Happy Monday! Here is a recap of some of the best gamification news from the past week.

Google Gamifies Maps. Where Will the Cube Take You? Technorati 4/29/2012 Google is no stranger to using game mechanics to engage users and guide them through new features on their websites. They are particularly excellent at employing simple games to inspire users to spend more time on site learning about different search features. Saturday, the search engine giant released another gamified feature, the Cube, a 3D game centered on Google Maps. The Cube encourages users to explore a 3D map of a famous city destination to learn more about little known map features.

She’s Playing Games With Your Lives New York Times 4/27/2012 We mentioned Jane McGonigal’s new project SuperBetter last week and it continues to create a buzz about the place of games in real life. Jane talks about how her concussion led to the creation of SuperBetter and what impact gaming has had on her success in life. On her new project Jane states, “What I really want to do is help people suffer less”.

Gabe Zichermann: gamification isn’t about offering ‘free stuff’, it’s about status Econsultancy 4/27/2012 In a keynote at The Next Web 2012 Gabe Zichermann talked about what makes gamification successful and it isn’t badges or free stuff. While free stuff is great and badges like those we get from Foursquare can be fun, what users really want is status. Status is what will keep a user engaging and interacting with a gamified website over any other feature.

Posted in: Blog, Game Mechanics, Gamification, Gamification Tips

Happy Monday! Most of us here in Seattle spent our weekends enjoying some rare but much needed sun. If you are like us and didn’t spend as much time as normal in front of the computer, you can catch up on some gamification news below.

Gamification beyond badges and leaderboards Vator News 4/18/2012 Vator is hosting a full-day learning event May 1 which will feature many different discussions on gamification (including one by our own Keith Smith). In preparation for that they have been releasing quite a few great articles on gamification, including this one about motivation and engagement. Understanding what motivates your users and how you can use that to create deeper engagement is at the heart of any gamification solution.

The Serious Business of Games Forbes 4/19/2012 Still not convinced that gamification is here to stay? This Forbes piece talks about the benefits of using game mechanics to connect with users, and use that interaction to collect valuable data that marketers want. Incentivizing users to provide relevant feedback to brands can be done in numerous ways, but even worldwide brands like Burberry are employing some of these strategies to gain insight from their customers.

Olympics Unveil Social Media Hub to Connect Athletes and Fans Mashable 4/18/2012 With only a few months to go before the London Olympic games, the International Olympic Committee has announced an online community for competitors and fans. The Olympic Athletes Hub will give fans access to training-tips, enter to win prizes as well as the possibility to directly interact with competitors in real-time during the games. There will be a gamification layer, to increase incentives for fans to engage.

Food Fight gamifies restaurant ratings, wins Hack Omaha Silicon Prairie News 4/16/2012 Ever wondered what the food inspectors rating of cleanliness is for your favorite restaurant? Omaha Food Fight can tell you! The app challenges users to guess the cleanliness of local restaurants and guess which restaurants rank better than others. As users play through the app, they gain ‘inspector’ points. Co-Creator Matt Steele said of the project, “We wanted to try to find a way to take the data that was already available, which is kind of bland … and make it more interesting,”. We wish Seattle had an app like this!

SuperBetter Is a Game that Rewards You for Healthy Living and Working Towards Your Goals LifeHacker 4/17/2012 Jane McGonigal is well known in the ‘gamification’ world for her passion towards applying game mechanics to ‘make reality better’. Her newest project SuperBetter is trying to do just that. The site is a free game, where you can choose goals, add quests and work in groups (or alone) to achieve them. This sounds like a great way to encourage yourself to meet those long set goals and keep those kinds of goals organized online.

Posted in: Blog, Game Mechanics, Gamification, Gamification Tips, Loyalty

Today marks the one year anniversary since the big Amazon Web Services outage that caused major downtime for numerous sites across the web including HootSuite, Reddit and Foursquare. In addition to those larger companies, many start-ups found themselves struggling during the outage, including us at BigDoor. Ask any of our current employees who were present then, and they can tell you about the levels of frustration we all felt as we were waiting to find out what was going on. Our CEO Keith Smith wrote about those frustrations in an article for GeekWire, “Amazon’s real problem isn’t the outage, it’s the communication“.

In the year since that outage, we have continued to work with AWS and though we don’t like to think about that horrible week last year, our experiences with them and their service have been largely positive. Our CTO and Co-founder Jeff Malek put together a retrospective of the past year with AWS, the improvements they have made and the challenges he sees for them (and us) in moving forward.

From the article “Amazon Web Services: A a year after the big outage, one startup’s perspective“:

“Looking back over the past twelve months, and revisiting the changes we made in response to the outage, brings some worthwhile observations to light:

1) AWS took action to address their communication and transparency issues. 

2) If you need or want what Elastic Block Store provides, options haven’t changed, but risk may have.

3) EBS IOPs performance continues to be the primary concern that has persisted for us and every other AWS EBS user I’ve talked to.”

As the end of the day comes to a close, we are happy to report no repeats of last years catastrophe and are looking forward to continuing to work with AWS. To read the full article over at Geekwire, click here.

Posted in: Blog, Startups, Technology

We absolutely love being a part of the Seattle tech community and sharing our office building with Founder’s Co-op and TechStars Seattle. Being able to meet and stay in touch with exciting new companies and the people behind them is inspiring and most importantly, fun. TheEasy, a space located in the basement of our office building, has always been a community space for meet-ups, sharing ideas, lunch and high competition ping-pong matches among office-goers and other community members. It has not however, always been very aesthetically pleasing or well-setup for that role. Red Russak of Startup City and the Startup Weekend folks started collecting money for some much needed improvements to the space last year, and succeeded in making the space smell and look much better.

But the space could use so much more. Spear-headed by Startup City, TheEasy has been entered into Turnstone’s $25,000 office makeover competition. While voting hasn’t officially started, we wanted to post this to show our support and excitement about this opportunity.

You can check out the video and the entry here:

http://tv.myturnstone.com/LueMF/theeasy-turnstone-25000-office-makeover-contest/

If you are interested in the space, and the types of events that go on in TheEasy, you can head over to Startup City’s blog post on the contest here:

http://startupcity.org/2012/04/19/theeasy-turnstone-25000-office-makeover-contest/

Spread the word!

Posted in: Blog, Startups, Technology

Happy Monday! Most of us up in Seattle spent the weekend enjoying the sun and avoiding our computers. If you’re like us and fell behind on gamification news, you can catch up below.

Tech Review: 3 apps to gamify your workouts Velum Media 4/15/2012 Fitness and competition have always gone hand in hand, but gamification is helping to connect mobile fitness app users and increase the competition and sense of community within those apps. Mauricio Balvanera highlights 3 fitness apps that use gamification to get you motivated and meeting your fitness goals.

Five Easy Tools for Adding Game Elements to Your Website  Entrepreneur 4/13/2012 Gabe Zichermann, gamification expert, talks about how easy gamification can be to add to your website in this 60 second solutions video. We wanted to thank Gabe for the mention!

Vanilla Forums Announces Blog Commenting System That Turns Blog Commenters into Engaged Community Members PR Web 4/12/2012 Vanilla Forums announced their newest feature which allows publishers “to use Vanilla to power blog comments and turn those transient commenters into engaged community members”. The feature is easy to embed into WordPress and uses game mechanics to encourage users to post and engage with publishers content by making forums and posts easy to access and use.

Building a High-Volume Reporting System on Amazon AWS with MySQL, Tungsten and Vertica Slideshare 4/12/2012 Our CTO/Co-Founder Jeff Malek was down at the Percona Live/MySQL Conference last week and gave this talk about our experiences at BigDoor. If you weren’t able to be there, you can check out the slides from his talk here.

Gamification: Why Aren’t Badges Enough? Business 2 Community  4/11/2012 Andrzej Marcewski has done an excellent job looking at different aspects of gamification. Last week, he talked about why badges are not enough, and what publishers need to focus on to use gamification successfully. His advice? “Experiment, test and gather feedback to work out the most effective use of gamification for you.”

Posted in: Blog, Game Mechanics, Gamification, Technology

Happy Monday! Last week was big for BigDoor in the news, as well as some other pretty cool gamification implementations. Catch up on everything you missed below.

BigDoor Rolls Out Updated Gamified Loyalty Platform CMS Wire  4/5/2012 We were excited to announced the release of our new Gamified Rewards Program last week. With the growing success of gamification, our platform provides a simple way for publishers to increase customer loyalty on their sites. Additionally, our analytics dashboard allows publishers to monitor performance and easily update their implementation.

Recyclebank gamifies for a better world iMedia Connection 4/6/2012 Recyclebank has been a powerhouse in the “gaming for good” trend over the last few years. Last winter they announced additional social sharing and interactive features which they believe have increased recycling significantly.

Why Gamification Can’t Be Stopped Mashable 4/7/2012 This headline caught our eye this week and we wanted to send some congrats to our friends at Bunchball. The gamification trend is here to stay and we are consistently seeing greater success as new implementations role out. Rajat Paharia founder of Bunchball on gamification, “I think it’s only going to penetrate deeper as long as people continue to see value.”

Education and Dragons: the gamification of schools CNET 4/5/2012 We have seen a ton of ideas on how to implement gamification into the classroom, but this is a great interview with teacher Craig Merrick who actually turned gamification of education into a reality. By designing his own flash application, Criag found a way to track experience points, achievements and challenge students in different ways, all with the goal of education and learning in mind. We wish we had a teacher do this for us in school!

Posted in: Blog

Today we’re so excited to officially unveil the next generation of gamification: BigDoor’s Gamified Rewards Program!

Three things everyone should know about our new product:

1). It’s Easy to Implement - no matter what size publisher you are BigDoor is simple to integrate on your site. Our proprietary tools offer an easy-to-use web-based command center that manages publisher’s implementations.

2). We Provide Actionable Analytics and Performance Measurement - BigDoor provides the tools that site publishers need to take action on their implementation and measure success.

3). Get Real Results - Sites participating in our private beta saw real results including 153% lift in User Loyalty; 672% lift in User Engagement and 355X in Social Sharing.

Online publishers today are constantly challenged with trying to attract more visitors to their site and keeping those visitors engaged. Our new Gamified Rewards Program takes aim at both problems and creates a real solution. Any size website can now integrate a Gamified Rewards Program seamlessly.

We offer three solutions: Lite, Plus and Premium. Lite is a free offering for websites with fewer than 25,000 monthly visitors. Plus is a white-label and highly customized solution built for medium sized websites with up to one million monthly visitors. For enterprise customers, BigDoor creates a fully customizable Rewards Program as part of the Premium package.

Now publishers can reward their users within a gamified experience; think of it as a fun and engaging frequent flyer program that integrates seamlessly with your brand. Rewards, such as exclusive content, unlocked powers, exclusive virtual items, community status and even tangible rewards create deeper engagement with a site and rewards users for their loyalty and engagement. Implementing a rewards program is now a simple process and can be managed entirely through BigDoor. Publishers can also take advantage of many advanced services provided by BigDoor, including paid sponsorship and management of high value rewards through sweepstakes.

Today we’re also very excited to announce our next round of funding from Foundry Group and Brad Feld. We’re incredibly lucky to have an investor who has such a great history with game and technology companies continue to be a part of what we’re building at BigDoor!

Over the next few weeks we’ll be detailing some of the proprietary features available so stay tuned for more and please share your feedback!

Posted in: Announcements, BigDoor news, Blog, Development, Financing, Gamification, Press, Publishers, Technology

Happy Monday!

Gamification: Adding stickiness to your campaigns The Next Web  4/1/2012 The Next Web put together a great piece that takes a look at successful gamification implementations in a wide range of industries. Using examples like Nike, Starbucks and Recyclebank it is pretty easy to see the benefits of gamification in marketing.

Gamifying Energy Use: Observed Trends From South By Southwest Interactive  Think Progress 3/29/2012 When asked, most people will say that they care about reducing energy and working towards more sustainable solutions, but how does one go from talking about these ideas to actually implementing them? Ben Holland of the Rocky Mountain Institute suggests that gamification is a great way to make that jump and encourage users who may be only casually interested, to engage and make change.

Outbid mixes gamification and social networks with real-time online auctions Venture Beat 3/29/2012 Due to the anonymous and often slow process of online auctions, live auctions are still outselling online auctions by a ratio of 9 to 1. Outbid, a company based in Oakland, is seeking to change this. By adding game elements alongside social integration, Outbid seeks to create fun, interactive and exciting online auctions that can be held by anyone.

The Way We Play: How Gamification Can Lead to Deeper Customer Engagement Power Reviews  3/29/2012 Still not convinced that gamification can lead to more engagement? Jean Kao puts together a great argument for why gamification works.

Gamification: You May Already by Using It! Business2Community 3/30/2012 While the term gamification is relatively new, the techniques that gamification employs have been around for a while. In fact, you might not even realize that you are using them. Elements like Facebook’s like button play a role in our egos and motivate us in a very subtle way to continue posting relevant content. Additionally, those little “recommended for you” boxes you see on blogs and news sites? A great way to promote users exploring your website and spending more time there.

Posted in: Blog, Game Mechanics, Gamification, Gamification Tips, Loyalty, Social Media