Few days ago I had the opportunity to attend the 2011 Social Matchbox, which is an annual presentation of top 10 tech startups preselected trough a competitive process. Each one has 5 minutes to present their project to potential investors, media and tech experts. The winners were OMGiLuv.it, which enables users to share their fashion preferences and Watch party that enables people to engage with other users that are watching the same program. The full list of winners and details is located in their page: http://socialmatchbox.com/wp/ I really suggest to the class to keep an eye in these startups and event like this, one of them might became the new facebook or living social!.
One of the topics that captured my attention is that a good portion of the presenters talked about incorporating game mechanics into their mobile solutions, so I did some quick research about it. Gartner research “Gamification Primer: Life Becomes a Game” defines gamification as “… is the application of game mechanics to nongame environments to motivate people and change behavior. Business managers must understand this trend — how it may be leveraged in their organizations and how it may affect their industries.”
The concept is simple, what better strategy to engage your users than rewarding them for following a sequence of steps of tasks within you application. Successful games are addictive and users are engaged to earn more and more rewards or get to the next level. Add it a social media component and you have users addicted to your application and sharing their experience to their network and beyond.
A Gartner Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies 2011 notes that the market penetration is still very low (1 to 5%), moderate benefit and still 5 to 10 years for mainstream adoption, so even if we already have some applications taking advantage of these features, there is still a long path and opportunity in this field. Google trends data on gamification: http://www.google.com/trends?q=gamification shows a quick growing too since this year.
So the question is, are we evaluating the potential of incorporating game mechanics in our capstone projects?
I read this post when you first put it on your blog. I really enjoyed it. I cannot wait to see how your group does in our VC exercise.
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