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Company

Badgeville

Badgeville provides gamification and social engagement solutions that enable companies to influence and measure user behavior.

United States, North America Disrupt SF 2010

Watch The Pitch

Details

Founded Date

2010

Industries
Analytics Big Data Gaming
Operating Status

Acquired

Website

www.badgeville.com

Founders

Ken Comée Founder

News About Badgeville

Enterprise

As Badgeville Homes In On Gamification For Large Enterprises, It Launches A New Behavior Lab

Ingrid Lunden

Gamification -- the idea of adding gameplay elements into services to get people to interact more with them -- has been one of the more buzzy features in the last few years of social media services, but it's also been one of the more problematic. Last year, Gartner estimated that some 80% of apps with gamification incorporated into them are liable to fail in their purpose. And if you look at companies like Gowalla and Foursquare, you can see that consumer apps that incorporate these have had mixed success.

ken comee
Enterprise

Badgeville Names Former Cast Iron Exec Ken Comée As Its New CEO

Anthony Ha

Gamification startup Badgeville just announced that it has appointed Ken Comée as its new CEO. Co-founder and outgoing CEO Kris Duggan will become the company's chief strategy officer, and he will also remain on the Badgeville board. Comée was formerly the CEO of Cast Iron Systems, a cloud company that was acquired by IBM, and of PowerReviews, which was acquired by Bazaarvoice. He might not seem like the obvious choice to run a gamification company, but Badgeville says it's actually selling its tools (which allow companies to add social features and game mechanics to their products) to some big enterprise customers, like Deloitte, EMC, and Oracle.

Enterprise

Badgeville Brings Gamification to Drupal Communities

Scott Merrill

It's a classic quandary -- getting people to participate in online communities can be hard, but getting people to participate well in online communities is even harder. To that end, behavioral management platform Badgeville has announced a new effort to bring its engagement-fostering gamification service to Drupal communities that want to reward their users for quality participation. There have been lots of efforts through the years to solve the problems of encouraging and rewarding positive participation (and discouraging trolling), from venerable Slashdot's karma system to StackOverflow's escalating access mechanism, and now newer gamification schemes aim to incentivize community interaction. Badgeville (which launched at TechCrunch Disrupt back in 2010 and recently locked up an additional $25 million in funding) isn't exactly the first to run with the concept, but the service's momentum can't be denied -- Oracle, EMC, Dell, Samsung, and (full disclosure) AOL are just a few of the names on Badgeville's client roster.

Startups

Badgevilles Acquires Gamification.org, Grabs The “Gamification” Username On Twitter, Facebook, YouTube

Sarah Perez

So that's how Badgeville is using some of that $25 million in funding from May. The engagement-focused startup (and former TechCrunch Disrupt participant) is today announcing the acquisition of the Gamification.org Community from Gamify, a two-year old online community that also just happened to have the rights to the the "gamification" username on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Google+ . Yep, @gamification is now in the hands of Badgeville (or it will be as soon as they get the password, says Badgeville CEO Kris Duggan.) While Duggan won't disclose the terms of the deal, he notes that it was for the community and namespace assets only  - they didn't buy the company. It was a cash and equity deal, he says. [Update: we're hearing that Gamify was asking $100,000-$300,000 for the property.]

Media & Entertainment

Badgeville Levels Up With $25M From InterWest & More To Gamify The Enterprise

Rip Empson

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.

Media & Entertainment

No Longer An Awkward Teenager? Gamification Grows Up

Contributor

Over the last year, you may have noticed that a once-niche trend not only crept into the mainstream, but is starting to really make a big splash. Gamification has become one of the hottest buzz words in the industry and is probably in the process of taking over a website or user experience near you. For the uninitiated, gamification, said simply, is the use of game design techniques and mechanics to solve problems and engage audiences. Over the last year, even large companies and enterprises are starting to get in on the game, with Gartner saying that all CIOs should have gamification on their radar, and M2 research predicting that the gamification market will reach 2.8 billion in direct spending by 2016.

TC

Badgeville Proves Gamification Is Here To Stay, As Recyclebank & Others Buy In

Rip Empson

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.)

Media & Entertainment

On Its One-Year Anniversary, Badgeville Launches A New Product Called Social Fabric

Sarah Perez

It's been a year since social rewards and analytics company, Badgeville took home the prize for Audience Choice Winner at TechCrunch Disrupt 2010. Today, Founder and CEO Kris Duggan spoke at this year's Disrupt to talk about how far the company has come over the past 12 months. When Badgeville started, he says, it had 4 people, $300,000 in seed funding and 10 beta customers. Now it has 35 full-time employees, has raised $15 million in capital and has 85 paying customers, including big names like NBC, Discovery and Universal Music. It's also pulling in 5 to 10 million in sales, notes Duggan. Not bad for just one year in. But in even bigger news, Badgeville is now launching its latest product: Social Fabric, a new technology based on users' online behavior.

TC

Badgeville Raises $12 Million, Celebrates With An Infographic

Michael Arrington

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.

TC

Lessons From TechCrunch Disrupt Audience Choice Winner Badgeville’s Launch

Contributor

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.

TC

Meebo CEO Seth Sternberg On Why He's Pushing For Website Check-Ins (TCTV)

Erick Schonfeld

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.

TC

Badgeville Investors Now Betting $2.5 Million That You'll Want To Check In To Websites

Alexia Tsotsis

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.

TC

Raid The MiniBar: Meebo Gets Into The Site Check-In Game. But Don't Call It A Game.

MG Siegler

With the rise of Foursquare, the "check-in" has become fairly commonplace. With the launch of Places, Facebook will only make it more so. It shouldn't be surprising that we're seeing dozens of other startups spring up to do check-ins for FILL-IN-THE-BLANK. Media check-ins were a pretty obvious extension. But now we're seeing a number of companies pop up that are doing check-ins for websites. A couple of these, Badgeville and OneTrueFan, launched in September at TechCrunch Disrupt. Now they're about to get some very big competition: Meebo. Specifically, on Tuesday, Meebo is launching a new browser extension, the Meebo MiniBar, in alpha. This extension, which will be available for Chrome, Firefox, and Internet Explorer, will allow people to check-in to the websites they're browsing on the fly. And this extension is just the first step. Once it's fully up and running, Meebo plans to add the functionality to their popular toolbar. A toolbar which spans some 8,000 partner websites and reaches 180 million unique users a month already.

Startups

Webpage Builder DevHub Sees Engagement Spike After Embracing Gamification

Jason Kincaid

Silicon Valley loves its buzzwords. And amid the current standbys like "Location-based" and "Social",  there's a word that seems to be popping up more and more: Gamification. The basic idea is to incorporate game mechanics, like badges and points, into sites that don't traditionally have them. This wouldn't normally be a trivial task, but there are already a number of startups popping up that make 'gamifiying' a site much easier, like BigDoor and TC Disrupt finalist BadgeVille. But can these services actually help? DevHub, a startup that lets users build out their own websites, certainly thinks so. Back in July the company relaunched its service using BigDoor to power some gaming mechanics, and the results are impressive: cofounder Mark Michael says that adding game mechanics to the site "increased their bottom line, user interaction, and the ultimate goal" of getting users to build out their custom websites.

Startups

Startup Battlefield: The Final 7 Make Their Closing Arguments

Jason Kincaid

The TechCrunch Disrupt Startup Battlefield is approaching its dramatic conclusion, and the 7 finalists remaining are making their closing arguments in front of a panel of all-star Silicon Valley judges. Here are their questions and the startups' answers, along with links to our past coverage of each company. Judges: Kevin Rose Marissa Mayer Jason Goldman Ron Conway Roelof Botha

Startups

The Final 7 Racing For The Cup At TechCrunch Disrupt

MG Siegler

Over the past two days, we've seen 25 startups (and 2 from the Startup Alley) launch on stage at our TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco. Our panel of experts questioned and voted on each. And now we're down to the final seven in the race to accept the TechCrunch Disrupt Cup from Soluto, the winner of our last Disrupt conference last May. Without further ado, the final seven startups in the running:

TC

Badgeville Wants To Layer Social Gaming (And Yes, Badges) Across The Entire Web

MG Siegler

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.

Startups

The List Of Startups Launching At TechCrunch Disrupt

Leena Rao

We are only a few hours away from kicking off the second TechCrunch Disrupt conference here in San Francisco and we are thrilled to announce the 25 startups that were chosen out of nearly 1,000 applicants to pitch ideas and applications over the next few days. We will also hear pitches from the two StartupAlley companies that receive the most votes over the next two days. These startups will battle it out over three intense days, with one of these companies eventually taking home $50,000 and the official Disrupt trophy.