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Information is power, but does information — by itself — actually make people change their behavior?

Not often, says BJ Fogg, director of the Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford University.

“For all the discussion and hype about living in environmentally friendly ways, few people are seeing information and then changing their behavior based on that information,” he said. “They’ve got many other things to worry about in their lives that are much more urgent than ‘Let me figure out how to stop driving to work.’ ”

So is all hope lost? Not exactly. A host of gadgets and Web apps aim, essentially, to guilt and peer pressure us into being better people — in spurts.

These “persuasive technologies” have various aims: Some want people to move more so they can lose weight (check out these health apps); others are designed to promote energy efficiency through neighborhood peer pressure.

The best examples, Fogg said, nudge people to do something simple that they wish they were doing anyway.

Here are five persuasive tech companies and products to keep an eye on. This list is based primarily on interviews with Fogg and University of Washington Ph.D. candidate Jon Froehlich, who wrote a paper titled “The Design of Eco-Feedback Technology,” and who is designing a prototype system to track and display home water consumption.

OPOWER

Think you don’t care what your neighbors are up to? OPOWER, a software company that promotes home energy efficiency, bets you do.

Instead of showing you a plain power bill, OPOWER collects energy data from the home and displays it in a chart that compares your energy use to that of your neighbors in aggregate. Such exposure causes 60 to 80 percent of people to change their energy behaviors, the company says.

The company puts a “smiley face” on the energy-consumption readouts of people who used relatively less energy than their neighbors.

The service is available through more than 30 utility companies, and users can get their energy data in online reports, through smartphones or on home display units. About 1.5 million people use the service now, said Ogi Kavazovic, an OPOWER spokesman.

“If we could take this nationwide — and there’s no reason why we can’t — we can take 3 million homes off the grid and have as much impact as the entire renewable [energy] sector,” he said.

An MIT fellow and NYU economics professor, Hunt Allcott, found OPOWER’s energy reports lead to about a 2 percent reduction in energy consumption, although those behavior changes may not last over time, the report says.

I move you

Imoveyou.com is the social network designed to persuade people to exercise more often by engaging them in quick “if/then” challenges with friends.

A user might type a challenge like this into the site: “I will walk the dog for 20 minutes if you will ride a unicycle around the block.”

The person who has been challenged is notified by Facebook, Twitter or e-mail, and can accept or reject the challenge. Fogg said the idea is likely to be persuasive because it encourages people to act as soon as possible, and it notifies them about the challenges wherever they are.

It also engages people in a bit of competition.

GlowCaps

Technologists have been working for years on ways to make people to remember to take their medicine on time.

Few have been able to persuade people to stick to their daily medication regimens more effectively — or more simply — than GlowCaps, Fogg said.

The idea is simple: A special cap fits on top of a standard pill bottle, and it lights up when the patient needs to take his or her medicine.

The caps are also Wi-Fi-enabled and send reports about how well a person is doing at sticking to his or her medication schedule.

The company claims that it is 86 percent effective at getting people to remember to take their doses, a figure that is “astounding” in the field of persuasive tech, according to Fogg. That number is based on a 50-person trial.

Withings – The Wi-Fi Scale

Weigh yourself on the Withings Wi-Fi-enabled scale, and if you choose, all of your Twitter followers or Facebook friends will be instantly blasted with your current weight.

Such public display of weight loss or gain could be incentive enough to get people moving. Or, if you’re not up for that, the scale can log your weight on a website only you can access.

It’s kind of like putting everyone on “The Biggest Loser.”

Hybrid car displays

Display technologies aim to change how people drive.

In hybrid cars, including the Toyota Prius and Ford Fusion hybrid, display panels that tell the driver how efficiently he or she is driving at any given moment.

The Prius plots this information on a bar graph, as current miles per gallon. The Ford Fusion goes a step further, causing a digital plant to grow (or die) on the dashboard screen as a person’s driving efficiency increases or decreases.

Fogg says these ideas are effective because they give people information on how to improve their gas mileage at exactly the moment when they’re empowered to do something about it: while they’re driving.

That makes it easy to change right away.

“It is giving you moment-by-moment feedback and triggering you” to do something about it, he said.

No one wants a dead plant on their dash. Someone might see it.

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Here’s the truth about AT&T’s wireless network: On the whole, despite what you’ve heard, it’s not actually that bad. It’s just bad for the wrong people in the wrong places — mostly tech- and media-types in New York and San Francisco, California.

Those two cities in particular — and parts of other big cities, like downtown Chicago, Illinois — are sort of the perfect storm for AT&T.

There’s a huge concentration of Apple iPhones, owned by tech- and media-savvy folks who demand a ton of bandwidth, and love to complain loudly on Twitter and in the press. And there are tall buildings, landlords and construction processes that make running a wireless network more challenging.

That helps explain why there are so many dropped calls and pokey mobile Internet connections in those cities, and also why there are so many angry tweets and news articles.

And that’s why even Apple CEO Steve Jobs has come to AT&T’s side, defending how his partner has tried to beef up its infrastructure in its most troubled markets. At a recent press event, Jobs said that when AT&T wants to add a cell tower in Texas, it may only take three weeks. But in San Francisco, on average, it takes three years.

“No one wants a cell tower in their back yard, but everyone wants perfect reception,” Jobs said, according to a rough transcript.

The rest of the country, overall, isn’t such a mess for AT&T. How can we tell? One way is to look at AT&T’s customer turnover statistics to see if people are fleeing from AT&T and its supposedly terrible service. The reality is that they are not.

During AT&T’s second quarter, its monthly “churn” — the percent of customers who leave every month — was 1.29 percent. If you exclude prepaid subscribers, who tend to switch carriers or discontinue their service more often than average, AT&T’s monthly churn was even lower, at 1.01 percent. Those are both record lows for the company and represent improvement over the same period last year.

How do those stats compare to the rest of the wireless industry? You’d think that Verizon Wireless — whose network has a stellar reputation compared to AT&T’s — would have much, much lower churn. Not quite.

Verizon Wireless customers are indeed more loyal than AT&T’s, but barely. Its monthly churn last quarter was 1.27 percent, only a hair below AT&T’s. If you exclude prepaid subscribers, it was 0.94 percent — again, better than AT&T’s, but not by much. For comparison, Sprint was almost twice as bad, and T-Mobile was more than twice as bad as AT&T and Verizon.

If things were that bad at AT&T — and comparatively, that much better at Verizon Wireless — you’d expect a greater difference in their churn rates.

Another recent study leans in AT&T’s favor. A 3G wireless performance test carried out by PC World showed that AT&T’s network was almost always faster than its competitors, and that its reliability was on par. Both measurements showed significant improvements over its 2009 tests. But indeed, AT&T’s performance and reliability in New York and San Francisco weren’t as strong as in other cities, such as Seattle, Washington, or Baltimore, Maryland.

Anecdotally, I’ve noticed similar things traveling around the country with an iPhone and 3G-enabled iPad. Last weekend in Maine, my 3G connection seemed much snappier than it typically does in New York. I was even able to stream a Netflix video to my iPad in a moving bus — something I can’t even do reliably when I’m stationary in Manhattan.

AT&T pours billions of dollars — between $18 billion and $19 billion this year alone — into trying to improve its network. For example, it’s going cell site by cell site to add more bandwidth to support faster speeds, a process that will continue through this year and next, an AT&T spokesman says.

Many of the carrier’s improvements have focused on New York and San Francisco. For instance, AT&T has doubled the capacity of its network in New York over the past year, and is in the process of doubling its capacity in San Francisco. It has also installed specialized indoor systems in high-traffic areas, including Grand Central Station and Yankee Stadium in New York.

As a result, mobile download speeds in New York are up 31 percent over the last six months, according to internal testing data. Blocked calls are down almost 40 percent in Manhattan so far this year, and dropped calls are down 23 percent, AT&T says.

The company has also complemented its strained 3G network with more free wi-fi hot spots for its customers, including a network recently installed in New York’s Times Square, one near Wrigley Field in Chicago and all Starbucks locations.

In addition to adding 400 percent more 3G capacity at AT&T Park in San Francisco, it has also doubled the number of wi-fi hot spots there. In those situations, the idea is that customers could hop on wi-fi to send emails or access the Internet, taking a load off cell networks.

To be sure, despite these improvements, the company obviously still has a lot of problems in New York and San Francisco. And because of the concentration of tech and media industry types there, we’ll probably see the “AT&T sucks” rants and “attfail” tweets for the foreseeable future.

At least until Verizon Wireless gets Apple’s iPhone. Then we’ll know if this whole mess is really AT&T’s fault or just the unique situation of having to support millions of iPhones in use at one time.

But in reality, things aren’t as terrible for AT&T as you’ve been led to believe. It’s just really bad in the wrong places, for the wrong people.

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Video game publisher Electronic Arts Inc. reported stronger results than it had forecast, boosted by solid sales of games such as “2010 FIFA World Cup South Africa,” “Scrabble” for Apple Inc.’s iPad and digital add-on content for older titles.

EA, known for popular games such as the “Madden” football series and “The Sims,” also cut operating expenses and reaffirmed its full-year guidance. Its shares got a boost in after-hours trading as a result.

For the three months ended June 30, EA’s net income was $96 million, or 29 cents per share. This is up from a loss of $234 million, or 72 cents per share, in the same period a year earlier. Net revenue rose to $815 million from $644 million.

By a more closely watched metric — adjusted results that exclude special items and account for deferred revenue from games with online components — EA reported a loss and revenue decline. Even so, it handily surpassed Wall Street’s expectations for the second quarter in a row.

“They are starting to put out games that are selling bigger and bigger units,” said Sterne Agee analyst Arvind Bhatia, adding that EA was also moving in the right direction on the cost side of things.

The company’s past results had been dragged by high game development costs and titles that did not always live up to lofty expectations. CEO John Riccitiello has been working to slim down EA’s portfolio to high-quality games that make money, while pushing aggressively into new revenue streams such as Facebook games and digital add-ons for games sold in stores. He’s also been cutting costs, much through layoffs. EA had 7,750 employees at the end of the quarter, down from 8,940 a year earlier.

On an adjusted basis, the company posted a loss of $78 million, or 24 cents per share in the latest quarter, compared with a loss of $6 million, or 2 cents per share, a year earlier. Analysts polled by Thomson Reuters had expected a larger adjusted loss of 35 cents per share.

Adjusted revenue fell 34 percent to $539 million from $816 million, but topped the $502 million that analysts were expecting.

Lower development costs helped bring down EA’s operating expenses down 13 percent to $495 million during the quarter.

EA, which is based in Redwood City, Calif., also affirmed its guidance for the full fiscal year and said for the current quarter, it expects an adjusted loss of 15 cents to 10 cents per share on revenue of $775 million to $825 million.

This compares with analysts’ expectations of a loss of 10 cents per share on revenue of $816.9 million.

The company noted that with the first quarter wrapped up, it still has about 86 percent of the year’s revenue to go, which is one reason for not raising its full-year outlook prematurely. EA has been burned in the past by giving guidance that later proved to be too high.

The video game industry relies heavily on holiday sales — about 40 percent of its revenue is made in the last three months of the year. EA, for its part, would not make a profit in fiscal 2011 if it weren’t for the October-December quarter. That quarter, said Bhatia, will be a “big test for them.”

Chief Financial Officer Eric Brown said the strong quality of the titles EA is releasing is contributing to the company holding its outlook for the rest of the year even as broader consumer confidence is declining.

EA’s shares rose 73 cents, or 4.5 percent, to $16.91 in after-hours trading. The stock closed regular trading down 32 cents, or 1.9 percent, at $16.18.

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