Badgeville gamifies business

The company launches a new Dynamic Game Engine and Widget Studio

Social loyalty platform Badgeville, which has raised just under $3 million from Trinity Ventures and angel investors, announced Tuesday the launch of two new products: its patent-pending Dynamic Game Engine, which is a flexible platform that allows brands to integrate advanced game mechanics and reward combinations into any Web property; and the Widget Studio, which allows brands to add social rewards such as a leaderboard or virtual achievements into their websites.

Founded in 2010, the Badgeville team boasts a number of recent recruits from Zynga, Playdom, EA, and more, and CEO Kris Dugan told me that the company has a lot of gaming DNA. The new Dynamic Game Engine provides a backend system, which provides brands and online communities with a turnkey solution for incentivizing user behavior. “You can configure your rules completely different from one customer to the next, and it’s customized for any kind of use case to create meaningful experience with users,” said Dugan. “These are proven techniques in social gaming, but when applied to non-gaming platforms, it increases everything—content, traffic, page views, and more.”

Dugan used the example of your average retailer. By applying game mechanics to a retail website, it can drive more purchases and more social sharing, which translates to increased traffic and revenue.

The Widget Studio handles all of the frontend stuff, allowing brands and retailers to create leaderboards, live activity streams, mini profiles, showcases, and more to help drive the behavior they want to see. The Dynamic Game Engine and the Widget Studio together can be applied to a wide swath of different sites, including retail, education, and more. Among Badgeville’s 50+ clients are Live Mocha, Samsung, Interscope Records, and Bluefly.

And the company is doing pretty well for itself. Badgeville launched in September 2010 and in the first quarter of 2011, the company did seven figures in bookings with 40% quarterly growth. And where is all that money coming from? “Basically we charge a license fee to companies who want to give this to their users,” said Dugan. “We’re more focused on medium and large companies. One of our customers is going to roll out to 400,000 users, and another company wants to roll out to 1.5 million users. The service starts at around $2,000 per month.”

Badgeville’s clients are part of the rising tide of applying game mechanics to consumer goods marketing and customer retention. By 2014, some 70% of all Global 2000 companies will have at least one gamified application, according to Gartner Research.

"This is a big market and everyone’s trying to figure it out, but we feel like we’ve figured it out," said Dugan.

To keep up with demand, Badgeville is hiring. The company hopes to take its 22-person team to 35 this year.

Image source: Badgeville.com