindbloom on Facebook at www.facebook.com/mindbloom or on Twitter at @mindbloom.

Free on-the-go Bloom app gives everyday life a powerful boost with a fun and simple way to transform photos and music into a private or shared digital inspiration

Seattle, WA, November 7, 2011 – Mindbloom (www.mindbloom.com) today announced Bloom*, a new iPhone (NASDAQ:APPL) app that makes it easy for anyone to create and share a powerful digital inspiration—keeping what’s important to them, top-of-mind. The digital inspiration, called Blooms, are made quickly and easily on the iPhone using personal photos, music and captions and are focused on inspiring people to make healthy choices, stay connected, manage stress, strengthen spirituality, save money, advance careers, or enhance creativity. The customized Blooms can serve as personal private reminders to motivate action or can be shared publicly on Facebook, Twitter or email to inspire or encourage friends and family.

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 Anne Krook Joins Experienced Team of Gaming, Technology, and Behavioral Science Experts to Make the Process of Personal Growth Fun, Simple and Effective

Seattle, WA, October 26, 2011 – Mindbloom ( www.mindbloom.com ), an interactive media company that’s out to make life improvement accessible to everyone, today announced the appointment of Anne Krook as vice president of operations. Krook is responsible for the strategic and operational leadership of Mindbloom’s technical resources and infrastructure, including the company’s recently launched free-to-play life game that inspires people to define what’s important, discover what motivates them, and take meaningful daily actions in all areas of their life. Krook joins Mindbloom’s experienced executive team with rich backgrounds from Amazon.com, Monolith Productions, Xbox, MSNBC, Rockwell and Group Health Cooperative. Continue reading →

New Mindbloom Life Game helps anyone grow the life they want in a few minutes a day 

Seattle, WA, September 27, 2011 – Focused on enhancing real lives, not virtual worlds, Mindbloom today unveiled its new free-to-play life game to inspire people to define what’s important, discover what motivates them, and take meaningful daily actions in all areas of their life. Mindbloom takes a deeper approach by focusing on the science behind behavioral change – integrating technology, art, and human psychology to make personal growth more effective. Using the gaming experience of founder Chris Hewett, a former executive producer for Monolith Productions who developed blockbuster hits such as No One Lives Forever, Tron 2.0, and F.E.A.R., and the operational expertise of Brent Poole, an early member of the Amazon team, Mindbloom offers the most feature-rich, fun-to-play, and effective life game ever released.

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We are excited and humbled to share the news about our new relationship with Aetna. Aetna’s decision to make Mindbloom’s wellness engagement platform available to its employer customer base is an example of the kind of progressive thought leadership that has made it an industry leader. This relationship obviously represents a big step forward for Mindbloom’s strategy of building a wellness experience for the consumer first, but one that drives results for the enterprise. This venture allows Aetna to bring a best of class consumer experience to its industry-leading consumer directed health programs.

So why this partnership, why now? Continue reading →