Sales people are an incredibly important resource, but how do you motivate them to close more deals without being an aggressive, insulting prig? LevelEleven believes its flagship app that gamifies the sales process is the answer to that problem.

Detroit-based LevelEleven recently caught our eye when it raised $500,000 in additional seed funding from Detroit Venture Partners and others. The company’s flagship application encourages sales people to meet certain goals like following up on leads, increasing numbers of face-to-face meetings, making calls, and logging events.

Now the company has rebranded the flagship app from the name Contest Builder to (fittingly) Compete. LevelEleven CEO Bob Marsh told VentureBeat that the name change was important because the core product was more about creating competitions than creating contests.

“One of the most frustrating things of sales is having so much data but still finding it hard to motivate sales people,” Marsh said. “I call it the ‘sales manager challenge.’ … But it’s a pretty powerful motivator when your name is up in lights on a leaderboard. It can be very emotionally compelling.”

On top of the name change, the app has been redesigned to simplify the user experience and modernize the look. LevelEleven will also soon add new pricing options so customers can make a month-to-month arrangement for the service instead of just a one-year commitment.

The Compete app is built on top of Salesforce’s CRM platform, and claims to be “the number one gamification app” in the Salesforce AppExchange. Marsh said that the company has considered building a standalone app that doesn’t rely on Salesforce, but it will focus on its app for Salesforce for the near future because it has more than 100,000 potential customers that use the platform.

LevelEleven now has about 80 customers, a substantial increase over the 25 it had just six months ago. It has raised a total of $1.5 million in seed funding to date and has 10 employees. Marsh also noted he’s proud of the company’s placement among the emerging Detroit tech scene.

Photo via LevelEleven

Chris Hollindale is cofounder and CTO of seed-funded stealth startup Hasty.

If you’ve ever tried out a Nike+ FuelBand, a Jawbone UP, or apps like RunKeeper or Strava for runners and cyclists, the chances are that you’ve seen the powerful effects that gamification can have.

Gamification is an effective mechanism that taps into our naturally competitive instinct to help change our behavior. And in the case of health and fitness apps, this change of behavior means real lifestyle changes, enabling us to be fitter and healthier.

But is this gamification being applied to the right health metrics? Could it be applied to areas that have even more of a positive health impact?

In the health and fitness space, the best examples of gamification are those employed by the likes of Nike+, Jawbone and FitBit’s tracking devices. Statistical and anecdotal evidence shows how effective the gamification is here – FitBit reports that its users take 43 percent more steps. But is tracking your steps  – which is ultimately what these devices do — actually all that good for you?

I’d argue that there are many more important metrics when it comes to living better and healthier, and this is where the future of health gamification will lie.

An interesting possibility is applying gamification to real health metrics. Services like WellnessFX now allow consumers to evaluate all manner of data points about themselves, from nutrient levels to cholesterol and testosterone. Being able to measure and improve these core health metrics is a huge leap, and I can see exciting applications of gamification applying here in the future. It could be that you’re able to create and compete with your own personal wellness score based on a variety of health metrics.

Or … even try to beat your mate’s level of testosterone – the ultimate “who’s the bigger man?” competition.

Of the metrics that people currently track, the one that has the most overall impact is food. Gamification has the potential to have a huge impact on the way we eat and the choices we make when it comes to food, and this can make a monumental impact in terms of our collective health.

If I earned a badge for eating well during the day, or was competing with a friend to see who could stick to a diet the longest, I would be way more incentivized to persevere and eat well. The problem standing in the way is that currently, tracking is hard: it’s simply not automatic enough.

But if that were to be resolved, the applications of gamification to food tracking become really interesting. Fooducate is a good example of gamification already being applied to food – by scanning barcodes, it grades the groceries that you buy to encourage you to eat better.

And Google Glass has the potential to fundamentally change the way we track and gamify health.

Imagine being able to track and gamify your statistics for any sport – like what your shot accuracy was in your latest tennis game – or having Google Glass automatically read the stats off your bike machine at the gym. And how about creating a proper augmented reality experience for exercise – extending the idea created by the Zombies, Run! smartphone app, your morning run could be turned into all manner of videogame-style scenarios, from escaping zombie hoards to chasing down one of your friends.

And its tracking applications will go way beyond physical health – it could even be used to track and gamify the number of words you spoke during the day, or the number of social interactions you had.

There are many opportunities for new applications of gamification in these areas. As a final thought, suppose Google Glass could record all the food you ate, the portion sizes and how much food you left on your plate. Suddenly, you’d have cracked the food-tracking problem and you’d have a massive opportunity to gamify and fix our increasing battle with preventable, diet-related health problems.

Photo credit: Chris Chabot/Google

Paul Kim’s before-and-after pictures are pretty astounding. He argues that you can look that way, too, if you use his Alpha Trainer app, which provides a workout regimen on iOS and Android devices that you can take to the gym. The app is part of Kim’s goal of making personal training more social, enabling people to tap their friends for support in becoming more fit.

Now, somewhere in the fine print, it must say that you have to work out for six hours a day to look like Kim does in his picture. But Kim swears that isn’t true, and he has created a custom training program with his Alpha Trainer app that will get you into better shape in 14 weeks. Alpha Trainer gives you a custom workout program that is narrated by Kim himself, who admits letting himself get out of shape on his last startup before he went back to the gym with a vengeance, moving from 17 percent body fat to 4 percent body fat in 10 months. He started San Jose, Calif.-based Nido Labs, named after a resort in the Philippines where he chilled out, to codify a serious fitness regimen in an app.

“This is something that I believe passionately in,” Kim said in an interview with VentureBeat. “I came up with this as I did my own body transformation.”

The app is launching today on the Apple iTunes App Store and on the Google Play store. Kim said that app can be customized in 100,000 ways to fit each user’s needs. It also features social motivation, inviting friends to provide encouragement with every fitness achievement.

Kim previously ran KreditFly, a venture-funded alternative payments company that raised $3.25 million but didn’t survive. Before that, he created BilltoMobile, a $9.5 million-funded company that was acquired in 2010. He also worked at Samsung’s venture capital arm, and he once was a management consultant. But fitness was his first love. His first job was as a fitness trainer at Bally’s. And he’s a certified personal trainer and a fitness competitor.

“I went the Philippines to decompress from years of startups,” he said.

The current market for health and fitness technology is huge, but it is dominated by navigation-based cardio-tracking apps such as Runkeeper. Many of these apps are now undifferentiated, except for some like Zombie Run that are putting game mechanics and storylines into fitness programs. There are also a ton of wearable health and performance monitors like Nike FuelBand or the Basis Health Tracker. But these are all reactive, not proactive, in Kim’s view.

Food-tracking apps can help you record what you eat, and existing workout and fitness apps require you to input your workout data in excruciating detail in small mobile devices. These apps can provide pictures and videos on how to do exercises, but they are often generic.

“I kept looking at the market, and the tracking is often really tedious,” he said.

What’s missing is something that gives people deep health and fitness guidance, coaching, and instruction in a systematically designed and tailored program. You can get that at your gym with a live personal trainer, but this can cost more than $1,000 a month (or maybe $50 to $500 per session) to get outstanding advice and monitoring. But what if your workout should change based on your body type, fitness level, age, gender, workout preferences, your schedule, workouts confined to home, or specific problem areas in your body?

“Everyone has different issues and goals,” he said. “We will have the largest library of 14-week workout programs for both the gym and home.”

Kim, a 1999 runner-up for the Mr. Korea body-building competition, said Alpha Trainer targets this need. He designed each program over the course of the past year. He changed the workouts for body type, goals, preferences, and even technology platforms (such as mobile devices or tablets). And the price is right. The apps is free to download and try out for four weeks.

After that, you have to decide if you want to pay to get the remaining weeks through the purchase of an Elite subscription.

When you use the app, you’ll see Kim demo the exercise with the proper intervals of rest, sets and repetitions. You can use the program to log and track your weight progress if you wish. Such a “freemium” model will eliminate some of the barriers that normally get in the way of fitness goals. If you’re thinking that the first four weeks are the same as the next 10, you’re wrong. Kim deliberately divides the program into multiweek parts, based on his experience with fitness regimens. At first, he said, your body needs to be shocked. Then you can focus on cutting fat. You can upgrade to premium features for a fee, and you can purchase Gold Coins to send messages and gifts to others.

You can pick the days when you will work out, and you can select the exercises you will perform. Many, but not all, of the exercises come with a video. You work out while using the app, which has a timer. After you’re done, you can post the accomplishment to Facebook. You can pause the workout if you are interrupted.

Alpha Trainer also uses social motivation from your close friends. You can invite them to offer you encouragement as motivation partners. These partners are notified via an alert on your workout days. They can send you encouragement messages and gifts from within the app. That part of the app is akin to mobile messaging apps such as What’s App, Line or Kakao Talk. (All of those are growing quickly). The good thing about the social motivation is that the partners will download the app as well, and they may adopt it. That could make the app naturally viral.

Alpha Trainer also has workouts that you can do that are separate from your customized workout program, such as core workouts, bodybuilding, sports training etc.

“People who have a strong network are many times more likely to hit their goals,” Kim said.

The program also has its own “gamification” features, using game mechanics such as XP (experience points), levels, earned or purchased virtual currency, gifting, and leaderboards. That is all aimed at making the app more engaging for users.

The company is self-funded by Kim and it has six full-time and part-time employees.

In fact, gamification boosts commenting 13 percent, social sharing to Facebook, Twitter, and networks 22 percent, and content discovery by a massive 68 percent.

“Sharing and comment are good for business, obviously,” Gigya marketing manager Victor White told me last week. “So having gamification tied in to to sharing and commenting is really valuable.”

Gigya offers social infrastructure services that gamifies sites as well as providing services like social login. According to the company, it touches 1.5 billion users monthly, and half of the ComScore 100 use its services.

Adding gamification to a site, of course, means giving users points, badges, status, and rewards for engaging in desired actions. Done thoughtlessly, it can seem random or manipulative. Embedded intelligently into the core of a site’s purpose, however, it can enhance the user experience and significantly boost both engagement and user growth.

But you have to be careful, White says.

“We have limits in place so users can’t ‘game’ the system and so they don’t spam all their networks in order to level up,” he said.

“Leveling up” is a term from gamer culture, where in order to achieve higher status, gamers must defeat multiple levels or engage in sometimes repetitive tasks. Apparently, some people do this on gamified websites for status, to get some kind of physical reward, or simply to hit the leaderboard.

Commenting and sharing are pretty obvious and simple. But the activity feed is something that many sites have not yet incorporated. It provides a form of social proof, White says, that a site and its content are worthwhile.

“It allows users to see what other socially connected users are doing on the site,” he said. “For example, ‘Victor just shared this article to FB.’ That’s a method of really increasing content engagement, and if you’ve integrated gamification into that, the user has more incentive yet to check it out.”

It also helps brands to identify and target their biggest fans, as they now can tie demographics to actual behaviors. For example, not only does a particular user live in a California and likes the Golden State Warriors, she’s also your top social sharer and has a ton of influence in her online network.

That’s why Pepsi used the solution for Pepsi Soundoff for X Factor and Super Bowl social media promotions, White says. And the social part is critical.

“Gamification needs to be tied to social,” White says. “It’s often thought to be social inherently, but it’s not – there’s a difference between getting a badge, and getting a badge and sharing it. One is social, and one is not.”

photo credit: compscigrad via photopin cc

Bunchball has led the way as a pioneer in “gamification,” or creating more engagement by putting game mechanics in non-game applications. Now the company is shifting more into the enterprise market as corporate customers embrace the trend to boost sales or motivate employees. And the latest release of its platform, Nitro 5.0, reflects this shift.

With the new Nitro, Bunchball has simplified its user interface so more people in an enterprise can create their own gamification programs, where sales managers can set the rules for a gamified sales experience and then proceed to fill out an easy-to-understand menu in order to launch the campaign.

While gamification has proven its worth in anecdotal examples, skeptics are plentiful. Market research firm Gartner recently predicted that by 2014, about 80 percent of current gamified apps will fail to meet business objectives because of poor design. Bunchball begs to differ.

Nitro first launched in 2007, but it hasn’t been particularly easy to use. Now it has a full set of functions and a dashboard that makes implementing campaigns easier, said Rajat Paharia, the founder of Bunchball, in an interview with GamesBeat. By 2010, more enterprises bought into the idea of gamification, and they began adopting it. One new feature is Nitro Studio, which has a more consumer-like feel for the user interface. At the end of 2011, Bunchball’s customer base was 90 percent consumer and 10 percent employee motivation. At the end of 2012, the ratio shifted to 60 percent employee motivation and 40 percent consumer.

“It provides a dashboard to capture everything you want to know about a campaign in one easy page,” Dan Katz, the director of product management at Bunchball, told GamesBeat.

The studio features a global search capability to access information, and it makes it easy to create challenges and then come back to them later again for use as templates for campaigns. It also has a lot of analytics and notification templates. And Nitro 5.0 is optimized for mobile devices.

Nitro’s platform reaches 70 million unique users and monitors 2.3 billion actions each month.

Katz and Paharia said they believe that gamification works well when you take an idea from games and apply it to enterprise activities. But creators of these campaigns have to be careful to make sure they measure and reward the right behavior. They believe gamification tactics are broadly applicable to a lot of companies, but the campaigns are not one-size-fits-all.

“It all has to be personalized,” Katz said. Paharia added, “You can’t take components, like Foursquare badges, and slap them on each other. You have to modify it for the context.”

And that’s what Nitro 5.0 tries to do. Heather Foeh, the director of customer culture at Bunchball’s customer Eloqua (a subsidiary of Oracle), said that Bunchball’s integrated analytics allows her to understand which gamification elements are working and which need adjustment. She can create custom challenges based on insights about engagement patterns.

Paharia credited his team with creating Nitro 5.0 and said, “I had nothing to do with it. They talked to customers and ran with it. This stuff just leapfrogs anything else”

Bunchball has 60 employees. Rivals include Badgeville and Big Door. A couple of days ago, the company said that it is partnering with Adobe to create a comprehensive solution to improve customer engagement.

Meanwhile, Paharia said he has a new book, Loyalty 3.0: How to Revolutionize Customer and Employee Engagement with Big Data and Gamification, coming out next month. Speaking at a recent Bunchball event, Forrester analyst Kim Celestre said that gamification drives engagement. And those features are involvement, interaction, intimacy, and influence. The engagement loop also includes actions, rewards, achievements, and motivations.

---

GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

---

Basis Science is announcing today it has raised $11.5 million in a round of funding for its wrist-based health tracker. The company launched the Basis website and health-tracking system in December and has been shipping units feverishly in an attempt to cull its waiting list for the popular devices. The investment is another vote of confidence in the rapidly expanding field of digital health.

The Basis wrist band functions as a watch, but it also lets you keep a watch on your health habits. The device has built-in sensors that let you monitor your heart rate, the steps you take, how much you sweat, and how many calories you’re burning as a result of your physical activity. Priced at $200, it sits at the high end of devices that are part of the “quantified self” movement, which advocates self-knowledge through measurement of the minute details of your life.

Basis has attracted a lot of attention, and the announcements today will bring it more. The company is adding Deepak Chopra, a healthy living advocate who has written 65 self-help books, and Esther Dyson, an investor and longtime technology analyst. The round was led by Mayfield Fund, with investment from existing investors DCM and Norwest Venture Partners. Tim Chang, a managing director at Mayfield, will rejoin the board of Basis. Chang helped Basis from its infancy and invested while he was previously working at Norwest.

Basis chief executive Jef Holove said in an interview with VentureBeat it will use the money to help meet production demands and scale the business. While other companies are making step counters, Basis Science has always been focused on helping people form lasting healthy habits, he said.

I’ve used the watch, and it can tell me at a glance my heart rate at any moment. It tells the time, how many steps I’ve walked during the day, and how many calories I’ve burned. I’ve also found it very useful at measuring my sleep, or lack of it, telling me something about my habits that I never tracked. I can charge it via universal serial bus while I’m wearing it at my computer, and the data automatically uploads to the web.

On the web, I can see my fitness data over time, including the number of minutes I slept during the night and whether I was interrupted or not.

“Most people in the Valley are sleep-deprived,” Chang said in an interview with GamesBeat. “Measuring sleep is turning out to be important.”

On the web, the data is “gamified” in its presentation, so that I can strive to beat my own records and unlock health goals as I make progress. Holove said he noticed his wife pacing back and forth late at night just so she could hit her daily average for steps. That kind of internal motivation means that the device is doing its job.

“We have an approach to how you make health part of every day,” Holove said. “It’s not fitness exclusively, or a device just for runners. It’s a 24/7 holistic health tracker.”

The watch itself is differentiated because it has a heart-rate monitor, which is also good for detecting whether you are asleep or not. It uses an optical blood-flow sensor that shines a light into the wearers skin and detects the amount of blood flowing. From that, it can deduce the heart rate. That information is something that the other step counters don’t have.

For now, that’s an advantage. But Apple is rumored to be working on its own iWatch, and Basis is going to need all of the investment and resources it can get in order to stay a step ahead of the  giant, which has become like the category-killing Walmart of technology.

Regarding Basis, Chang said in an interview with VentureBeat, “They are the company to beat in this space as the market is flooded with pretty pedometers and no differentiation. Apple could come in and crush the pedometer companies. If all you have is a pedometer, you’re going to get squished.”

Chopra is a heavy hitter when it comes to drawing attention. He has written numerous New York Times bestsellers, and he advocates a holistic approach to health. He is trained as a doctor of internal medicine and endocrinology and is a fellow of the American College of Physicians.

“People can now get a more complete picture of their overall health, with visibility into their activity and sleep, as well as important physiological metrics like heart rate,” said Chopra said in a statement. “This means Basis can offer a more engaging and insightful way for people to get and stay healthy.”

Dyson is known as a Silicon Valley insider (she was actually a guest on Bravo’s ill-fated Startup: Silicon Valley reality TV show). She is an angel investor, entrepreneur, and frequent commentator on health care and health technology. She was also an early proponent of quantified self.

Other advisors include Kevin Colleran (one of the first 10 employees at Facebook), Kai and Charles Huang (creators of Guitar Hero), Patrick McGill (media and entertainment industry veteran), Daniel Kraft of Singularity University, and Jeff Rosenthal along with his co-founders of entrepreneur organization Summit Series.

To date, Basis has raised $20.5 million in revenues. The company hasn’t reported its sales so far, but Holove said that it is working on bringing down its waiting list, which is in the “five figures.” Over time, Basis is going to collect a lot of big data about our bodies.

“The first few weeks of data is encouraging,” Holove said. “People are adopting healthy habits.”

Jesse Schell, a game designer and professor of entertainment technology at Carnegie Mellon University, is one of the leading academic thinkers and communicators in video games. He raised his profile in 2010 when he gave a talk, “Beyond Facebook,” at the industry conference the DICE Summit that got more than a million views on sites such as YouTube and TED.

“That was shocking to me because I’m a college professor, and I’m not used to having people listen to what I say,” Schell, who is also the chief executive officer of Schell Games, said at his second appearance last week at the DICE Summit 2013.

In his 2010 talk, he urged Zynga to go to real-money gambling. That turned out to be prescient. He also predicted the iPad would fail because it was like a Swiss Army knife that didn’t do any one thing great. That prediction was a dud. He also foresaw that gamification, where non-game companies used game-like mechanics to spur customer engagement, could be applied to such a large swath of activities in the real world. That spurred the creation of a gamification industry, which was a strange side effect since Schell wasn’t saying this was a good idea at all. He also predicted an onrush of “authenticity,” something that fans expect and want from all of the entertainment, products, and services they embrace. His message in 2010 was that “games have crept out and are going everywhere.”

At this year’s DICE, Schell returned with a talk on “the secret mechanisms,” which was loaded with a million ideas and a million expert opinions. He made some keen observations about the hype curve and what’s hot in games. He noted that Zynga was hyped, it crashed, and everyone dumped on it, and it may now be poised for a more realistic comeback.

Schell thought that the gamification hype was off base because those companies are applying a one-size-fits-all solution, and they are failing to consider the nuances in what motivates people. He believes game designers carefully study the psychology of seeking out pleasure and how it is different from avoiding pain. Done poorly, gamification can be as dumb as “chocofication,” or making vegetables sweet so kids will eat them.

A good way for developers to entice gamers is to invite them to engage in plans, like figuring out how to reach goals in titles. But Schell worries about the mad rush into free-to-play games — not because it’s a good way to reach a wider audience. Rather, he worries about properly motivating players and distinguishing between work and play. When players want a game so much that they’re willing to pay $60 upfront, there’s nothing wrong with that. But if you create a free-to-play game and then create frustrating hurdles so that the player is forced to pay money in a microtransaction, then it becomes a pain. If you trick players into playing a game that forces them to pay, they may resent you and quit.

“There are different channels in the brain for seeking positive consequences and avoiding negative consequences,” he said. “These games promise you utopia, and then you find yourself in chains. That’s the part that’s frustrating.” It would “suck” to make a game like Skyrim into a free-to-play title where you have to buy things to make progress. He pointed out that Disneyland started out with tickets, or microtransactions, and then shifted to a single ticket price. Disneyland’s revenues have gone up because people like to pay one price up front and then do whatever they want. Payment systems have to be fair.

“People are willing to sacrifice to get into utopia,” Schell said. “Every single one of us is searching for utopia … . In utopia, you don’t screw people out of nickels and dimes.”

To get to that utopia in games, Schell advocates creating social games that don’t use gimmicks to get you addicted. Rather, he wants social gaming that makes you feel more connected to friends and family. He believes games with magical interfaces will be appealing. And he wants companies to make people into better people, or the people they want to be.

“We are shifting into an enjoyment-based economy,” he said. “And who knows more about making enjoyment than game developers. Fake marketing bullshit isn’t going to work anymore. You have to bring people to the promised land. Then you will be in an excellent place.”

Schell hasn’t figured everything out. He tried his hand last fall at an idea that allowed players to suggest the course of a game that designers were creating, episode by episode. Schell Games created Puzzle Clubhouse to crowdsource games, but it didn’t work out. Schell Games is moving on to an interesting new idea that allows players to propose their own ideas for a game that professional developers can then create.

After his talk, we caught up with him for an interview. Here’s an edited transcript.

GamesBeat: Tell us about pleasure and pain pathways and why it matters in games. 

Schell: For me, it was a huge insight that, when you’re looking at the neuroscience of the brain, we have different systems for seeking out pleasure and different systems for avoiding pain. When we think about it as designers, we just think about it as, “Oh, we’re incentivizing the player.” We think about just one thing. But you can feel it as a player when it shifts over.

This is one of the problems with free-to-play. It lures you in initially with pleasure-seeking or reward-seeking behavior, and then it gradually shifts over to pain avoidance. Don’t let your friends down. You’ve got this, and you might lose it if you don’t do something. You plant the strawberries, and if you don’t harvest them, you’re going to lose the money and everyone’s going to see your wilted crops.

GamesBeat: This is what winds up not being fun — or frustrating players.

Schell: It’s part of the tool for slow seduction of players into something that isn’t fun anymore. Something that starts out fun becomes gradually less fun. You still want to do it as much. If you’re looking at the player incentive, it stays level, until one day it suddenly drops off. I love the way [my colleague] says it. People don’t just stop playing Facebook games. They divorce them. That’s why.

GamesBeat: Is it similar to gambling in that way? Gambling lures you in, but it doesn’t wind up being that much fun.

Schell: For some people, it does. You could draw the similarity to if you’re gambling and you fall behind. Initially, you start out, and you’ve got your pot of money. You hope to leverage it into a big win. I think about gambling a lot because it’s interesting, and it’s hard to think about. If you go in with a pot of money and you say, “If I lose this all, it’s OK,” then you never get into it. If you go in and you say, “I’ve got this much money, but I don’t want to lose it all. I’m OK with putting up half,” but then you feel like you should dig in to that second half, then you get into that bad place of pain avoidance. “I gotta get my pot back, or I’m screwed. I shouldn’t have bet the company payroll on this.”

Pages: 1 2 3 4

Today, it jogged out its new 360/365 platform that seeks to keep employees engaged with their physical well-being at all times.

Keas is used by businesses to create and manage their workplace health programs. The system promotes healthy behavior and teamwork by rewarding people for achieving simple exercise and nutrition goals through games and social motivation.

The latest product update seeks to take a comprehensive and personalized approach to workplace wellness. Upon signing up, employees take a health risk assessment to generate a detailed user profile. The technology then generates custom goals, objectives, and recommendations accordingly. As for the 365 component, Keas seeks to be an integrated part of an overall healthy lifestyle, even away from the office. It provides games, fitness challenges, and educational content that are accessible on multiple channels.

Unhealthy habits can lead to lower productivity as well as higher health costs, so it is in the enterprise’s best interest to promote wellness programs. Accordingly, Keas doubled its customer base in the fourth quarter of last year and increased registered users by 282%. Keas clients include Pfizer, SalesForce, Reed Elsevier, British Telecom, and The Cheesecake Factory, where I can only imagine the most significant challenge is to refrain from excessive consumption of cheesecake.

In addition to announcing record growth and its ramped up platform, Keas also formally introduced Josh Stevens as its new CEO. Stevens previously worked at YouSendIt, TicketsNow, AOL, and Time Warner and has experience in both the consumer and the enterprise space.

Keas was founded by former Google Health leader Adam Bosworth to promote corporate wellness in 2008. It has raised $17.5 million in institutional funding from Ignition Partners and Atlas Venture. The company is based in San Francisco, while its namesake the Kea parrot, resides in New Zealand.

You know more about sports than your friends, and now you can prove it and maybe even win some memorabilia in the process.

Today, Steiner Sports, a sports marketing service and memorabilia dealer, and developer SportsPicker released the Steiner Sports Pick’Em platform. It’s is a branded sports-challenge game available on Steiner’s website.

The idea is that players can compete for prizes (like an autographed picture of Yankee shortstop Derek Jeter) by putting their sports knowledge to the test. Sports fans sign up using their Facebook account and then pick the winner in a series of games over the next few weeks.

Steiner and SportsPicker hope this will encourage sports geeks to challenge their friends, which would bring more people to the Steiner website.

“With Sports Pick’Em, players are transformed into brand marketers while they’re having fun and competing for valuable Steiner Sports prizes,” said SportsPicker chief executive officer Oren Kantor. “Players are eager to display their sports knowledge, so they typically do the company’s marketing for them by using social media to invite friends and sharing the results of their picks. It’s a win-win for Steiner Sports and the players, who have a shot at winning amazing prizes.”

In addition to the Derek Jeter autograph, Steiner is also putting up a $250 Steiner Sports gift card as a prize.

This is another example of how marketers are using games and gamification to encourage customer engagement. Players respond more eagerly to brands when a friend introduces them to it. Steiner has found a method that is compatible with its existing fan base and one that should appeal to potential future customers.

---

GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

---

Ashok Kamal is cofounder and CEO of green social media marketing company Bennu.

When I told VentureBeat I wanted to write a piece about the rise of green gamification — the use of games to make sustainability fun and rewarding — they were skeptical. They’ve seen a lot of green-themed apps hit the market, but many are poorly designed and largely ignored attempts by brands to “greenwash” their image.

But amid these half-baked products, there’s actually some real, solid progress at the intersection of two of today’s most disruptive business forces: gamification and sustainability. And for those of us eager to see the masses go green – whether to save the planet, or just save money – it’s good news.

The growth of green gamification is being accelerated by forces ranging from the government’s Green Button promotion of energy-use data to the digital generation’s strong desire for smartphone apps that allow them to manage resource consumption.

Much as Nike+ Fuelband is turning exercise from a chore into a cool activity, a suite of green web and mobile apps are transforming the way people approach environmental stewardship. From startups such as Leafully to corporate alliances that increase energy efficiency, gamification is emerging as a powerful weapon to advance sustainability.

Whether working out or conserving water, actions become rewarding when they are measureable, engaging, and shared.

Not only are people driven to gain status and recognition by social sharing, but also there is positive peer pressure to avoid being a laggard. Do you want to be the house on the block with the worst recycling rate?

The Zynga of green gamification is Opower, a software player that processes big household energy data into a gamified interface that helps people reduce their power consumption and utility bills. The company partners with utilities to analyze data in over 50 million homes, and it closed out 2012 by saving users an estimated 2 terawatt hours of energy, or $200 million.

Greenbean Recycle is a Boston-based startup changing the attitude and behaviors about recycling on the campuses of some of the nation’s best colleges, including MIT, Harvard, and Tufts. [Disclosure: I'm an unpaid member of the company's advisory board.] Greenbean’s game mechanics, such as intercollegiate challenges and recycling lotteries, have resulted in up to a 40 percent increase of the recycling rate.

Moreover, Greenbean is cracking the code of one of recycling’s main hurdles: how to get people to recycle non-deposit bottles that don’t pay a redemption value. By posting leaderboards and rewarding the top recyclers, Greenbean’s collection is 30% non-deposit materials that would normally be destined for overcrowded landfills.

Other new green gaming companies that have raised millions of dollars in venture funding include My Energy and Practically Green, both of which use the social web to calculate environmental footprint metrics and reward users for their performance.

Even historically static sectors, such as academia, nonprofit, and small business, are embracing innovation through green gamification. Ocean explorer and activist Philippe Cousteau, in conjunction with Dr. Jeffrey Plank at the University of Virginia, have developed a massively multiplayer online game to simulate the impacts of human activity on the health of the Chesapeake Bay (the largest estuary in the U.S.). Players of the UVA Bay Game take on the role of key stakeholders – ranging from fisherman to regulators – to learn systems-thinking and collaboration.

Philippe, Dr. Plank and I spoke on a 2012 SXSW panel with Intel’s Carrie Freeman, who asserted that corporations can leverage the UVA Bay Game model to solve business challenges such as balancing company vs. community water needs. The UVA Bay Game developers recently announced a partnership with The Nature Conservancy to launch a new version of the simulation focused on a major Texas watershed.

While small business owners are often pressed for time and money, thousands across the country have joined the Green Business Bureau (GBB), which offers a gamified online sustainability tool that helps assess, manage, and report on a library of 400+ green initiatives. [Disclosure: The GBB is a client of my company.] One GBB member, NewMarket International, shaved $60,000 off its annual budget by following the adaptive survey’s recommendations and reducing packaging waste, among other green achievements.

The GBB’s technology also powers green business certification for nonprofit Green America and Intuit’s small business supplier network.

Gamification is still in its formative years, evolving to exhibit more purpose and tangible impact. As the sustainability movement also matures, stakeholders are realizing the potential of green gamification. In order to propel green into the mainstream, we need to make it enjoyable, accessible, and rewarding.

The main reason people play green games is that they are fun. A more sustainable world is the convenient — and welcome — by-product.

Ashok Kamal is cofounder and CEO of green social media marketing company Bennu. He has worked extensively with Fortune 500 clients and startups to develop game-based campaigns that promote sustainability while creating enterprise value. He is a frequent public speaker at events such as the White House’s GreenGov Symposium, South by Southwest, Gamification Summit, and Sustainable Brands. In February 2013 he will be presenting a workshop with Gabe Zichermann on “Green Gamification by Design” at the GreenBiz Forum in NYC.

photo credit: gadl via photopin cc

SAP doesn’t usually do much consumer software. Its enterprise software serves as the modern foundation for companies. But its analytics technology came in handy in creating an online dashboard for fantasy football fans.

SAP has provided its dashboard for fans who participate in the NFL.com Fantasy Player of the Year 2012 competition. The dashboard, which is live on NFL.com/Honors, shows the stats of the top eight finalists in a visually rich format. It combines SAP-generated analytics with NFL.com fantasy football data. It recognizes the football player that has outshined everyone else in fantasy football leagues.

The winner of the competition will be announced for Super Bowl XLVII at the second annual NFL Honors primetime awards special on Feb. 2 on CBS. SAP has all the data you’ll want on the finalists, with information from 16 weeks of fantasy football. It has overall season points, points per game, and average player figures in comparison to others who play the same position. The database also provides a week-by-week point graph, a quick analysis of each player’s performance and other data for fans. The site has gamification features (the use of game-like incentives for non-game applications).

“Fantasy football fans love stats almost as much as watching the action on the field,” said Jonathan Becher, chief marketing officer at SAP. “The SAP dashboard enhances the NFL.com Fantasy experience by distilling millions of data points and allowing fans size up their favorite players more easily. Soon fans will be able to use the analytical power of SAP to predict the most valuable players for their fantasy teams.”

In October, the NFL and SAP announced a multiyear marketing sponsorship, and the NFL will adopt SAP’s on-demand technology.

---

GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

---

No one likes their alarm clock. It might be functional, but it’s loud, and it occasionally wakes you up at the wrong time. Now, a new application called Wake-up Club is about to change how you feel about getting up in the morning.

Available for free to owners of Sony’s PlayStation Vita handheld gaming device, the application makes waking up fun — and it’s finally coming to North America today, according to the PS Blog. Gamers can personalize the virtual alarm clock with a tone and background theme that’s pleasing to them, so it’s a lot better than hearing the same dreadful buzzing every day. But Wake-up Club turns what used to be a relatively solitary activity — waking up — into a social activity where you earn in-game achievements, or Trophies, that reward you for getting out of bed.

Wake-up Club matches you with 12 other random players who have all chosen the same time to start their day. When the alarm goes off, tapping your bouncing onscreen avatar (the Vita has touchscreens on the front and back of the device) will let the others in your group know you’re awake, and from the virtual club room, you can see who else is an early riser and who’s catching some extra shuteye.

The players who wake up first can encourage those still sleeping to get up by “cheering” them on. As they snooze, other players’ avatars will show up on their screen, and they’ll have to swipe them away and tap their own to join the rest of the “awake” group.

It’s a great example of how gamification, or the use of gaming mechanics and ideas in nongame situations, can improve everyday living. You may actually want to be the first of your buddies to wake up from now on.

You can also tap on other people’s avatars to learn more about those players and even send a friend request. You can check your club records to track how many times you’ve woken up within five minutes, how many consecutive success you’ve had, and how long it takes you on average to get moving.

Players can get started with Wake-up Club by accessing the Vita’s “Settings” menu. From there, choose “Date & Time” and then “Date & Time Settings.” Make sure “Set Automatically” is on.

The more you play, the more chances you have of earning some impressive Trophies. The app features achievements such as being the first of your club members to wake up at least 30 times and achieving a wake-up time that’s faster than 3 seconds. Now that’s embracing a new day.

We’ve contacted Sony for more details and will update accordingly.

---

GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

---

These days, chances are if you mention gamification in conversation, you’ll invoke a bit of a debate. Everyone has an opinion — whether hyped, disputed, or applauded – on the benefits of gamification, the blanket term for motivating and rewarding participants in non-game contexts. In enterprise especially, the buzzword has seen widespread adoption in recent years and is credited with engaging employees, motivating behaviors, and driving innovation.

But while gamification might seem simple and basic in theory, applying it and designing a program tailored to fit your enterprise and unique business challenges take time and careful thought. Gamification is not slapping badges on the world; it is motivating salespeople or whomever the target audience is to focus on the right things. As Gartner recently noted in a webinar on gamification, “By 2014, 80 percent of the current gamified applications will fail to meet business objectives primarily due to poor design.” The main takeaway not being that gamification will fail businesses, rather that ill-considered or brash application of gamification will not motivate employees or drive your business’ bottom line.

That’s where meaningful gamification comes in.

Salespeople are fundamentally competitive; gamification plays right into their ambitious nature, so participation in motivational rewards campaigns is not much of an issue. The imperative first step is designing an impactful gamification program. Before applying gamification tactics to your business, take a moment to evaluate behaviors that are essential in your sales force and instrumental to addressing your business challenges. This is a key part of the process. Once the focus and ideal behaviors are identified, then you can move forward and get to the actual application of gamification techniques.

We’ve identified 7 simple steps to implementing meaningful gamification.

1. Entertain: Make the program fun and interesting for sales reps.
2. Simplify: As we’ve stressed, stick to the motivating behaviors originally decided upon. Focusing on too many behaviors gets confusing.
3. Keep it top of mind: Share status updates regularly among sales teams.
4. Real-time results: Allow salespeople to always know where they stand by making the contest transparent and in real-time.
5. Don’t depend on it: Always encourage key sales behaviors — layer on rewards to amplify them when needed, but do not depend on gamification contests to motivate your reps all the time.
6. Make it social: Encourage team members to share how they’re doing — a little trash-talking is OK.
7. Real rewards: Virtual rewards are fun, but include some real prizes, too.

When gamification is appropriately applied, it does not only boost the number of data entry points per the hypothetical example but can also impact employee motivation, result in better marketing efforts since the data entered is more accurate, and increase staff retention because employees are more engaged.

So yes, gamification might currently be associated with a lot of hype. But we’ve seen evidence of the positive impacts of meaningful gamification firsthand and expect it to continue to drive businesses from the bottom up by rewarding motivation, innovation, and focus.

Bob Marsh is the CEO of LevelEleven, a sales gamfication and CRM solutions company that has the #1 ranked gamification app on Salesforce’s AppExhange: Contest Builder. LevelEleven was incubated by ePrize, where Marsh managed sales teams for 13 years. Follow Bob on Twitter @BobMarsh5.

---

GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

---

Parents and children are forever locked in battles over household tasks. ChoreMonster publicly launched today, just in time for the New Year. It turns chores into an engaging game. The company also announced that it has raised a total of $1.125 million in seed funding.

Using the ChoreMonster suite of apps, parents can get their kids “begging to do their chores.” Moms and dads set up a digital point system that translates into real-life rewards. Kids earn points when they complete a specific task and then redeem them for rewards like a hug, ice cream, a new video game, or a fun excursion. The kids also have access to their own dashboard, where they can track their chores and progress towards their goals. In addition to points, children also collect interactive monsters.

During its five-month private beta, kids completed 314,600 chores on ChoreMonster at an average of 11 chores per week (see infographic below). The top 5 chores were making the bed, picking up after themselves, cleaning the bedroom, helping to feed pets, and taking care of dirty laundry. The top rewards were ice cream, cash allowance, movie night, sleepovers, and computer time.

Despite the fact that the system takes away any intrinsic motivation kids may have to help out, parents are excited by how much easier it makes household care. Founder Paul Armstrong wrote in a blog post that his goal is to improve life for both parents and their kids.

“The arduous task of getting our child to do a chore becomes a war,” he said. “We get tired of nagging and fighting while our child is exasperated and worn out; and managing a chore becomes more of a chore than the act itself!  The solutions are often more about what we parents understand than what our children understand. Our desire isn’t to make a parental chore management tool — while that is part of our strategy and goal, it isn’t the solution to the problem. Our goal is make a lifestyle enhancer.”

The redesigned web app is live today and the updated iOS app is on the way. It is free to use, although a premium version is available for $4.99 a month. This investment was raised from CincyTech, Vine Street Ventures, and other angel investors. ChoreMonster is based in Cincinnati. Competitors include You Rule, iReward, HighScore House, and Chore Hero.

In contrast to our article on the biggest game stories of the year, these aren’t individual events affecting a single company. These trends surfaced multiple times during the year with different companies. But the patterns were similar and, when viewed as a group of related events, they signaled something larger happening. We’ll try to explain why these trends mattered.

Mobile becomes the major platform to target

Mobile game companies were once too small to be noticed. But with more than 821 million smartphones and tablets selling this year (according to market researcher Gartner), the mobile game market is too big to ignore now. New devices like the iPad Mini will only make the this market more interesting.

Rovio hit the big time with more than a billion copies of Angry Birds downloaded (it launched Angry Birds Star Wars, pictured at top, this year). Zynga shifted gear in a big way into mobile games, but so far it hasn’t been able to extend its dominance in Facebook games to mobile. With a wide-open market up for grabs, everybody is entering it. That includes entertainment giants such as Disney, which had five No. 1 hits in the past year, as well as established mobile leaders such as Electronic Arts and Gameloft. Joining the party is a raft of new startups. It’s also increasingly common to see established companies such as King.com test their ideas on social networks and then launch the successes on mobile.

Companies are following the users, with 44 percent of people now playing mobile games. “Mobile first” is becoming a more common strategy, and 42 percent of game startups are now focused on mobile gaming. In this environment, getting lots of users matters as does monetization strategy. No longer can developers rely on just getting lucky. But getting repeat hits is a great challenge. If your company hasn’t expanded into mobile, you may have a new chief executive officer soon.

Crowdfunding revives midsized developers

A slowdown in venture capital funding (in the wake of Zynga’s market crash) meant that developers had to get money from somewhere. Many of them turned to Kickstarter, the crowdfunding site that allowed them to raise money from fans. The site churned out millions of dollars in funds for midsized developers who couldn’t get money from publishers. These developers — from Tim Schafer’s Double Fine Productions (Schafer is pictured right) to Brian Fargo’s inXile Entertainment — had big fan followings that allowed them to tap the crowd.

The amount of funding raised was impressive, with Ouya leading the way at $8.3 million for its Android-based game console. But there were plenty of Kickstarter campaigns that failed. In all of 2011, game companies raised $3.6 million on Kickstarter. In 2012, more than $50 million had been raised as of August. The success of Kickstarter led to new game-focused crowdfunding sites such as Gambitious and Gamesplanet Lab. Chris Roberts tried a hybrid of a Kickstarter campaign and a fundraiser on his own site for Star Citizen. If these crowdfunding methods take off, developers will have more alternatives beyond traditional game publishers when it comes to funding their creative visions. Crowdfunding could disrupt venture capitalists, or at least keep them more honest.

Game studios cut back as the console cycle comes to an end

Retail game sales fell at double-digit percentages compared to the previous year for practically every month of 2012, and that was the case even though 2011 sales weren’t anything to brag about. Nintendo recognized the pattern and launched its Wii U console just in time. But Microsoft and Sony waited, and that has made life tough for a lot of traditional game studios.

Layoffs were the result. Job cuts spread far and wide, hitting companies including Microsoft, Glu Mobile, Foundation 9′s Backbone Entertainment, EA-BioWare, PopCap Games, Trion, Petroglyph, THQ, Sega, and Blizzard Entertainment.

The game industry has always been about winners and losers. These companies cut their losses and positioned themselves for the road ahead.

Cloud gaming has a mixed year

OnLive carried the flag for cloud gaming for many years. In 2010, it launched a cloud gaming service that would allow people with low-end computers to play high-end games that were processed in a data center and then streamed as videos to the players’ screens. The cloud would allow players to log into their games from anywhere and play as long as they had a good Internet connection. OnLive beat its milestones and surprised the skeptics for a while, but it hit the wall in August, running out of money. The company changed hands and suffered a big setback.

Fortunately, rival Gaikai managed a great exit, selling out to Sony for $380 million. By year end, CiiNow revived hopes by raising money from Advanced Micro Devices for its cloud gaming software, aimed at heading off some of the problems that OnLive encountered. Playcast took cloud gaming services into international markets, and Big Fish Games launched a casual cloud gaming service.

Gamification pumps up

Gamification is defined as using game-like mechanics to increase the engagement of nongame mechanics. Market researcher Gartner warned that 80 percent of gamification efforts could fail. But that rate isn’t so scary considering the percentage of games that fail. But the fact that Gartner cared about gamification at all was a sign of growing awareness.

Many hope that gamification will catch on big time in the enterprise. Consulting firm Capgemini offered a big endorsement when it said it would help companies gamify their sales and other processes. Gamification services firm Badgeville scored $25 million in funding as its business took off. As more corporations adopt gamification, the culture of game playing will spread far and wide. It could also take off in fields such as sales, marketing, web design, fitness, and education. Gamification is cutting through the hype, and it could gather further momentum in the coming year as long as companies stay focused on real business.

Social casino games spread like wildfire

Social casino games gained traction this year, fueled by investor speculation that such games could benefit from the coming legalization of online gambling in the U.S. There are a lot of barriers to be overcome in this quest, but that didn’t deter the hopeful.

Zynga has the largest social casino game with Zynga Poker, with 31 million monthly active users. But it got a lot of company after the Justice Department unexpectedly broke down one barrier when it ruled a year ago that online gambling could be legal in the U.S. as long as states passed laws permitting it. In January, IGT paid $500 million for Double Down Interactive, a social gaming company with only 70 employees.

After that, dozens of new startups received funding for their social casino and sports-betting games. Analysts report that social casino games will generate $1.6 billion in revenue this year, and that will steadily grow over the next several years. Betable has cut deals with five social casino game companies to convert their titles into real-money gambling games. The company tracks more than 2,000 social casino games worldwide. Zynga’s stumbles slowed down the enthusiasm, but Facebook embraced the trend too when it allowed Gamesys to launch a real-money gambling Bingo game on Facebook in the United Kingdom.

Zynga’s crash took some of the air out of this bubble, but many are still betting that online gambling will give a big boost to the social casino game companies, and visa versa. Zynga itself is betting big on online gambling, and so is Facebook. We’ll find out next year if this trend has staying power.

Online triple-A games gain critical mass

When League of Legends debuted in 2010, it started a revolution that drew hardcore gamers away from their consoles to play an online battle arena game. It grew and grew, and publisher Riot Games was acquired by China’s Tencent for nearly $400 million. The hardcore online tank-battle game World of Tanks, published by Wargaming, grew by more than 27 million players this year to more than 45 million by the end of 2012. Those titles were helped along by livestreaming on Twitch, and they developed big followings among fans who played the games in eSports tournaments.

That made everybody stand at attention. New hardcore online game companies such as Meteor Entertainment, the publisher of Hawken,
have jumped on the opportunity. More promising hardcore online titles are on the way from companies such as Rumble Entertainment, Crytek, and others. These are the games that will give $60 console titles a run for their money, and they may prove very disruptive in the long run.

Not all the hardcore titles have caught traction. Microsoft’s Flight simulation game didn’t catch hold as a free-to-play title, and it came crashing down to earth.

MMOs go free to play

Massively multiplayer online games lived off the subscriptions of gamers for years. World of Warcraft soared past 12 million subscribers in 2011. But in 2012, gamers warmed up to the attractions of free-to-play games, where users play for free and pay real money for virtual goods. No longer were they willing to pay $10 or $15 a month. One after another, the marquee MMOs moved to free to play.

These included Dungeons & Dragons, Everquest, Vanguard, Star Trek Online, and others. Blizzard made the first 20 levels of World of Warcraft available as a free-to-play title. And even Star Wars: The Old Republic, developed over six years at a cost of more than $200 million, was forced to go free to play. World of Warcraft has slipped to 10 million subscribers, and it may not be long before it too will have to go the same route. The competition in the online world is stiff, and it remains to be seen if the free-to-play gamers will spend enough to make these games viable. But there’s no turning back.

Third party game publishing migrates to mobile

To increase their chances of getting a hit amid a sea of mobile games, publishers are setting up more third-party services in order to scoop up the talented developers who prefer to work on the outside. As its core casual games market slowed down, Zynga moved fast to set up third-party publishing for both social network and mobile games. Its slate of titles included midcore titles such as Row Sham Bow that were outside of Zynga’s core focus.

Third-party alliances were a popular way to make strategic moves. Activision moved into mobile by setting up a third-party mobile game publishing platform operating in a partnership with Flurry. Red Robot Labs (founders pictured right) set up a publishing operation based on its successful location-based mobile gaming platform. Playsino set up a third-party operation for casino games. TinyCo, Tapjoy, and many others also set up similar platforms.

The pattern reflected the need to diversify beyond a company’s core development teams. The third-party publishing made sense for developers who wanted to stay independent but take advantage of a partner’s distribution reach. This third-party publishing is a great way to play the field and play it safe at the same time.

Gaming goes global

Peter Relan, the chairman of incubator YouWeb and its portfolio company CrowdStar, argued that companies could reach billion users by leveraging social, mobile, and international game markets. Many other game leaders realized that, and 2012 was the year when they expanded far and wide beyond the usual international markets. Gaming took off in Brazil, Russia, China, and India. But the market in Turkey and the Middle East gave rise to strong companies such as Peak Games.

Japan’s Gree and DeNA expanded into the West, spending heavily on acquisitions. By the end of the third quarter, DeNA was generating $627 million in revenue per quarter, so it had lots of cash to throw around. Tencent, the huge social media company in China, expanded into the West by taking a stake in Epic Games, the creator of the Gears of War console series. And likewise, industry leaders like Electronic Arts took their games into China via relations with Tencent.

Companies that go global have an extra leg to stand on when times get tough. Zynga failed in Japan. Had it succeeded, it might have withstood the financial storm that struck when its core Facebook market slowed.

---

GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

---

In the workplace, most employees have been exposed at one point or another to various personality profile tools like Myers-Briggs or DISC assessments to help determine which roles best suit their strengths. People tend to be more engaged and perform better in jobs that are aligned with their interests and personalities. For example, outgoing people might gravitate towards sales, while introverts might focus on more analytical roles.

Interestingly enough, in the world of games, research has been done to analyze the link between a person’s personality and interests and the types of games to which they tend to be drawn. Intuitively, we understand that different personalities are attracted to different types of games. For example, World of Warcraft players tend not to play Farmville and vice versa.

Let’s look at each of Bartle’s gamer types in more detail:

So what does this have to do with work? There has been a lot of buzz lately about how companies can increase employee engagement and performance when processes and systems are gamified. When thinking about applying game mechanics to work, managers must keep their audience in mind in order to develop an effective system. Bartle’s gamer profiles might not apply to every employee, but can provide a general framework for the types of game mechanics that will best motivate workers.

For example, the vast majority of players tend to be socializers and explorers, while fewer are achievers and killers. Salespeople, however, tend to be more achievement- and killer-oriented than most. They like friendly (and not so friendly) competition. They’re more independent and are motivated by rewards, awards, and trophies. So if their job was turned into a game, it would have to look very different from one designed for an accountant.

When designing any product or system, one size does not fit all — There are obviously a number of factors involved in the effective application of game mechanics, but keeping the audience in mind is one of the most important keys to success.

Mike Smalls is the CEO and Founder of Hoopla.net. Hoopla’s platform leverages enterprise data, advanced game mechanics, and sophisticated communication tools to cultivate a high performance culture and drive results.

[Top image credit: Webgrrls]

---

GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

---

MeritShare has figured out a new way to give employees recognition through game-like incentives. The Seattle-based startup is one more company that is offering “gamification” services, or making non-game applications more engaging with game-like rewards.

In contrast to other rivals such as Bunchball or Badgeville, MeritShare offers both online and offline rewards, with social elements and public appreciation aimed at helping companies motivate their employees. Most other employee recognition programs are relegated to internal networks, but MeritShare believes that transparent awards are better. The company allows an option for businesses to create public profiles for award winners. That helps the employee build a professional reputation online. The rewards even come up in search results about that person.

MeritShare has web-based software that can be used to set up awards for companies. The service includes a free tier for any individual or team to get started. MeritShare creates recognition communities based by corporate email domains. When a user registers and confirms a matching email, they are then able to access and give awards for that company. By creating a unique reward, the company can differentiate itself from others.

Based on one trial, more than 40 percent of employees at one company have given a thanks or an award to somebody else. Notification email open rates are above 50 percent. Employees can be given awards, shout-outs, comments, and points. Managers can share the awards via email weekly. The premium service starts at $99 a month.

Companies spend more than $46 billion per year on recognition programs, and $2 billion of that is for trophies and awards. They do that because recognition motivates employees and drives results. It becomes a part of a company’s culture. But surveys show that over 50 percent of people don’t feel appreciated at work and only 17 percent of employees surveyed think their companies do a good job of recognition.

It makes sense to reward employees in an environment where there’s a war for talent. Oracle recently estimated that the cost of replacing an employee is $104,000. And if that is correct, the cost for turnover in the U.S. is $2.1 trillion a year. The Society of Human Resource Managers lists employee engagement as one of the most important challenges for managers.

The company tested its system with San Francisco-based startup Vungle. The employees can nominate each other for the “Honey Badger” award, given for persistence and tenacity. Vungle maintains an online “award wall” where each nominee is posted. The founders (pictured at top: Zain Jaffer and Jack Smith of Vungle) pick the winner and the winner’s name is added to the physical trophy.

“MeritShare makes it easy to provide internal recognition and the social features help ensure more people know about key accomplishments across our growing organization,” says Ken Willner, CEO of Zumobi, a leading mobile media company and one of the top places to work in Seattle. “Our team partnered with MeritShare to develop a ‘ThankZ’ award that encourages peer recognition and we’ve seen tremendous involvement from our employees at levels.”

Nakao formed the MeritShare with Travis Pearl in July. The company has no other employees and it is self-funded. Rivals include OC Tanner, Bunchball, Achievers, and Badgeville. Nakao and Pearl met at WhitePages, a web and mobile publisher, where they launched a variety of web and mobile apps. Nakao was chief operating officer and president of the company, and prior to that he was vice president of music for RealNetworks. Pearl founded the domain monetization service Avidify and has worked as an engineer at Tippr, Active Voice, and Microsoft.

[Image credits: MeritShare]

---

GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

---

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Salesforce-owned customer support app Desk.com has added a new “achievements” feature to motivate service representatives to earn badges as they help more people.

Desk.com launched in January and competes with Zendesk and TalkDesk to give small and medium-sized companies cloud-based customer support management. With the super simple desktop and mobile apps, business can field questions and issues through phone, email, web, Twitter, Facebook, and other channels. While Desk.com wont reveal its number of customers, notable companies including Square, Spotify, Rdio, Pandora, Vimeo, Grooveshark, and Bonobos use the service.

The new achievements feature essentially is an automated system that rewards service reps for various accomplishments. Some examples are helping a certain number of customers, resolving a case in less than a minute, responding to certain number of emails, or helping a customer on the weekend. The new badges will go live for all Desk.com users on Thursday.

“This is about boosting customer happiness,” Alex Bard told VentureBeat. “It’s also a good tool to add greater productivity.”

Bard said that the company will look at adding further achievements, especially looking at ways to have satisfied customers give badges and positive feedback to the agents that helped them through a problem. He also likes the idea of making it so a boss that oversees service reps can reward them with badges too.

“This is our first foray into this, so this is just the tip of the iceberg,” Bard said.

Check out the 16 new Desk.com achievements below:

Call center photo via dotshock/Shutterstock

Bunchball rolled out what it called the “rock stars” of gamification on Tuesday at an event in San Francisco. Gamification is a service that Bunchball offers to clients who want to use game-like mechanics to increase interest in non-game applications.

Rajat Paharia (pictured), chief product officer and founder of San Jose, Calif.-based Bunchball, pointed to successes such as Adobe, which used Bunchball’s Nitro platform to gamify Adobe’s photo manipulation software, Photoshop. Adobe created missions that motivated users to learn different features of Photoshop. The result was a big increase in the number of people who completed a tutorial on learning the ins and outs of Photoshop.

While gamification has proven its worth in anecdotal examples, skeptics are plentiful. Market research firm Gartner recently predicted that by 2014, about 80 percent of current gamified apps will fail to meet business objectives because of poor design.

Paharia said, “Nothing could be farther from the truth.” He added that poor design will kill anything. And gamification done right can drive people to change their behavior, he said.

Paharia said he defines gamifcation as the “idea of motivating people through data.” Gamification can help measure and motivate, reward and recognize people, increase loyalty among employees and consumers, and guide and amplify behavior.

Forrester defines the insertion of game dynamics into non-game activities to drive a desired behavior, said Kim Celestre (pictured left), senior analyst at the market analyst company. She said that gamification drives engagement. And engagement’s features are involvement, interaction, intimacy, and influence. And the engagement loop includes actions, rewards, achievements, and motivations.

She also said that gamification will gain momentum as young folks get older, since 60 percent of people ages 18 to 30 play games. Companies are using it to drive down support costs, incentivize customers, foster employee loyalty, spread messages, accelerate product adoption, and increase the number of brand advocates.

Acknowledging the pitfalls of poor design, Paharia said some projects end in failure. Google News awarded badges for reading stories. It didn’t work out and Google ended the experiment in September (Because we don’t need no stinking badges). Banks also tried offering badges to people who used ATMs.

“It was a really bad idea,” he said. “My prediction is poor design will lead to the failure of anything.”

But Paharia thinks that good “interaction designers” (like the folks at his previous employer, product design firm Ideo) can create lasting gamification services.

“Gamification takes something that already exists, and you layer game mechanics around it to drive loyalty,” he said.

Jesse Redniss (pictured right), senior vice president of digital at NBC Universal’s USA Network, said that his team is trying to get people to get more engaged with TV shows as they play with their tablets while watching TV. Targeting campaigns to “second screen” users, Redniss wants to drive more interest in shows and spread awareness through gamification campaigns.

The Psych campaign, based on a USA Network TV series, encouraged viewers to use Twitter to talk about a killer in the show. Those who came in first place were given the “reward” of being killed by the “hashtag killer” on the TV show. Psych users engaged so much with the campaign that it was trending on Twitter within an hour of launch. The campaign won a Shorty award for the best social media for television. And ratings for the show also improved in its seventh season after the campaign, Redniss said. Higher ratings lead to more ad revenue. People came back three or four times a week to engage with the seven-week campaign.

“We started using Bunchball five years ago,” he said. “This was the first time ever that people vied with each other to get killed. We’ve got some proof here that social activity, great storytelling, and multiple platform access is generating real tangible business results for us.”

Here’s some examples of those highlighted at the Bunchball event:

Solar Winds’ Thwack online community rewards members for participating in beta programs and usability testing.

Zamzee creates apps that let kids become more active. Games can motivate kids to do that. The aim is to get them to exercise more and avoid a “ticking time bomb” of bad health, said Lance Henderson (pictured far right), chief executive of Zamzee.

Bluewolf is a cloud consulting firm for companies trying to implement Salesforce web services. The company increased collaboration internally and externally using Bunchball software, said Natasha Oxenburgh (pictured, second from right), social programs manager at Bluewolf.

Crowdflower has created a platform that gives out rewards to people who help perform small pieces of large tasks. Chris Van Pelt (pictured in green pants), founder and chief technology officer, said that the company tries to make the boring data-entry tasks more fun.

Tracy Trowbridge (pictured third from left), worldwide education programs manager at Adobe, said her task is to get young people to be more creative by taking advantage of more features of Adobe’s software.

---

GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

---

Gamification, the use of game-like mechanics to make non-game applications more engaging, of the business world has moved beyond its experimental phase. Add achievements, such as badges and leaderboards, to the sales process, and all of a sudden you have salespeople who are seriously motivated to win.

That idea is getting a big endorsement today as Capgemini Consulting, a giant enterprise consulting firm that specializes in transforming companies for the digital age, is teaming up with gamification provider Badgeville to accelerate the adoption of gamification in the workplace. The aim is to engage, reward, and motivate employees and customers.

“Engagement is a critical part of the technology infrastructure, and we help make sure the technology gets adopted,” said a Badgeville senior vice president, Kevin Akeroyd, in an interview with GamesBeat.

Capgemini’s digital transformation division will offer advice related to gamification to companies that are considering adopting it. Badgeville could then provide the gamification service based on the leads from Capgemini. Badgeville can set up its service to let companies reward employees for collaboration, workforce efficiency, and  loyalty.

“Serious businesses cannot ignore the transformative possibilities of gamification across their enterprise,” said Carter Lusher of Ovum Research. “The partnership between Capgemini Consulting and Badgeville signifies two global leaders teaming up to bring these powerful techniques to businesses aiming to modernize their entire employee and customer management experiences.”

Capgemini and the MIT Center for Digital Business recently studied more than 400 companies and found that digital leaders invest significantly in engaging the workforce about the digital transformation.

Maggie Buggie, a vice president at Capgemini Consulting, said, “The bringing together of Badgeville’s gamification expertise with our track record in large-scale strategic transformation is very exciting. Large and complex digitally enabled business transformations are often dependent on a significant cultural and behavioral shift, and the use of smartly applied game mechanics as part of a behavioral change program can tackle that need in an innovative, engaging, and meaningful way.”

Akeroyd said that his team worked with Capgemini over the past nine months to prepare for the partnership. He said that the alliance will give a nudge to companies that are considering new ways to motivate their workforces. Capgemini has more than 120,000 employees, including 3,600 working on digital transformation. Badgeville, founded in 2010, has more than 200 companies for its software-as-a-service gamification business.

---

GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

---

Plyfe launched earlier this year with the goal of doing something different with social rewards: What if you could earn real-world prizes simply by sharing content with friends, or by playing online games?

Today Plyfe is bringing its social reward platform for the mobile web, and in the process making it available to just almost every smartphone user. The company also announced new partnerships with the fashion site Haulerdeals, DermStore, and the United Nations Foundation.

Plyfe’s pitch is fairly simple: Sign in with your Facebook account at Plyfe.me, then look for available Plyfe games or prizes from a brand that you’re interested in. By accomplishing specific tasks, you’ll win tickets that could lead you to a significant prize. For example, you can try to win a meetup with productivity guru Timothy Ferriss by following the UN Foundation on Twitter and Facebook, or win a $25 Sephora gift card by doing the same for StyleHaul.

“Technology has empowered consumers to do things that they’ve never been able to do, and it’s actually creating new economies,” said Jeff Arbour, Plyfe’s co-founder and chief marketing officer, in an interview with VentureBeat. ” …We looked at that from a media perspective, we realized thre are all these consumers that have this ability to attract audiences, leverage audiences … We wanted to figure out a way to reward them in an authentic way.”

Arbour, and Plyfe’s other two co-founders, chief executive Mateen Aini and chairman Zaw Thet have been working to help brands succeed in mobile for the past decade. Before the iPhone hit in 2007, Arbour also worked with major brands to launch their first mobile channels.

For now, Plyfe seems like an intriguing idea, but it’s still unclear if consumers are willing to go through these social activities for the unknown potential of prizes. The company’s mobile website also isn’t the best experience — it’s sometimes slow, and the site’s formatting has trouble adjusting to different-sized screens. Arbour tells me an iPhone app is due next year.

New York City-based Plyfe raised $1 million in funding earlier this year from Initial Capital and General Catalyst Partners.

It’s unclear which a-little-knowledge-is-a-dangerous-thing moron thought this up, but whatever you believe about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, glorifying death — like assassinating a Hamas leader on almost-live YouTube yesterday — and making a game out of war is stupid, wrong, and unspeakably distasteful.

Here are all the badges you can win for participating in this sick game:

I’m going to lay my cards out on the table (stupid, I know) because I don’t want to be mistaken. I support Israel’s right to exist. I support Israel’s right to defend itself. I think that we in the West have absolutely no freaking clue what it’s like to live under threat of terror, rockets, and suicide bombings month after month, year after year.

But it’s not okay to glorify war. It’s not okay to broadcast killings as if they were some sporting match — yay, a goal for our team — or release images of enemy combatants with the word ELIMINATED pasted over top.

You shouldn’t lose your fundamental respect for human life, even in the midst of war, and terror, and death, and destruction.

This is not fun. It is not a game. People are dying. This is not Xbox, this is real life.

War is not a game.

photo credit: mugley via photopin cc; hat tip: ReadWriteWeb

Adding gamification just got a little easier.

Badgeville, a firm specializing in gamification products, announced the launch of Badgeville Embed today. This new offering from the company will allow developers and software providers to add many of Badgeville’s tools without a lot of effort.

“The integration of gamification concepts such as motivation and rewards often improves the usage of enterprise applications,” said Alan Lepofsky, vice president of Constellation Research. “Organizations of all sizes can use these features to enhance customer engagement as well as drive employees to get their jobs done more effectively. With the introduction of Badgeville Embed, Badgeville has made it easier for software vendors to add these engagement mechanics into their products without a lot of development effort. With gamification added, products often see greater adoption rates since people are more excited to use them.”

Gamification is the concept of adding rewards and accolades to non-gaming tasks. Think of applications like Foursquare that give users titles for performing certain actions in the real world. This type of user-retention method is intended to engage users and to build a relationship with them in the hopes that they will stick with a product.

Badgeville offers its customers an ease-of-use with a unified interface, robust security features, and in-depth behavior insights.

To date, Badgeville has raised $40 million in funding, including a $25 million round led by InterWest Partners in May.

---

GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

---

That’s a question social infrastructure company Gigya is looking to answer.

Gigya promises to make sites, services, and apps social, fun, and engaging via simple-to-integrate plugins, giving brands the ability to integrate social sign-on or gamification strategies. Now, a few months after announcing a $15.3 million fifth round of funding, the company is releasing new capabilities for brands to use the social data they collect and feed it into marketing automation systems such as HubSpot and Marketo.

Gigya, which is in a hyper-growth phase right now, already touches over a billion Internet users with its social plugins and architecture. As Victor White, the company’s senior marketing manager told me, Gigya is on target to triple revenue this year, having just completed seven consecutive quarters of double-digit sales growth, signing new clients in the past few months like Adidas, Time Warner, and Italy’s national airline, Alitalia.

Now the company is taking that momentum and building a partner ecosystem, which it is calling NEXUS. The make the millions of data points Gigya’s social tools collect on your site and your apps available to marketing automation tools.

For example, online retailers using Gigya’s tools can integrate Certona’s product recommendation engine into their site, which can then segment users based on rich social data, target specific groups and subgroups, and make better product recommendations. Another example would be feeding social data into an email marketing campaign, which sounds old-fashioned but is actually still one of the best ways to connect to customers and drive sales.

“By strengthening our relationships with top online marketing vendors, we are able to help our clients extract the incredible value that social data brings,” Gigya CEO Patrick Salyer said in a statement.

NEXUS integrates seamlessly with a number of launch partners out of the gate and offers an open API that allows businesses and partners to connect any existing technologies.

photo credit: Chris Pirillo via photopin cc

The company has developed Contest Builder, an app for creating sales contests that motivate employees to complete tasks such as finding new leads, making cold calls, and doing other things that fill up a pipeline with sales and eventually lead to better numbers overall. The software is an app on top of Salesforce.com, said Bob Marsh (pictured), the chief executive of LevelEleven, in an interview with GamesBeat. The app is currently the top gamification app on Salesforce.com’s AppExchange.

“We think we can serve this market better by going out on our own,” said Marsh.

Marsh showed up at the recent Salesforce.com Dreamforce convention in San Francisco as part of ePrize, a loyalty and promotions firm that was recently acquired by Catterton Partners. But now Marsh’s small division has been spun out as LevelEleven to focus on gamifying sales and call centers. That could result in big gains for companies that want salespeople to be more productive.

The Detroit Pistons used the app to gamify its ticket sales. After adopting it, the Pistons saw a 127 percent increase in the number of appointments set per day by its sales people.

LevelEleven will develop new products that provide gamification tools to motivate sales teams and then move on to other business departments. The startup is the latest example of Detroit’s rebirth as a hub for tech innovation. The company is based in Motor City’s innovation center in downtown Detroit.

The company is late to the gamification trend as Bunchball, Big Door, and Badgeville have focused on the gamification market for some time. They offer services that make it easy to turn any activity into something more fun and engaging by adding game-like leaderboards and challenges.

But Marsh said that his company will be laser-focused on addressing the problems of sales, which is unique. The company’s $1 million in funding comes from parent company ePrize and Detroit Venture Partners, which was founded in 2010 by Josh Linkner, Dan Gilbert, and Brian Hermelin and joined in 2011 by former Lakers basketball star Earvin “Magic” Johnson.

Linkner, the CEO and managing partner of Detroit Venture Partners, will join the board. The company also recently hired a new vice president of engineering, Kevin O’Hara, a seasoned Salesforce, cloud-computing, and web developer.

Marsh conceived Contest Builder as an app to motivate ePrize’s own sales team. The company introduced the app at Dreamforce in September 2011 and then continued to refine it over the past year. With it, a sales manager can create a contest and real-time leaderboard (like the one pictured at right) in a matter of minutes. The manager can offer incentives for sales people to make more calls, book more client meetings, find new sales leads, or close more sales.

“For 13 years, brands have relied on ePrize to guide them through evolving online, social, and mobile marketplaces. Gamification and rewarding behavior have been the foundation of our promotions and loyalty technology platforms. We’re proud that the constant innovation coming out of our company is driving Detroit’s economic growth, and this successful incubation and launch of LevelEleven is testament to that,” said Matt Wise, CEO of ePrize.

LevelEleven’s client list includes Comcast, the Detroit Pistons, Concur Technologies, and others. The company has six employees. Its fees vary based on the number of users and start at $5 per user per month.

---

GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

---

Mike Tinney is making jumps of a completely different kind. The former president of the online game company CCP Games North America (the makers of EVE Online) is going from leaps into hyperspace to jumping jacks with his new startup, Fitness Interactive Experience.

The Atlanta-based company plans to launch its first fitness “gamification” title, UtiliFit, in a closed beta test in December and then start an open beta in January, Tinney said in an interview with GamesBeat. This is part of a trend toward gamification, or using video game mechanics to motivate people to accomplish goals in non-game activities.

Advisers on the project include Tim Church, a national expert on exercise and preventative medicine; Reynir Hardarsson, founder of CCP; and Monte Cook, a well-known role-playing game designer (he once worked on Dungeons & Dragons).

“They’ve signed on to help the company get its product started,” said Tinney, who started the company in March. “There is a huge opportunity in digital fitness to bring more gaming into it. It’s all about creating and maintaining healthy habits. So you can control what you are eating better and increase your physical activity.”

He added, “When you align your activity against goals and do them time and time again, then you can achieve those goals. How quickly you achieve them depends on consistency and quality with which you do it. Video games have a unique intersection with that because they’re a very addictive activity. We’re trying to get people to do a mundane task again and again. Combining those two can be a game-changer.”

The first will be an activity-based game that helps people be less sedentary. It will encourage you to take small steps toward being more active. It will score you based on how well you do and rank you competitively against your friends, if you wish. You can also cooperate with your friends. It’s like a massively multiplayer online game meets cross-fit training, he said.

The company is targeting both gamers and nongamers. The U.S. Department of Health recommends that people exercise 30 minutes a day five days a week. Only 3 percent of Americans actually do that.

“It’s a disturbing number of people who don’t do exercise,” Tinney said. “We are making this app more accessible, and we are not limiting it to gamers. We’re seeing early traction in casual fitness and in the corporate wellness market.”

Tinney has a small team working so far, with three full-time employees and eight part-timers. He’s raising money. The game will target web browsers via HTML5, the lingua franca for the web. Rivals include Striiv, Nike, and a number of other fitness gaming and exercise-tracking companies.

“We want to keep the barrier to entry as low as possible,” he said. “We’re trying to focus a lot more on game design.”

Tinney left CCP earlier this year. Tinney has been directly involved in board and online gaming since 1993, when he was part of White Wolf Publishing. He managed White Wolf’s publishing and trading card game business. Iceland-based CCP Games (publisher of Eve Online) bought that company in 2006, and Tinney became the head of the company’s North American operations as well as some of CCP’s global operations.

[Image credits: the company]

---

GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

---

Gamification, or the use of game mechanics in non-game applications, has made its way to stock trading.

Kapitall has launched an online stock-trading site that makes trading stocks a lot less intimidating for people who aren’t familiar with stock trading. The basic idea is that trading stocks should be no more difficult than playing a video game. And if you practice at it long enough, you can become much more skillful than a neophyte stock picker. This clever approach to training people how to do something hard is another sign that the influence of gaming is growing and that gamification — delivered as achievement, badge, and leaderboard services to enterprises — has only scratched the surface so far.

“Financial services brands are delivering complex services to active traders who have experience,” said Jarrett Lilien, the chief executive of New York-based Kapitall, in an interview with GamesBeat. “We feel that’s a little unfair to smaller investors. We tried to simplify it because too much information is overwhelming.”

The user interface for Kapitall, pictured above, looks a lot more like a video game than an online brokerage account. That’s important for attracting people 35 and under, who are more likely to enjoy a game-like experience. Lilien said Kapitall draws a young set of customers, and roughly half are women.

When you first create an account, you play for free. You receive $25,000 in virtual money to get started picking stocks. When you aren’t trading with real money, you can do the experimentation it takes to understand how stocks move up and down over time. The first time I logged in, I went through a tutorial that showed me important numbers to notice like “price of profit.” That number is basically a forward price-earnings ratio, which divides a company’s stock price by its expected earnings per share 12 months from now. It is a measure of how good a deal a stock is. The lower the number, the better the opportunity to make money.

You can drag and drop icons onto a central work space dubbed a “playground,” where you can look at a lot of things at once. You can look at stocks on a superficial level or drill down on them. The tutorial also shows you how to compare different stocks with the press of a button. You can do so by using an “analyze” or “compare” tool. It’s easy to see analyst ratings at a glance, so you can see whether the bulk of analysts following the company recommend it or not. Purchasing a stock is similarly easy.

The second time I logged in, I found that my practice portfolio of $25,000 had turned into $24,996. But my return for that day was $9.63. A normal newbie investor would play around with the practice portfolio for a while and see if he or she had a knack for making money trading stocks. If they don’t, then they won’t lose any money. But if they can consistently make money over six months or a year, it might very well be profitable to convert the practice account into a real online brokerage account.

That’s where Kapitall makes money, and it gives you a series of missions to fulfill so that you can get more comfortable with trading. Some of the changes are intuitive. Rather than show a new investor a tile with a stock symbol, Kapitall has a tile with an icon on it. A stock ticker runs across the bottom of the page with real-time stock quotes. But the stock symbols are replaced with icons so that the company are more easily recognizable.

You can explore stocks by clicking on the icons of investment themes. Those icons include a portfolio of stocks that fit a particular investment strategy. If you want to invest in electric cars, you’ll see stocks like Tesla listed.

If I had any complaint about the way Kapitall looks, it’s that it doesn’t look enough like a game. But it has to balance the need to make its user interface flashy against the fact that a very different type of user will be playing this “game.” You can share your picks with others. But Gaspard de Dreuzy, who has the game experience on the team, said in an interview with GamesBeat that Kapitall is designed like a game, but it just doesn’t look like a game.

“Our market is likely going to skew toward women who are older,” de Dreuzy, chief innovation officer, said.

The video game experience comes from founder de Dreuzy, who started the company (under the name Stereo Scope) in 2008 with Serge Kreiker, Cordell ratzlaff, David Neubert and Sally Wood. Lilien, former president of E*Trade who has spent a career in stock trading, came on in August as chief executive and chairman. It launched its first iteration of its Kapitall web site in 2009 and it now has dozens of employees. One of its directors is Mike Haller, former senior vice president at video game publisher THQ, and an advisor is Bruce Shelley, a game veteran and co-creator of Age of Empires.

“The world doesn’t need another online broker,” said Lilien. “But there is an opportunity for one that brings a radical change to the usual model.”

“And to me, the user experience will be the next radical change,” de Dreuzy said. “We don’t really like the word ‘gamification’ because it suggests you do something on top of another site. In this case, we have built in the game technology from the ground up.

Real-world brokers are likely to give you a lot more attention. But if you want to sign up with Merrill Lynch, you’ll find that you have to put a lot of money down.

Their hope is to use gaming to change how people invest in the future.

So far, more than 100,000 people have logged in and created practice portfolios. Of those, 2,800 have created brokerage accounts. Over time, de Dreuzy said his company will add more features and applications. The way he sees it, the company has creating an operating system for gamifying online trading. And the applications will follow to make the users more and more engaged.

---

GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

---

Badgeville provides a platform for gamification that it says can help modify behavior. Over two years, more than 300 customers have adopted the platform.

Claritics, meanwhile, provides analytics to customers of Badgeville’s platform. The real-time analytics deliver information about the rewards that Badgeville offers to users and the impact that has on their behavior. Badgeville can then use those analytics to optimize a campaign for that user and others who are similar. And Badgeville’s customers can use the analytics to get better results from users in fields including retail, publishing, entertainment, health care, education, community, and other verticals. Claritics can help a company discern the lifetime value of a user and how that user brings others into an application.

“Badgeville has built an incredibly impressive platform for using gamification strategies to help companies reward any type of user behavior that promotes further brand awareness and intimacy,” said Raj Pai, the cofounder and CEO of Claritics. “Our goal is to help those companies get even more value from their gamification efforts by delivering actionable insights that help drive deeper engagement and more lifetime value from each user.”

“Claritics’ user intelligence analytics platform provides very flexible and powerful capabilities to address the needs for marketers to understand how to improve and promote deeper engagement with their customers” said Kris Duggan, Badgeville’s CEO. “This enables our customers to measure and improve the effectiveness of their gamification strategies in addition to identifying user groups who display highly differentiated behavior for future retargeting campaigns.”

Badgeville says that its customers typically experience 200 percent to 500 percent increase in metrics such has user-generated content, page views, retention, time spent on a site, and social referrals.

---

Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

---

It’s not a pretty topic, but bankers have to learn to be good about collecting money from delinquent borrowers. And the better at it they become, the more they’ll be able to lend money to (hopefully good) borrowers in the future.

So BankersLab has created a “gamified” training simulation — a game, really — to train bank employees how to do collections right. It’s not about who will pay a bank the money they owe it or the best way to get results as a Repo Man. Rather, the CollectionLab simulation helps bankers correctly forecast the impact of debt collection decisions over the lifetime of a bank. The game is part of the Serious Games movement or gamification, where game mechanics are used to improve engagement in nongame applications.

With the simulation, bankers can create competing teams that operate virtual portfolios over a 30-year period. They can test debt-collection strategies in real-world conditions.

San Diego, Calif.-based BankersLab tapped the expertise of Neil Seitz, a professor of finance at Saint Louis University and a pioneer in simulation games for the banking industry. He had created simulations based on spreadsheets, but BankersLab brought the decade-old games into the modern era. Seitz served as an adviser to BankersLab. Game designer Robert Zepeda, the founder and chief executive officer of PlayBasis, helped create the modern gamified simulation program, which is web-based.

As the number of delinquencies and write-offs remain stubbornly high, collections managers are faced with big challenges. Delinquencies on residential home loans rose to 10.61 percent in the second quarter, according to the Federal Reserve. The idea is to improve collection skills by turning the learner into a player, said Michelle Katics, the CEO of BankersLab, in an interview with GamesBeat.

“You can think of them as flight simulators for bankers,” said Katics. “They make decisions and see the impacts play out over years.”

To win, players have to operate the most profitable virtual bank with the most satisfied customers. Katics said bankers have to use their resources wisely. If they make a lot of risky loans, they’ll need to hire more collectors. But hiring collectors drives up costs.

If they can only make so many phone calls to delinquent customers, the bankers have to choose which people to call. Some need coaching or reminders to make their payments. The work requires expertise in staffing, collection management, resource allocation, economic analysis, and product growth. Each module in the game is linked to gamified course materials, online learning, and iOS mobile apps.

Is it fun?

“If you’re in this business and this is what you do, then it is fun,” said Katics.

She added, “The secret to successful delinquent collections is finding the right balance between cost and benefit while still maintaining customer satisfaction. We wanted to create a product that taught professionals how to confidently walk this tightrope.”

Other bank-related simulations address new kinds of products, asset liability, operational banking, agricultural banking, or local territories.

BankersLab was founded in January, and it has 20 employees. It is self-funded and has four founders: Katics, Kurt Gingher, Gail Galuppo, and M. J. Kim. A bank in India has already signed up to use the simulation.

---

GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

---

Education powerhouse Hobsons is acquiring Beat the GMAT, a website aimed at helping people pass the test required for admission into a graduate management program.

The purchase price wasn’t disclosed, but Eric Bahn, chief executive and founder, said in an exclusive interview with GamesBeat that the outcome was “very good” for the team. He said he looks forward to integrating the site with Hobsons’ larger educational properties and adding more vertical topics over time. The acquisition shows that education technology companies are still in favor when it comes to mergers and investments.

Bahn founded the site in 2005 in his Stanford University dorm room and built it into a resource for all things related to the GMAT (the Graduate Management Admission Test for those who want to earn an MBA, a master’s degree in business administration, among others). The site gets 2.5 million to 3 million unique visitors a year, or about ten times the usual 250,000 people who take the GMAT each year. While that number is small, Bahn says that the engagement of the users is very high and that the demographic profile of the users is critical.

“It’s a small and focused niche, but it is incredibly valuable,” Bahn said. “People who apply to business school are ambitious, have large incomes, and are prepared to pay more than $100,000 in tuition. There are lots of admissions consulting firms and schools that want to reach that audience.”

Beat the GMAT launched its MBA Watch feature, a directory of social networks for each business school, a year ago. Today, it accounts for 22 percent of the site’s overall traffic.

The site grew organically, with an investment of $4 from Bahn himself. It never raised any outside capital. The company has three full-time employees and four contractors. In the past year and a half, Beat the GMAT partnered with gamification vendor Badgeville to add game-like features, such as achievement badges and leaderboards. These pushed people to compete with their friends and study more. And it helped offset the loneliness and frustration that often go with applying for higher education slots.

“It more than doubled the time spent on the site,” Bahn said. “Gamification has knocked it out of the park for us. The GMAT isn’t a pleasant experience, but we have discovered that simple game mechanics can get people to study more.”

That, in turn, made Beat the GMAT more attractive to Hobsons, which is a decades-old firm that had more than $100 million in revenues last year and more than 700 employees currently. Bahn said that the company was profitable but started looking for money to raise so it could expand to other verticals. At the same time, it was looking for channel partners. It found Hobsons, which could be a partner in both respects.

Bahn said he has seen enthusiasm ebb and flow when it comes to educational startups. He has seen skepticism, but the profits in the sector are winning over other fans, and that’s important in Silicon Valley.

---

GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

---