Last week, 43 awesome people came and attended our 2nd gsummitX in NYC with great enthusiasm! There was so much excitement, one particular person came an entire hour early. Not entirely a big deal because, since we at GCo love you all so much, we provided the delicious taste of Sam Adams, Hoegaarden, Land Shark and great local pizza for the early birds to enjoy whilst networking. After happy and hearty servings of free pizza and beer at AOL Ventures (our venue Sponsor), attendees sat down to hear the first speaker. PS: Did anyone find the secret pepperoni and sausage slices?
Albert Balcells, SVP of Software Engineering at Next Jump, spoke about a new company initiative called 10xFactor. 10xFactor was designed as a competition to develop public speaking and presentation skills for engineers. Balcells walked through the evolution of the competition, talking about how Next Jump never even intended to gamify the competition from the get-go and how the choice to add gamification elements became the most sensible design choice. It would seem that the single most valuable addition to the 10xFactor competition was providing a prize that had the most intrinsic value to the employees participating: access to an exclusive mentorship program. The Next Jump engineers cared very much about winning the opportunity to gain self-improvement and valuable knowledge, making the first season of 10xFactor a stellar success.
Up next was our tech demo, featuring Memecube as demonstrated by Justin Schier, Chief Creative Officer at Dopamine Inc. If you attended GSummit 2012 SF this year, then you are already well-aware of the awesome conference-optimized twitter experience that Dopamine created for our GSummit attendees. Schier walked through the functionality of all Memecube features and then engaged in a great discussion with attendees for future uses and solutions for for the application.
Finally, the last and most exciting part of the Meetup (also known as the “meat & potatoes” of gsummitX) was our gamestorming workshop–Play for a Cause. Our guest nonprofit was the National Multiple Sclerosis (MS) Society, represented by Alexis Stone and Karen Drzik (both from the NJ Metro Chapter). At each gsummitX, our attendees are divided into teams and engage together to solve a challenge. The MS Society’s challenge…“How do we get companies to be more involved with MS?” Gabe Zichermann facilitated the brainstorming game and provided prizes for the top three solutions to the problem. After a timed 45 minutes of hard thinking and deliberation, winners were chosen through a crowd-voting process–with some of Gabe’s comedic commentary.
The three winners were:
- Orange Solidarity Avatar – where companies can work with the MS society and do a collaborative branding of each company’s logos and colors.
- MS LARP (Live Action Role Playing) Game – small and medium companies can hold MS-awareness events by having team building games and exercises. The kicker is that each team will be given a physical handicap that are symptoms of M.S. and will need to achieve their goals with the handicap.
- MS Kickstarter – would be an intranet crowdfunding platform in a large corporation, where people can donate money, based on employees’ personal stories about family or relatives and their experiences with MS.
The winners received prizes (MS swag, Gamification by Design, and reusable grocery totes) and the MS Society representatives received all the creative ideas that were presented at the event. The night ended on a wonderful note, as people were still talking gamification while riding down the elevator at AOL Ventures. If you missed this event, you definitely need to come to one of our future Meetups around the world.
Please feel free to leave any feedback about the event and even request some things you would like to see and check out the rest of the pictures from the meetup in our gallery. If you’re interested in speaking at any of our upcoming events, please fill out this FORM. If you’re interested in demoing your product at gsummitX, this is the FORM for you.
