It’s become quite clear to all sorts of businesses and organizations that adding an element of gamification to their interactions with their customers can be a real asset to them. Even NASA is taking note of the success of gamification, and working to use it to their advantage.
More and more businesses are employing gamification to get customers interested in their products and services. Schools are looking to startups like Amplify to encourage their students to be more engaged in learning, inside and outside of school. The quantified self movement has even evolved to start measuring your brainwaves. Everywhere you look, the world is turning to games to improve participation and morale. Could there be real use for these ideas into your everyday life? These two new companies are saying yes, you can gamify your life.
Byki (stands for “Before You Know It,”) is a free — premium version available — language-learning application. The software uses a clever combination of animated flash cards and robust gamification, which involves the learner in a multi-sensory vocabulary-building experience.
Download the free version of the application after choosing from an array of 67 languages — Afrikaans to Zulu — and start right in with the basics of situational vocabulary learning, common phrases, asking directions, etc. The gamification element is what makes experience especially unique
This Wednesday, LRN hosts an evening with Rajat Paharia as he discusses the release of his new book, Loyalty 3.0.
Date: June 26
Time: 7:00
Location: LRN Headquarters
745 5th Avenue, 8th Floor
New York, NY 10151
Come join Bunchball for the release party!
Duolingo is a new learning tool that uses gamification to teach and reinforce language learning. Say that you’re a beginning learner and want to build your vocabulary and translation skills. Log into duolingo.com, sign up and begin learning Spanish, French, Portuguese, German or Italian.
The program cleverly incorporates gamification by awarding points for completing vocabulary exercises and keeping track of the learner’s progress through line scales and level badges along the way. Log in each day for new sessions to view previous progress, your current level and to do optional review practice. The website has a desktop version that works on both the Mac and Windows platforms. You can also go mobile and run the learning program on either iPhone or Android devices.
And the best part? It’s all completely free.
There’s already an entire library of information about game mechanics and how startups have successfully implemented gamification. If you’re considering gamifying an experience, however, you should probably know the ways you can reduce its efficacy. That way you can either choose differently, or if you really want to test social experiences you can see how well people respond to gamification that simply doesn’t work.
Americans tend to eat about five meals per week in restaurants. But how often do you go to a restaurant and vow never to return because of bad service? Some food service industry businesses fail based on the personalities of their servers rather than the quality of the food being served. For the business owners, this can feel like an unearned failure, which is why it’s important to make good decisions when hiring employees.
And this isn’t some tightly-kept trade secret. Customers know this and business owners know this. Customers are more likely to return if they’re treated well. Therefore, business owners — especially those in the service industry — have a remarkable incentive to retain highly performing service workers by rewarding them with desirable shifts and, especially in the case of food service, more generous financial bonuses. Objective Logistics, an innovative company in the broad category of gamification startups, is offering a service to restaurants that rates and manages servers in the food service industry.
It’s important to recycle and reduce consumption and turn off the water while brushing teeth, but who wants to sort trash? Who wants to go around the house making sure all the light bulbs are off? If you make it a game, you create a situation where people actually want to use less power, and some cases, you could even generate more power. There are a number of mobile apps for iOS and Android that aims to make the whole act of conserving energy a little easier. Here are three applications aimed at encouraging eco-friendly behavior.
While there are many benefits to gamification and many businesses are using this practice to make their website more engaging, the methods used by practicing businesses could often be more effective. Many businesses who integrate game dynamics within their company are often too focused on a corporate level, rather than the gamification of individuals. Because people play games for their own enjoyment, gamification that is too general is often ineffective due to its irrelevance to customers or employees.
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.
Many people think of gamification as a consumer targetted model. While gamification techniques are particulary apt at increasing consumer involvement, they can also be applied to the employee management process for improvement.
Maintaining a consistent working attitude by employees is important for any business to keep healthy productivity. It takes effort by management to encourage employees to work for higher goals. It requires investment by management to identify where employees struggle in the process. Utilizing a gamification model within the management process can help businesses save time and reduce costs while increasing the bottom line.
Kids like using video games to fight bad guys. Now Re-Mission 2, a new release from the nonprofit company HopeLab, is helping kids do something much more important: fight cancer.
Re-Mission 2 is a follow-up to HopeLab’s highly acclaimed first-person shooter, Re-Mission. Re-Mission 2 is made up of a suite of 6 games modeled after more casual, addictive games like Angry Birds or Bejeweled. Designed to be played on computers or smartphones, each free game depicts different ways of fighting or treating cancer.
Grabbing the attention of potential customers can supply a continuous flow of revenue for many businesses while improving productivity. Applying gamification techniques and methods is a great way to encourage customers to visit and to stay for new content, products, or services.
A new study shows that employers are increasingly relying on gamification to increase employee health engagement. According to Buck Constultants, 62% of employers consider gamification the most effective strategy in encouraging employees to improve their health and at least 31% will adopt at least one new health-related gamification strategy in the coming year.
As healthcare costs continue to rise, employers are facing new pressure to encourage employees to be proactive about their health. While there is still insufficient data to determine whether employee health incentive programs are actually saving companies money, it seems that most businesses are not waiting to find out.
Homeschooling has become one of the fastest growing forms of education, and gamification has become very integral to the way these children are learning.
When a parent decides to remove their child from school, many times it’s due to the boring nature of traditional classrooms, inflexible schedules, and just a general disagreement with the American education system but now there are a number of gamification tools that can solve these issues and make homeschooling better.
