Yesterday our Co-Founder and CEO, Keith Smith had the opportunity to participate in the Vator Spark conference presented by Vator News. The event was titled “Get Game: How to Gamify your startup” and it brought together entrepreneurs, VC’s, startup enthusiasts and more to the Berkeley Skydeck. Keith was invited to share his own thoughts on gamification and presented a talk entitled “Monetization: The Love Child of Gamification and Rewards.” As we see it, gamification and rewards can really drive monetization.  One of our principles from early on has been that gamification should be a profit center not a cost center. We believe the keys to monetizing gamification is to create yearn, or as Keith puts it “Yearn matters. Without a deep desire on the part of your users, you are left with uninspired and uninterested users.” 

So how do you create that yearn? Yesterday Keith shared a few tips from the BigDoor wheelhouse:

1) Onboarding – First impressions matter a lot. Websites often invite users to their site and then don’t give them any ideas about how to interact with their content. Gamification can help users navigate a site through directed user engagement. Tell users what’s important when they first come to your site.

2) Rewards matter – Tell your users why they should stick around on your site. Reward users with something that’s important to them and give them the incentives for being there.

3) Virtual Currency – A redeemable virtual currency makes for a wonderful means to an end. Giving users small, incremental rewards in the form of points makes it so they actually have a reason to participate and be there. Points become meaningful for the user because of what they can be traded for.

You can see more of Keith’s presentation below.

Posted in: Blog, Conferences, Gamification, Gamification Tips

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

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

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

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