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Author: Sheryl Grant

Is there some core definition or badge-ness to explain what makes badges unique?

If badges are like degrees, diplomas, grades, or currency -- which many of us have collected and displayed and benefited from -- what's wrong with them? Why are badges worse or better? If badges are visual signs of rank, reputation, membership, and identity, and are just another way to show affiliation, why are they different than, say, titles, clothing, hair, language, accents, bumper stickers, friends, or an alma mater?  

Badges for Javascript courses are currently being developed at the School of Webcraft by Mozilla. It also plans to rope in diverse groups such as P2PU, 4H, NASA, PBS, US Department of education and Intel to develop badges. This new process claims to be of advantage to learners as they will be given an opportunity to collect badges from any internet website. These collected badges will reveal the learner’s proficiency in various subjects. And that’s not all, it is believed that open badges may prove beneficial for users to build online reputation, look for collaborators and find jobs. “Open Badges is a response to this trend: an open specification and APIs that provide any organization the basic building blocks they need to offer badges in a standard, interoperable manner. If we’re successful, the benefits to learners will be tremendous. Open Badges will let you gather badges from any site on the internet, combining them into a story about what you know and what you’ve achieved,” states the Mozilla blog.

Any other organization can join them in asking for partners to design a new way of offering accreditation to their own organization.

operating on inexpensive mobile phones or Web-based platforms

Some might be games---but most will have nothing to do with games

Google News has recently rolled out its Badges program and entered the world of meaningless digital rewards. Get excited. From now on, if you have a Google account, log in and enable your web history before reading articles on Google News, you will accrue what are basically experience points (my words, not theirs) which will unlock badges and eventually cause those badges to “level up” (their words, not mine) from bronze to silver, gold, platinum and finally “ultimate.” Badges are related to certain subjects and level up based on articles read about that subject. For instance, to use the example from the instructional video, if you read articles about basketball, you will level up your basketball badge. While you might expect a news-site achievement program to stop there, Google has gone the extra mile to implement a balancing effect. Gorging on a whole bunch of articles in one day won’t earn you as much xp as reading a moderate amount on a regular basis. Pavlovian conditioning much?

There is also, of course, a social networking application to be had here. Badges are automatically set to private but can be shared with friends.

There is something slightly juvenile about the concept of giving away badges for reading the news, and something condescending about Google giving you gold stars for browsing their websites, and you know what? I don’t care.

Gamification is a hot space, and Got Badge? is a new entrant.

The phrase “Pic or it didn’t happen” might be something you’ve heard before. Basically it means, you can’t say you’ve done something unless you’ve taken a picture of it. It’s the honor system that Got Badge? works on for claiming badges.

Badges are broken up into categories, ranging from “Lifestyle” to “Geeky” to “Fun”. Got Badge? is super simple, super fun, and kind of addicting really.

his week Google announced the launch of their Google News Badges. Google heralded the launch with the following description: The U.S. Edition of Google News now lets you collect private, sharable badges for your favorite topics. The more articles you read on Google News, the more your badges level up: you can reach Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum, and finally Ultimate. Keep your badges to yourself, or show them off to your friends.

Similarly, Google has created a way to make some fun and competition out of what you already do – that is, read the news. They’ve created categories with badges that allow you to level up and share your achievements if you wish. But, being acutely aware of many peoples’ need for privacy, they’ve also given you the option to turn the feature off. To me, this still makes it a viable system because there’s an element of self-competition here as well. We all like to see our own achievements, whether or not we want to share them with the world.

It is interesting to see gamification now being applied in a marketing/website/community context, because many marketers and community managers have already been using these techniques to build engagement for several years.

there are many ways to incorporate game mechanics into a community and which ones are appropriate depend a lot on the make-up of your community audience and what the ultimate goals for the community are.

my belief is that you need to gradually introduce new elements into a community and make sure that any new features are fully explained and documented.

Get Glue:

In their first three months, 1 million users, 100 million data points and shipped out thousands and thousands of stickers. Amazing, but how on earth are they making profit? Because it’s an advertising platform and collecting information on demographics, popularity, etc. and providing the entertainment industry with amazing data – sold.

SEOmoz

Perhaps you’ve recently read about the Tampa Bay Lightning’s innovative chip-embedded jerseys. Blending physical gamification techniques such as a special badge to denote a certain level of status – in this case a season ticket holder – and embedded chip technology in the patch that issues those donning the jersey automatic discounts on concessions and merchandise while at the arena, the Lightning have a bona fide innovation hit on their hands. As a marketing ploy, you can not argue with the success of this experiment. As a technological innovation, what you see here – a piece of connected clothing – is just a rudimentary beginning of Web 3.0.

The first of these changes is BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) computing. BYOD is a much better term than “consumerization” and really portrays the meaning that many of us are buying smart phones, tablets or laptops to use them on a work network. The tension this creates is predictable.

In 2012 and beyond, we’re going to see more and more different devices coming into the workplace.

Just a few weeks ago, Forrester Research said, “It’s time to repeal Prohibition” about Macs in the workplace, but the real changes are going to come from the smartphones and tablets.

“After carefully weighing our options for building a social rewards solution in-house versus integrating with a best in class technology provider, we selected Badgeville, a recognized leader in the space, for their comprehensive, lightweight and flexible platform,” said Larry Drebes, CEO, Janrain.

Badgeville jumped onto the scene when they won “Audience Choice” at TechCrunch last fall. Within two quarters they’ve captured 50 clients for their “white label” social rewards, loyalty and analytics platform.

Badgeville helps web publishers of all sizes increase audience engagement and unlock new monetization opportunities. The Palo Alto– based company provides platform that makes it easy for web publishers, to increase user loyalty and engagement. 

roughly 30 percent more individuals in the U.S. carry a smart phone than buy a daily newspaper.

New York Public Library In a move that embodies the public intellectual history of America and the perfect application of social media, the New York Public Library plans to celebrate its centennial smart phone style.

It recently launched a “Find the Future” Foursquare badge that encourages and rewards exploration of public libraries in New York City. It transforms visitors into library ambassadors who, via location-based check-ins, end up promoting library services, programs, and collections to their Foursquare friends.

Boring conversation? Accessories that decipher emotional cues could save your social life – or reveal that you're a jerk

The glasses can send me this information thanks to a built-in camera linked to software that analyses Picard's facial expressions. They're just one example of a number of "social X-ray specs" that are set to transform how we interact with each other. By sensing emotions that we would otherwise miss, these technologies can thwart disastrous social gaffes and help us understand each other better. Some companies are already wiring up their employees with the technology, to help them improve how they communicate with customers. Our emotional intelligence is about to be boosted, but are we ready to broadcast feelings we might rather keep private?

In a 10-day experiment in 2008, Japanese and American college students were given the task of building a complex contraption while wearing the next generation of jerk-o-meter - which by that time had been more diplomatically renamed a "sociometric badge". As well as audio, their badge measured proximity to other people.

4. Offers, Offers and More Offers With the daily deals craze dying down post-Groupon IPO, mobile offers are springing up. Google Offers, Google's response to Groupon's daily deals, continues to expand and personalize its deals. It recently stepped into the mobile commerce space with an Android app. Amazon entered the daily deals space with Amazon Local. Mobile commerce isn't a part of the story, but with Amazon's hefty investment in Living Social and an infrastructure far more mature than Groupon's, Amazon may be waiting for just the right moment before really making its move. Meanwhile, daily deals superhero Groupon moved further into the location-based mobile commerce space through a partnership with Loopt. Soon after the Loopt announcement, Groupon launched Groupon Now, which inserts real-time, location-based offers into the daily deals game. Such offers are usually only available for a few hours, do not include the typical Groupon tipping point and are meant for impulsive mobile users.

5. Shop Till You Sit: Tablet Commerce Tablets are all the rage this year. A recent study by eMarketer.com predicts that one in three online consumers will use a tablet at least once a month by the year 2014. Appel iPads are positioned to dominate the tablet market until 2015. So what are people doing on their tablets? Shopping, naturally. And thus the boom of tablet commerce. Amazon.com, the top revenue-producing Internet retailer, naturally leads the pack with a strong tablet-optimized site. Couch commerce, the act of sitting on one's couch and shopping from a smartphone and tablet, saw a strong increase this year - especially after Thanksgiving dinner and on Black Friday. Amazon launched its Kindle Fire tablet on September 28. ReadWriteWeb Writer Jon Mitchell calls it a store with a screen, quite literally suggesting that its sole purpose is to be a media consumption device. As the Kindle Fire continues to gain consumer mindshare and more developers flock to the Amazon Appstore (don't call it the App Store, OK?), we expect more tablet commerce growth in this area. Shopping catalogs designed specifically for tablets will add to the tablet commerce experience. Google launched a shopping catalog app for tablets back in August. Google Catalogs, as they're called, are like "window shopping with your iPad and Android tablet." The only potential problem for retailers? Now they won't have catalog readers' home addresses on hand.

6. Location and Local Groundswell: Chicago to Des Moines to Boston and Back Again The partnership between daily deals service Groupon and location check-in Foursquare was a big one. The two got together and made it happen. Or, as the Groupon blog says, "when we think of mobile addiction beyond Now! we think foursquare, and many of you guys do, too." The idea of positioning daily deals on Foursquare as an "addiction" doesn't exactly insure longevity; rather, it signals imminent burnout. But hey, we'll forgive Groupon's marketing team - with Groupon's stock prices slumping, the company is needs to keep looking for new ways to hit up consumers. Dwolla, mobile payments system based in U.S. mobile payments capital Des Moines, Iowa, seeks to completely sidestep credit cards. Unlike its main competitor PayPal, Dwolla does not snag a percentage of the transaction; instead, it asks for a shiny silver quarter, regardless of the transaction amount. LevelUp from Boston-based SCVNGR brings location-based gaming to the daily deals space. The idea is simple: Users will receive better deals the more they use the system. Much like the "unlocking" of Foursquare badges, LevelUp users will unlock new "levels" of awesome deals with particular merchants as they continue buying. Like its competitor Dwolla, SCVNGR recently began building local mobile payments into LevelUp.

Badgeville has been synonymous with gamification, the idea of incorporating game mechanics to motivate employees and consumers to do specific tasks. But the company says it’s not stopping with gamification; it sees a future in shaping behavior through a combination of game mechanics, private social networks and reputation and rank.

building off its Social Fabric technology that allows any website to build a social network out of its community using a new behavior graph. The behavior graph helps track a user’s interaction within a social context on any site, application or product.

provide corporate clients with a suite of services that can help them apply “behavior management” to their own employees or consumers.

In the fast-moving world of Internet innovation, the search for the winning combination of strategies often means companies are continually rolling out features to match their competitors.Take local deals, territory that Chicago-based Groupon claimed with its launch more than two years ago. Google, Facebook, Yelp, OpenTable and a host of other Web-based companies have introduced their versions of discount offers since then. And many of these players have started allowing users to "check in" to local businesses on their mobile phones, a concept popularized by Foursquare and other location-based services.This ongoing flurry of activity is underpinned by a common desire to conquer three important categories of growth for consumer-oriented Internet companies: mobile, social and local commerce. The race to find the right mix is crucial for capturing revenues and the loyalty of consumers whose sources for information and entertainment are becoming increasingly fragmented.

"A mobile and social Web, both on the advertising side and e-commerce side, is going to be more highly monetizable," said Mendez, whose private-equity firm focuses on privately held companies such as Facebook. "It's more likely to turn eyeballs and visitors into transactions and dollars spent."Companies are building on the three pillars of mobile, social and local commerce in different ways, focusing on core strengths before adding other capabilities.

Groupon, for example, built its business model on the idea of social plus local commerce, creating a group-buying platform as a new form of local online advertising. Last week, it launched a mobile application called Groupon Now that delivers deals to consumers based on their location.

Since location-based check-in app Foursquare was launched at South by Southwest in 2009, the app has seen exponential growth, reaching over 7.5 million users this year.

Apart from gamification through leaderboards and badges (or stickers, or pins), the motivation for users to participate in location-based networks is severely lacking.

1)make it easy and 2) create value. Users want to put in less effort and receive more value.

Focus has been largely placed on volume and reach of an individual’s ideas versus the implications of their actions. We’re so focused on growing our own brands that the megaphone has become more important than the message.

The Whuffie Manifesto further states that “when reputation is wealth, only those who do good and well unto others are the richest.”

Sites like DailyFeats have created models in which people self-badge positive actions that then aggregate their overall “Life Score,” which CEO and co-founder Veer Gidwaney says “is a reflection of the good that you do every day.”

Newly formed Singapore-based start-up YFind is the latest location-based start-up in the country. It has nothing to do with check-in or badges. Rather the team has a vision to make buildings “location intelligent.”

YFind’s mobile app uses WiFi signals to detect the position of a mobile device. So what’s that good for? Melvin Yuan, one of the co-founders of YFind explained via email:

If you’re a customer, this means you can now easily find amenities like the nearest toilets and the right ATMs. If you’re a retailer or mall operator, it means you will be able to engage your customers more effectively – telling them what’s available around them, immediate and relevant promotions, and what else is happening in the mall at any point in time. It’s real-time, contextual customer engagement at its finest.

Motivating Gen Xers

Room to grow. Offer Gen X employees clear statements of goals

Opportunities to make choices. Since this generation has become accustomed to "fending for themselves," provide options--options for task selection, options for challenges, options to formulate new processes, and options to develop creative yet appropriate conclusions.