Seattle startup BigDoor powering NFL.com rewards

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With the NFL regular season fast approaching, the football league this week announced its first-ever NFL Fan Rewards. The program gives regular users of NFL.com virtual coins in exchange for reading articles, commenting and taking part in other activities on the site. The coins can be redeemed for a variety of items, including NFLShop.com discounts,… Read More…

BigDoor rival Badgeville scores $25M for ‘gamification’ platform

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Fast-growing Badgeville has reeled in $25 million in fresh funding, money that the 20-month-old Menlo Park, California startup will use to expand its gamification platform. Badgeville, which competes against Seattle’s BigDoor, said that its revenues grew by 300 percent year-over-year as it added customers such as Oracle, Dell, Samsung and NBC. Total financing now stands… Read More…

BigDoor closes $5M, touts new ‘gamified rewards program’

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There’s so much content clutter on the Web these days that it can be tough for online publishers to keep their readers or viewers engaged, coming back each day for more. BigDoor, the Seattle upstart led by Keith Smith, Matt Shobe and Jeff Malek, believes it has the solution to that problem. And the 29-person… Read More…

The coding game: Microsoft’s Visual Studio gets badges, achievements and leaderboard

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Is there anything that can’t be turned into a game? Apparently not. Microsoft today embraced the gamification trend by introducing a new plug-in for its Visual Studio development program that will let software developers unlock achievements, receive badges and work their way up a leaderboard based on the code they write. And of course, they can… Read More…

Cheezburger cans ‘collectibles,’ discontinues virtual coins

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Cheezburger’s experiment with an online currency and collectibles program has ended in … failure. The Seattle company announced this week that it will pull the plug on the Cheezburger Collectibles program and discontinue the use of Cheezburger Coins on January 15th. “Though we have greatly enjoyed running the Collectibles Program, we are not able to devote… Read More…

Doctors and lawyers get gamified on Avvo, but will they play along?

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It’s the hottest thing on Foursquare and FarmVille. Now, Avvo — the online Q&A site for medical and legal advice — is adding game mechanics to its popular forums. The Seattle company announced today that it is adding virtual rewards and leaderboards, a move by Avvo to deepen the engagement of its more than 120,000… Read More…

FlowPlay brings virtual goods, avatars to Yahoo Messenger

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Why just chat with someone, when you can chat in a virtual condo or apartment? Seattle startup FlowPlay, maker of the ourWorld virtual world, is promising that and much more with a new offering being announced today with Yahoo Messenger. Instead of just chatting with text in the normal fashion, your avatar can chat with… Read More…

Mindbloom: A new game designed to change your life

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In some games, you solve puzzles. In others, you try to wipe out enemy forces. But a new offering from Seattle’s Mindbloom has a deeper, more spiritual purpose. It wants to help you improve your life, nurturing a virtual tree by engaging in positive behavior related to health, exercise, relationships and finances. Tasks in the… Read More…

Bobber Interactive raises cash to help young adults manage money via Facebook

The Bobber Interactive team in Seattle

Bobber Interactive, a Seattle startup that uses motivational psychology and game-based mechanics to help young adults manage their money, has raised $1.4 million from PEAK 6 Investments and Dove Capital Partners. A filing with the SEC earlier this year indicated that the company had raised $1.1 million of a $2 million round, and we’re following up… Read More…

Seattle gamification startup BigDoor buys OneTrueFan

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BigDoor believes it has the keys to success to increase engagement on Web sites. And today the fast-growing Seattle startup — led by technology veterans Keith Smith and Jeff Malek — is taking a step to accelerate those efforts. BigDoor has acquired OneTrueFan, a San Francisco-based startup which has developed a Web site widget that… Read More…

The dreaded ‘G’ word: Gamification

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I’ve been spending a portion of the week at the Casual Connect conference in downtown Seattle, a three-day extravaganza which highlights everything you could possibly imagine about the casual games business. This year, one of the hot topics of discussion has been “gamification,” the concept of rewarding users with virtual coins, badges or more for participating… Read More…

Rewind: Keith Smith, BigDoor CEO, on the economics and future of gamification

Keith Smith in the KIRO studios (Erynn Rose photo)

Our guest this past week on the GeekWire Podcast was Keith Smith, CEO of BigDoor, a Seattle company bringing the principles of video games to the world of online publishing, with badges, leaderboards and other rewards for users of traditional websites. He talked about the company’s new deal with Major League Baseball, the underlying economies of… Read More…

BigDoor ‘gamifies’ America’s pastime, strikes deal with MLB

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Baseball already has pennants. Now, it is getting badges too — at least of the digital variety. Seattle startup BigDoor and MLB Advanced Media — the interactive arm of Major League Baseball — today announced that visitors to MLB.com can earn and collect player badges as part of an online rewards program powered by BigDoor…. Read More…

Amazon.com’s real problem isn’t the outage, it’s the communication

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Guest Commentary: Like many companies running on Amazon’s Web Services, BigDoor has been affected by the AWS outage today.  And like most startups, we are braced for bad stuff to happen, and we do our best to learn from the painful stuff.  We spent a better part of the day in constant contact via Twitter,… Read More…

CPMs or CPCs? Nope, BigDoor has its eye on the CPQ: Cost Per Quest

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You may have heard of CPMs or CPCs. But Seattle startup BigDoor wants to start a movement around another online advertising acronym. It’s called the CPQ or Cost Per Quest. Say what? Keith Smith, who founded BigDoor in 2009, unveiled the program today and he thinks it will redefine how online media companies interact with… Read More…

Bobber Interactive brings gamification to personal finance for the Facebook set

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Gamification is the hot buzzword these days. And Seattle startup Bobber Interactive is looking to capitalize on the trend, bringing game mechanics to the world of personal finance. The company — led by Eric Eastman, John Bito and Scott Dodson — today announced that it closed a first round of funding, with participation from Peak6… Read More…