Are Brain Waves the Next Step for The Quantified Self?

Activity trackers have become very popular among fitness enthusiasts, quantified-selfers, and gadget fans but are they making any sort of difference? I had mixed feelings about the Nike Fuelband when I reviewed it a year ago and Wired thinks it isn’t making you any healthier either. But maybe these glorified bluetooth accelerometers are missing a crucial feature: brainwave monitoring

Educating with WoW and Minecraft with Lucas Gillispie

The Gamification Revolution is the only live gamification webcast featuring Gabe Zichermann and fellow gamification experts every week. Join us and have all of your gamification questions answered by these experts.

This past week’s guest was Lucas Gillispie, educator and creator of Edurealms — a site dedicated to providing educational materials that make use of games like World of Warcraft and Minecraft. Check out the full video to learn about Lucas’ insights on using games in the classroom and some of the challenges he faces.

Be sure to catch tomorrow’s episode at 1PM EDT with Gabe for another gamification design QnA on the Gamification Revolution

What the Xbox One Means for Gamification

The successor to the Xbox 360 was just announced about an hour ago and we finally have a name for Microsoft’s next generation console: Xbox One

Many features about the Xbox One looked really impressive, especially the new high-fidelity Xbox Kinect sensor and voice commands but the most significant take-away for gamifiers is the presence of a TV tuner and a nifty little feature called “snap-mode.”

PromiseUP, the Gamification App to Help Keep Promises

Remember the promise you made to your mom that you would call every so often? What about the other time you promised your boss that would not be late for work again? Or that promise you made to yourself that you will quit smoking?

Many individuals are capable of keeping to their promises, but there are also many others who are unable to do so. The fallacy of making promises is that there is no one else besides the person who is being made the promise to that will hold the individual accountable for his or her actions. As there is a lack of an immediate feedback loop, it leaves the individual complacent in accomplishing their tasks and making good on their end of the promise. A new IOS app, PromiseUP aims to change that by helping people to fulfill their promises.

My Gamification Birthday Wish

Today is my 39th birthday.

When we started on this crazy gamification journey in 2010, I could not have predicted how large an impact our community would have in just 3 short years. What began as a shot in the dark (“I think there are some people out there who think that game concepts can improve business and the world”), has mushroomed into a real movement. Collectively, you have worked to design change in marketing, human resources, product development, strategy and business process. You’ve brought the best ideas from games, loyalty programs and behavioral economics to health, finance, education, government, loyalty and travel…just to name a few industries.

3 Ways to Make TV More Engaging Without the Second Screen

For people who still watch regular broadcast television, it has become very common to actually watch TV while simultaneously using your laptop, phone, or tablet. Savvy networks like USA/NBC have picked up on this and created gamified mobile companion applications to engage with users as they both watch TV and browse on the net. There are compelling case-studies that outline the efficacy of this concept, coined the second screen, but I have not really seen any other kinds of engagement tactics for viewers. However, I found inspiration for new possible ways from the gamer community, and more specifically, the Dota 2 community.

All Gamification Companies in the Buyer’s Guide Now Have Lead Generation

The Gamification Co Buyer’s Guide has been steadily growing ever since we first launched it back in November 2012. It’s the only comprehensive selection of gamification vendors with filtering elements to help you find the right partner to help you implement gamification into your organization.

Now that there are 60+ qualified gamification vendors listed in the database, we decided to celebrate this milestone by offering each vendor a free service upgrade to receive lead generation from their company profile.

New Seeds Startup Brings Gamification to Venture Capital and Microlending

The Jumpstart Our Business Startups (JOBS) Act is on the verge of altering the investment landscape, finally enabling startups to procure capital from investments that follow the model of crowdfunding sites such as Kickstarter and Indiegogo. The crucial difference is that the funds are given out as true risk/reward-bearing propositions.

The world of investment, at all levels, typically carries the nomenclature and ethic of gamification even though it is engaged in the serious business of real money. This means that it is a natural fit for gamification startups. Some are bringing unorthodox approaches to crowd investing that borrow ideas from an extremely fun and popular source – casual online games.

GSummit SF 2013 Recap with Jessie Rogers

The Gamification Revolution is the only live gamification webcast featuring Gabe Zichermann and fellow gamification experts every week. Join us and have all of your gamification questions answered by these experts.

This past week’s guest was GSummit veteran, Jessie Rogers. Jessie has been working with Gamification Co and has GSummit since Day 1.  In this week’s episode, Gabe and Jessie discuss how the gamification landscape has changed in two years and what it means for the future to come. We also get some insights about some of the speakers and behind-the-scenes information.

Check out the video below for the full interview.

Memecube’s Success as the the World’s First Real-Time Gamified Twitter App for Events at GSummit 2013

This past GSummit 2013 in San Francisco conference was again powered by the world’s first real-time gamified twitter app for events, Memecube. Running on its second iteration, Memecube 2.0 allowed all the attendees at GSummit to engage with the best speakers and ideas coming out of every session in a contained Twitter environment. 40% of all GSummit attendees engaged with the application, creating 4775 tweets with the hashtag #gsummit and an additional 4135 check-ins to food truck vendors and sponsored presentation booths.

The Term Gamification: Why I Hate It AND Why I Love It

If one area of engagement can be taken for granted, it’s the one when people engage again in passionate discussions on the term “gamification.” It doesn’t matter if you are coming from inside or outside the industry. It seems to engage. Given that, alone that would already a big case for keeping that term. But let’s not hasten the things, let me go through that step by step

Recently Kris Duggan, co-founder and former CEO Badgeville and gamification-evangelist (ok perhaps more “whatever-you-call-it-but-not-gamification”-evangelist) took up the torch to lead the latest rally against the term. Kris and others have certainly not one, but many good points when they talk about the initial reactions of corporate (and we only talk about “boring” enterprise) when they are confronted with that term. And I agree with many of them. And knowing Kris, who in the spirit of every innovator, needs to be convincing, smart, and sometimes a little bit of a prankster, is certainly one of the best minds to open that topics for an honest discussion