Webi­nar: Top 10 Cog­ni­tive Fit­ness Events of 2008 — A Mar­ket Update

What: Alvaro Fer­nan­dez, CEO of Sharp­Brains and mem­ber of the World Eco­nomic Forum’s Coun­cil on the Chal­lenges of Geron­tol­ogy, will lead a webi­nar dis­cussing the Top 10 Cog­ni­tive Fit­ness Events of 2008.

The Top 10 Cog­ni­tive Fit­ness Events include: 

1) Feb­ru­ary: Dakim secures a $10.6m invest­ment from Galen Part­ners. Jack LaLanne becomes spokesper­son.
2) April: The Gov­ern­ment of Ontario, Canada, invests $10m in Bay­crest to develop and com­mer­cial­ize cog­ni­tive fit­ness tech­nolo­gies.
3) April: Uni­ver­sity of Michi­gan researchers reveal in the Pro­ceed­ings of the National Acad­emy of Sci­ences how com­put­er­ized work­ing mem­ory train­ing can gen­er­al­ize and improve fluid intel­li­gence in healthy adults.
4) May: Humana unveils Games for Health ini­tia­tives, not renew­ing its agree­ment with Posit Sci­ence.
5) June: The US Army launches a new pol­icy requir­ing cog­ni­tive screen­ings of all sol­diers before deploy­ment (in order to bet­ter diag­nose poten­tial brain-based dis­or­ders such as PTSD and TBI upon return).
6) June: Lumos Labs secures $3m invest­ment from First­Mark Cap­i­tal and Nor­west Ven­ture Part­ners.
7) July: health insurer OptumHealth announces a 3-year, $18m agree­ment with Brain Resource to offer web-based cog­ni­tive assess­ments to inform clin­i­cal diag­nos­tics and treat­ments.
August: Cog­niFit secures $5m from Milk Cap­i­tal.
9) Sep­tem­ber: The Paul Well­stone and Pete Domenici Men­tal Health Par­ity and Addic­tion Equity Act of 2008 is signed into law.
10) Octo­ber: All­state launches a large-scale research project to mea­sure the impact of Posit Sci­ence InSight on dri­ver safety for adults aged 50–75.

Con­text: The mar­ket for soft­ware appli­ca­tions that can help assess and enhance cog­ni­tive func­tions (Cog­ni­tive Fit­ness) is rapidly grow­ing, as out­lined in Sharp­Brains’ report The State of the Brain Fit­ness Soft­ware Mar­ket 2008 (see Mar­ket Report). Pub­lished in March of this year, the report esti­mates that Brain Fit­ness mar­ket rev­enues grew from $100m in 2005 to $225m in 2007, in the US alone. Impor­tant devel­op­ments dur­ing 2008 under­score the solid fun­da­men­tals for the con­tin­ued growth of this cat­e­gory: pub­lic pol­icy ini­tia­tives, wide scale cog­ni­tive assess­ments, mul­ti­ple ven­ture cap­i­tal invest­ments, major ini­tia­tives by insur­ance com­pa­nies, and new pub­lished research. Sharp­Brains fore­casts the mar­ket to grow above $2b by 2015.

When: Thurs­day Decem­ber 11th, 2008, from 12:00 to 1:00 pm Pacific Time. The same webi­nar will be repeated on Thurs­day Decem­ber 18th, from 9:00 to 10:00 am Pacific Time.

Fees: This webi­nar costs $350: you can click HERE to pur­chase and reg­is­ter. Free for Sharp­Brains’ con­trib­u­tors, Pre­mium Research Cir­cle mem­bers, and reporters.

Notes: Instruc­tions for select­ing the date (Decem­ber 11th or 18th) and access­ing the Webi­nar will be emailed to you one busi­ness day after you reg­is­ter below. Your reg­is­tra­tion is for 1 com­puter and 1 indi­vid­ual only. Pow­er­Point slides will be shared with par­tic­i­pants one busi­ness day after the event.

Reg­is­ter for this Event
	Click HERE for pur­chase and reg­is­tra­tion. $350.

Be Socia­ble, Share!

•