While some may still cringe at the word (and its overuse), gamification is reaching the tipping point. As Mayfield Fund Managing Director Tim Chang recently wrote in a must-read post, gamification is now moving beyond its early adopting verticals like media and fitness and is no longer content to just play in the realm of consumers and end users. It’s headed to enterprise next.
Badgeville’s vision of a web and business experience being re-shaped by game dynamics is not only being validated by the media, but by investors, too. Earlier this month, mobile gamification startup SessionM raised $20 million from Charles River Ventures, Highland Capital Partners and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, among others. And today, Badgeville is leap-frogging SessionM, announcing that it has closed a badge-worthy $25 million round of series C financing. → Read More
Badgeville is convinced that 2012 is going to be a big year for gamification and that the startup can help your company take advantage of all the elements of gaming that make us tick (and click), whether they be leaderboards, badges, leveling up, experience points, or any of that good stuff. That was the motivation behind the company’s launch at Disrupt San Francisco in 2010, where Badgeville won the Audience Choice Award.
And there are plenty who agree that gamification (and Badgeville’s vision of what it means to web business and enterprise) will continue to play: Among them, Norwest Venture Partners, El Dorado Ventures, Trinity Ventures and Webb Investment Network, who collectively poured $12 million into the startup in July of last year. (This round followed a $2.5 million series A funding post-Disrupt in November 2010.) → Read More
Badgeville founder and CEO Kris Duggan is one of those people that is so ridiculously upbeat and positive all the time that sometimes you just want to strangle him. No one has a right to be that happy.
He was smiling and happy when I met him at the Fortune Brainstorm conference a year ago and he showed me Badgeville for the first time. He was happy on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francsico last September while launching his company and taking the audience choice award.
And now he’s a whole new level of happy because he just closed a second round of financing – $12 million from Norwest Venture Partners and El Dorado Ventures, with participation from previous investors Trinity Ventures and Webb Investment Network. → Read More
I was honored to have been selected to launch my social rewards and analytics company, Badgeville, this past September at TechCrunch Disrupt. Badgeville made it to the final round of the Startup Battlefield and won the Audience Choice Award. As a result of our success at TechCrunch, we’ve had the opportunity and good fortune of selling over $1 million in Web-based software, securing 25 clients with 1 billion monthly page views, raising $2.5 million in series A funding, and growing our team from five to 20 people with three offices around the world.
In the first 30 days following Disrupt, our website received 20,000 visitors, often with over 1,000 visitors per day. We were impressed and, at times, overwhelmed by the amount of qualified leads we received as a direct result of the publicity spurred by the event.
Since then, when I first meet an entrepreneur, they are frequently interested in the key factors that contributed to Badgeville’s successful launch. I thought it might be helpful for others to consider our story when evaluating their options when it comes to introducing their companies to the world. → Read More
Now that people are just starting to get comfortable with the concept of the check-in for geo-location, it is starting to spread to other areas like product check-ins, TV show check-ins, and website check-ins. Just a couple weeks ago, Meebo introduced website check-ins as a new feature for its Meebo Bar. And before that, at our last Disrupt conference in San Francisco, two of the startups (Badgeville and OneTrueFan) launched entire companies around the concept of the website check-in.
So why would you ever want to check into a website? I ran into Meebo CEO Seth Sternberg today at SAI’s Ignition conference in New York City, who explains in the video after the jump. → Read More
TechCrunch Disrupt Audience Choice winner Badgeville announces a $2.5 million Series A round today in order to apply its badge-based game mechanics across the web. Investors in the round include eBay COO Maynard Webb, Palantir founder Joe Lonsdale, Pejman Nozad and Zain Khan from Felix Investments and senior executives from Paypal, Chegg, Shopping.com, Drugstore.com and Warner Music.
Publishers who use Badgeville can set up an account, offer defined rewards and track visitor behavior with realtime analytics. Badgeville works for any company that has a community on its site: Anyone from gaming to education, to retail and more can use the service to reward people for checking into a site, taking tests or simply browsing through products. Virtually anything can correspond to a badge reward. → Read More
When Foursquare first launched, there were no deals. There was no way to get free pizza or cheap beer. The only incentive to play their game was to earn badges and bragging rights among friends. Badgeville, a new startup launching today at TechCrunch Disrupt, wants to apply that gaming mechanic to all sites across the web.
So how does this work? Well, a publisher sets up a Badgeville account and chooses what type of badges they want to give to readers for various types of actions on the site. For example, if you comment, you may get a badge. Or if you click the Like button on comments, you may earn points for that. If you become a Facebook Fan of a page, you may earn a different badge for that, etc. All of this is defined by the publisher. → Read More
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