June 17, 2026
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gamification startups

Gamification Startups Are Finding New Niches and Greater Profits

Kevin Shane25 mins

Gamification startups are still finding innovative methods to stake their places in new niches while producing large profits. Businesses are looking for new techniques and methods to establish their presence as the first authority to consumers. Many businesses are finding that new competition are ramping up the game which is leaving many to say: “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.” These new competitors are banking on the ideas and innovations coming from gamification methods and practices lending to impressive startups and profits.

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gamify the job search

How Can You Gamify The Job Search?

Ivan Kuo21 mins

Jon Guerrra first showed up at GSummit in 2012 when he spoke about a low-tech personal gamification system he created to achieve his goals. One year later, Jon has taken this system and used it to get a job at Google. Watch his talk from GSummit SF 2013 to learn about his journey into Google’s Mountain View campus and the ultimate power of post-its.

We’ll be releasing more talks from GSummit SF 2013 in the weeks to come! Subscribe to our YouTube channel to get each video as they’re released and as always, if there is someone you want to see released next, sound off in the comments below.

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naureen meraj

Naureen Meraj on Motivational Psychology and The Leadership Game

Ivan Kuo12 mins

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 week’s guest was Bob Marsh, CEO of LevelEleven, which is a company that develops gamification apps for Salesforce.

Remember you can participate in the show if you sign-in and RSVP! Signing in will allow you to receive show reminders, ask questions, and even join Gabe and our guest for a live question.

In this week’s episode, Gabe asks Naureen about her work at NTT Data as a behavioral psychologist who led the implementation of a leadership game worldwide. Expect to learn the nuts and bolts that go into such a big implementation, important global design principles, and measuring engagement.



Download this episode (right click and save)
Keep up with NTT Data’s work by following them on Twitter at @NTTDATAAmericas

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gsummit sf 2013 videos

GSummit SF 2013 Videos Are Coming Out to the Public!

Ivan Kuo22 mins

If you joined us for GSummit SF 2013, then you’ve clearly seen how awesome our community is, amidst of sea of brilliant experts, food trucks, and a gamified conference experience. It is our job here at Gamification Co to proliferate the latest and greatest knowledge about the gamification industry, so we’re finally going to begin releasing all of our videos from GSummit SF 2013 over the next few weeks.

We’ll be posting each of the new releases on our blog but if you want to get each of them immediately, be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel to get each video as they come.

To kick off the first video we’re releasing, we want to share a story about engaging audiences with a real sense of purpose. Jeremy Heimans, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of…Purpose, shares his story about using narrative storytelling to transform engagement for corporations, non-profits and citizens with integrity and purpose.

Stay tuned as we release more videos every week! Also, if you’re interested in seeing a particular speaker on GSummit, sound off in the comments below!

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Blue Goji

The Creators of Guitar Hero Want to Make Your Treadmill Less Boring

Ivan Kuo15 mins

Even if you deny your participation with the plastic instrument fad with Guitar Hero and Rock Band in the late 2000’s, everybody had a taste of how awesome it was to be a fake rockstar. The toy instruments sure didn’t make anyone into a musician but what if these same mechanics actually helped you run or bike more? That’s a much more feasible prospect to accomplish.

Guitar Hero co-creators Kai and Charles Huang have been quietly working on a series of game accessories that could be used on bikes, treadmills, and ellipticals in their new venture called Blue Goji.

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game mechanics

Focus on the Game Mechanics, Not the Game

Kevin Shane23 mins

While games are an important and fun aspect of gamification, the main focus of gamification should not be the games, but rather the game mechanics. Game mechanics are what makes gamification so motivating and flexible; depending on the goal for implementing gamification, the games may vary considerably, but the most basic game mechanics will have the same purpose: to engage the user. Because of this, when companies evaluate the impact of gamification, they should not be focused on how many points the user achieved or whether or not they won the game, but rather on the increase or decrease in their productivity after the installment of game mechanics.

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long term engagement with gamification

5 Key Design Factors for Long-Term Engagement with Gamification

Victor Manrique2112 mins

Did you ever lose track of time because of a game? And have you ever asked yourself how you ended up spending 4 hours playing Candy Crush?

Games are one of the most engaging things that we can find because they involve and fulfill almost all of our main human motivators and happiness factors while creating so much funbut some very special ones have this stickiness that makes us want to play them for a long period of time.

But…why?

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bob marsh

Bob Marsh on Motivating Employees with Competition

Ivan Kuo02 mins

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 week’s guest was Bob Marsh, CEO of LevelEleven, which is a company that develops gamification apps for Salesforce.

Be sure to catch our next episode this Thursday, August 1 at 1PM ET/1800 GMT, where we feature Naureen Meraj, Senior Global Director, Gamification & Strategic Engagement at NTT Data.

Remember you can participate in the show if you sign-in and RSVP! Signing in will allow you to receive show reminders, ask questions, and even join Gabe and our guest for a live question.

In this week’s episode, Gabe and Bob discuss the theory behind motivating sales teams with gamification mechanics. They explore interesting topics as to why employees need more motivation beyond commission, what really determines an effective salesman, how gamification allows employees to track performance, and what’s unique about LevelEleven’s approach to gamification design. They also take a number of questions from the audience and a special video guest who comes on to ask about the potential for gamification desensitization in the future. Watch the full video below:



Download this episode (right click and save)
Check out LevelEleven to learn more about their Salesforce offerings and be sure to follow Bob on Twitter at @BobMarsh5

Be sure to check out next week’s episode on Thursday at 1PM ET.

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babbel

Babbel Offers Gamified Online Language Learning

Kevin Shane05 mins

In a previous blog we received a lot of positive feedback for mentioning a few gamified language learning tools like Duolingo and Byki. If you want a somewhat more feature-rich language learning package and are willing to pay a low monthly subscription fee, try Babbel!

This site uses game based-learning to teach, reinforce and track your lesson progress in its array of 10 foreign language offerings (Danish, Dutch, French, Indonesian, Italian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Swedish, Turkish — and English for the folks overseas).

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tim chang gabe zichermann

Tim Chang on Why Gamification Works as a VC

Ivan Kuo12 mins

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 Tim Chang, Gamification VC and Managing Director of the Mayfield Fund.

Be sure to catch our next episode this Thursday, July 25 at 1PM ET/1800 GMT, where we feature Bob Marsh, CEO of LevelEleven as our next guest.

In this week’s episode, Gabe and Tim get down into the nitty gritty on why gaming and gamification have always made sense as a business practice. Learn how an accomplished venture capitalist sees gamification and get a new perspective on the design practice. Also take a look to learn about Tim’s investment sensibilities as it comes to gamification and Tim’s investment case for gamification.

To learn more about gamification in ed and government, follow Tim on Twitter at @timechange.

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The Goldman Sachs NYC Scavenger Hunt for Charity

Alex Landa35 mins

With the simple rules “do not tamper with the clues” and “no private motorized transport”, 20 Goldman Sachs employee teams armed with bubble gum cards, a seating chart for Kevin Bacon’s wedding, a plastic cube, and a three-stanza poem all competed to win the scavenger hunt Midnight Madness.

Originally founded in 1996 by Mat Laibowitz and his Columbia University friend Dan Michaelson, these teams of NYC based financiers and some of their friends took to the streets to decipher clues to win the hunt – all for charity. For almost two days, these contestants live in their own reality solving puzzles that would make even Sherlock Holmes or the most hardened gamer cringe.

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employees accept gamification

6 Tips for Getting Employees to Accept Your Gamification System

Gal Rimon36 mins

Julie has recently been hired to a global sales team, she is eager to prove her worth. She keeps receiving countless emails letting everyone know her new co-workers are being awarded badges and accumulating points in some way. When she tries to find out why she is getting all these public notifications that are clogging up her inbox, her manager tells her it’s some gaming platform his boss made him use – “it’s a mandate from up high, I had nothing to do with it”.

During lunch, her cubicle mate tells her that three months ago the company decided to implement a gaming platform announced with great fanfare by the higher ups, but since then the only thing that’s different is that they have a desktop app that gives them “meaningless points for meaningless actions”. Once her lunch break is over, she marks all the emails as spam.

Could this have turned out differently?

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wearedata watch dogs

Be a NSA Spy in this Promotion for The Watch Dogs Video Game

Ivan Kuo13 mins

Watch Dogs is Ubisoft’s big upcoming game about big data, government spying, unscrupulous agencies, and vigilantism set in the Windy City of Chicago. Amidst all the uncomfortably apt news of whistleblowing and Edward Snowden, creative agency Paris BETC has created a “hyped-connected” visualization tool that offers a way of seeing all the enormous amounts of data publicly available.

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