Top 10 Cognitive Fitness Events of 2008 (Webinar)

We have just announced an upcom­ing webi­nar to pro­vide a mar­ket update:  Top 10 Cog­ni­tive Fit­ness Events of 2008 — A Mar­ket Update.

When: Thurs­day Decem­ber 11th, 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 pm Pacif­ic Time.

The Top 10 Cog­ni­tive Fit­ness Events that will be dis­cussed 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.
8) 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.

Fees: This webi­nar costs $350. You can click Here to learn more and reg­is­ter. Free for Sharp­Brains’ con­trib­u­tors, Pre­mi­um Research Cir­cle mem­bers, reporters and fel­low bloggers.