The second Basis fitness tracker slims down but retains a healthy battery life
Basis announced the Basis Peak on Tuesday, which is a fitness-focused smartwatch that can measure REM sleep.
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Basis announced the Basis Peak on Tuesday, which is a fitness-focused smartwatch that can measure REM sleep.
Foursquare has released its check-in app, Swarm, but stripped it of its trademark gamification elements.
For banking startup LendUp, personalization is a matter of survival. As a lender to the underbanked that doesn’t charge late fees, LendUp needs to get the right data and design the right experience to ensure it gets paid.
The U.S. tech firms are teaming up with Cancer Research UK in a bid to give citizen scientists a gene-analyzing game that they can play on their mobile phones for a few minutes at a time.
DerbyJackpot combines the feel of casual social gaming with real life betting on horse tracks across the country. Thanks to a legal exception bets on horse-racing, the company is one of the few that can offer online gambling in the US.
Redbox Instant is letting its users play for prizes to get feedback on its beta test, and collect a lot of useful data in the process. Data that one day could be used to improve the service’s movie discovery.
Gamification is thought of as a hyped buzzword by skeptics, but it’s increasingly being used by corporations to incentivize consumers and motivate employees. As enterprise adoption of gamification grows, that could make gamification startups the next hot acquisition target in the coming years.
While skeptics still scoff at the term gamification, Badgeville keeps gaining the trust of big companies and investors, who believe in its power. Badgeville announced Wednesday it raised $25 million led by Interwest Partners, bringing its total funding to $40 million to date.
While early critics may have scoffed, gamification start-up Badgeville just kept growing adding more clients and evolving from a gamification provider to a broader behavior platform utilizing games, reputation and social networking. Now, it’s releasing what it says is the first mobile gamification SDK for developers.
Memrise, a TechStars Boston graduate, has raised $1.05 million for its gamified approach to memorizing languages. The company supports six languages officially and has more than a million words created by its community. It’s now looking to expand beyond languages and will launch mobile apps soon.
Keas, a San Francisco-based startup co-founded by veteran technologist Adam Bosworth has raised $6.5 million in new funds from existing investors Atlas Ventures and Ignition Parters. The company is finding success with focus on wellness as a social game and selling it to large companies.
How do you get a highly distracted customer or employee to complete paperwork, pay attention in meetings, or respond to surveys? Make…
Badgeville has been synonymous with gamification, the idea of incorporating game mechanics to motivate business employees and consumers to do specific tasks. But the company says it’s not stopping with gamification. It wants to shape behavior through game mechanics, private social networks and reputation.
Bunchball, the social gaming software company, has raised $6.5 million in a new funding round. The San Jose, Calif.-based startup has recently received “knocks on the door” from potential acquirers, but opted to raise money instead to bet on growing more, CEO Jim Scullion told me.
Here on the internet, just because you build it, it doesn’t mean anyone will actually come. Or click on a link. Or leave a comment. Or become a Facebook fan.YouSendIt co-founder Ranjith Kumaran wants to change all that with his loyalty-marketing startup, PunchTab.
Gamification startup Badgeville expects to book $10 million in sales for 2011, its first year in business, according to CEO Kris Duggan. He claims that being the new kid on the gamification block is an asset. “We’ve built this over last year with modern approaches.”
For Silicon Valley startups, good timing can be just as crucial as good technology. Just ask Bunchball, the six-year-old, San Jose, Calif.-based, social gaming, software startup. In 2005, when the company debuted its software platform, the current industry buzzword “gamification” hadn’t even been coined yet.
Apple launched a brand new site offering tech support for its products on Saturday, called Apple Support Communities. The new site represents an evolution of its support discussion forums, where users offer advice to one another regarding technical issues or other problems with Mac products.
Can making email into a game make you more productive, encourage you to develop better habits and make email more fun? That’s the idea behind Baydin’s The Email Game, which applies gameplay mechanics to the process of working through your inbox.
I recently interviewed Daniel Debow, the co-CEO of enterprise social software company Rypple. During our conversation, we discussed the game-like constructs built into the Rypple software, like the concept of rewarding people with “badges” for giving recognition and building reputation within a company.
Despite some bad examples of gamification, the concept of adding game mechanics to tasks has merit as I’ve said when done in a thoughtful way. And that takes offering real world rewards, said Irving Fain, CEO of New York start-up CrowdTwist.
We Farm, Tap Zoo and countless other similar apps have made tons of money by asking you to spend yours on virtual goods. A brand new iPhone app called Raise the Village uses the same model for a good cause. But does it go too far?
Gamification has been a buzzword for 2010, but there are many underlying issues plaguing the trend. The use of game mechanics can still have a bright future, but it needs to take the next step up. Here’s a look at what needs to happen.