Archive | August, 2011

How can it be that summer is almost over!? Hopefully you still have some time to catch up on last week’s Gamification news: Kleiner Plays Catch-up, WSJ, August 29, 2011 While it’s not really from last week, and it’s not really about Gamification we thought we’d include this article in the news recap.  When people like Bing Gordon talk Gamification – we all should listen! Ford and Twitter talk keys to marketing to millennials, AdAge Digital, August 19, 2011 Great article about social media strategy from giant Ford. Saving Obese Kids with Virtual Goods, Silicon Angle, August 15, 2011 Article highlights FunGoPlay’s initiative to keep kids healthy and uses games and Gamification. To Play or not to play; Bleacher Report finds a third way, Forbes, August 22, 2011 The “Gamification of the contributor base” for sports bloggers.

A great article today on Geekwire about incredible growth in the South Lake Union neighborhood. While the national news focuses on the economy and lack of jobs this article examines the explosive growth in SLU, including a mention of BigDoor and TechStars! The article says, “In fact, South Lake Union has already attracted 13,647 jobs — well ahead of the 10,497 that were estimated in the original Sommers’ report.” We’re excited to be part of this thriving community – though we grumble some when the line of the taco truck is 20-people deep.

TechFlash: Q&A: BigDoor’s Keith Smith

Happy Friday! Tonight we’re excited to take part in the Seattle Startup Crawl. The event is the brainchild of entrepreneur Nick Hughes and starts at 5:00 p.m. at Cheezburger Inc./Decide.com; then moves to Estately/Nine-by-Blue; followed by HabitLabs, and rounding things out at BigDoor (at 8:00 p.m.). The after-party, courtesy of Founders Co-Op and TechStars, will run late in to the night at The Easy in South Lake Union. If you already have your ticket we’ll see you tonight…..did we mention that BigDoor has beer AND nachos!?! If you haven’t already, buy your ticket here and join some of the hottest Seattle Startups tonight.

Every Wednesday we have a company meeting and our awesome dev team walks us through a Demo of everything they worked on during the prior week’s sprint.  At BigDoor we iterate on our platform weekly – we listen to and value feedback from our partners and incorporate as much as we can each week to make our product that much better through each weekly iteration.  Yesterday’s demo revealed a “surprise” which one of our great devs Brian Immel details below.  We took the liberty of posting this in its entirety but feel free to check out Brian’s blog – its chock full of goodness! “New Features…..You Didn’t Even Know About” Yesterday’s demo was exciting. At BigDoor, the developers (myself included) Demo to the entire company everything we worked on during last week’s sprint. Honestly it’s one of my favorite parts of the job. We move so fast that the demo has become a greatest hits list of killer features that makes our platform so great. With so many awesome things coming down the pipe weekly, we set the bar pretty high. So to demo something truly impressive it’s got to break the mold of normal awesome and become uber-awesome. During yesterday’s Demo, our fellow developer, Harley Holt gave us that opportunity. Our weekly sprints are jammed packed with “stories” we’re working on. Usually this means new features, performance gains and bug fixes that are in line with our company roadmap. However, Harley went above and beyond the call of duty. Somewhere between his daily work hours and getting a nasty ankle sprain playing kickball, he built something truly uber awesome. I can’t tell you what right now (awwww, you tease), but I will say it got me all giddy and giggly with excitement. As a result, today’s demo was exceptional. At the end of our normal routine, Harley showed off the thing he’s been working on for the last few weeks outside of our normal sprints. No one asked him to do it. It was just a damn good idea so he led himself. So kudos to the man. In my mind it was worth the ankle sprain, since we’ll see ripples from Harley’s work for months to come. And that was all before 10:30 a.m. Wednesday. Wonder what we’ll do tomorrow?

Today’s guest post is from our Co-Founder and CTO, Jeff Malek: “The Five Layer Scaling Burrito, TechStars and Inquiry over Assertion FTW” On Tuesday I talked with the new TechStars group (class?  winners?) for an hour or so about scale, specifically from the tech perspective.  It would have been a mistake for me to try and give out advice in this context, but I thought it would be helpful to share some things that I’ve seen work well, and some pain points. I mixed in some anecdotal criticisms that I’ve picked up from other CTOs and developers, with regard to competing technologies that I may have or have not used, which turned into good exchange. We had a great discussion afterwards, and I think we all learned – which is my favorite aspect of working in tech. Clearly there were extremely bright minds in the room – my good fortune to be a part of it. By far my favorite part of the whole hour was being surprised to hear that each team was going to give me their quick pitch, describing their business plan, and I was to react off-the-cuff. What a great idea, for practice and feedback (nice work, @kaylakristine). While it must be very challenging to hear all of the (sometimes half-baked) feedback, good and bad, similar but bigger challenges are still to come on the startup road – so it’s a great approach. What impressed me the most out of that process were the guys who stood up either physically or figuratively to the challenge, with big smiles on their faces, taking the good with the bad – a few even bouncing back to drill into my critical feedback. These positive, curious guys who asked probing questions exemplify what I’m trying to get across in my second slide here, when I say that inquiry should precede assertion. Rather than respond to input with a counter-argument, responding with inquiry (probing questions) keeps the conversation going. While that approach is a mantra of mine, I by no means consider myself an expert at it – it’s an art form that I’m always trying to improve on. I was impressed with just about every pitch, pitcher and business idea. The best ones were concise, had a narrative (I may have mistakenly used the word ‘anecdotal,’ but I meant narrative), and included metrics. More points for big itch balm, like solutions geared toward health care or renewable energy. Overall, clearly the TechStars qualification process is solid – the qualifying team must be brilliant (shameless self-promotion). I’m looking forward to seeing what this brilliant crew can do. Best of luck, guys. Take pictures while you’re up at Keith’s “cabin” – you’ll never forget these times and that woodsy retreat is the source of many legends. What happens at the cabin stays at the cabin. While you’re sitting around the campfire with beer in hand, ask him to tell you about his invention: a device that protects the face from exploding, flaming glass. My slides from this presentation are below, and I’ve included a few links to previous decks and info from other presentations, stuff that provides a bit more color and detail around related topics.   I hope they’re useful. Thanks to all who attended and participated, and again – congrats! – Jeff Want to dig deeper?  A few more presentations for you to study from Jeff including Retrospective from a Startup Built in the Cloud and Building Scalable Web Services. Enjoy!

A few very high profile gamification stories from last week. Check it out! The gamification of the presidential election, The Washington Post, 8/18/11 The story focused on the campaign’s social media strategy and use of Foursquare during the latest tour. Zynga’s not playing games when it comes to branding, AdAge, 8/22/11 A Q&A with Zynga’s new head of marketing and revenue Jeff Karp.  He discusses the Zynga brand, Facebook, Google+ and cross-promotional marketing. Gartner: Gamification to be mainstream in 5 to 10 years, TechFlash, 8/19/11 Gartner’s Hype Circle news the previous week continues to get buzz. Article discusses how humans want to be rewarded for what they do. Finally, last week our CEO, Keith Smith’s presentation from the Casual Connect conference was added to their site – “Gamification what’s your strategy” details a little more about BigDoor and how we define gamification.

Happy Friday – we wanted to share this time-lapse glimpse of our developers hard a work on #gamification in a war room sprint. Thanks @ua6oxa for video skillz.

An interesting article today from The Washington Post, “The gamification of the presidential election.” Writer Dominic Basulto draws attention to The President’s social media strategy as it relates to gamification and the upcoming election. Currently the campaign is using gamification through the location-based service Foursquare. We believe the way for the re-election campaign to really move the needle is through directed user engagement experiences. At BigDoor we use gamification to power social engagement and loyalty programs. We work to create that deeper loyalty for brands through those directed user engagement experiences, including quests that enable users to earn things that are valuable to them.  We see this to some degree in how the Obama campaign is using tips on Foursquare to drive users to watch videos of the President on the campaign trail. But the President is also interested in engaging different agencies within the White House through the use of prizes and challenges. “The President in his national innovation strategy asked agencies to increase their use of prizes and challenges as a tool for stimulating innovation,” explains Tom Kalil, White House Deputy Director for Office of Science and Technology Policy, to Kevin Werbach during last week’s Gamification Symposium at Wharton School. Utilizing social networks is incredibly powerful and important during an election. Adding on gamification as a way to harness people’s social graphs and encourage them to interact and engage with content we think is also extremely important – especially in the year of an upcoming Presidential election!

Our new Content Manager Conor Ryan has been at BigDoor for almost two weeks. Below he shares his thoughts about working in a startup environment and why the Hell Elvis is mentioned all the time….. I’ve been at BigDoor for a couple weeks now and one thing that’s pretty different from my previous work experience is Elvis. Yes, the famous singer, actor – that very Elvis. Let me explain. Elvis is referenced a lot at BigDoor. The King pops up in specs; he’s in presentations; he’s even in the BigDoor Wiki – I’d be willing to bet he’s in the code somewhere too.  So what does Elvis have to do with a Seattle startup?  I have a few ideas:

• Elvis seems to symbolize that our time on Earth is finite (like Elvis’s was).
• Those old Elvis movies were pure, cheesy fun and we should have as much fun as possible while we’re kicking ass in the gamification world, Elvis would.
• When we’re doing things like working long hours punctuated by short games of ping pong or even sitting together on Fridays drinking German beer and eating delicious schnitzels (never deviating from the plan) we are living with the Elvis spirit.
• Elvis is everywhere, inspiring greatness and a totally unique way of doing things and has a very high standard.

Elvis is embodied in the work we do here at BigDoor and he does indeed live in this office; I’m pretty sure he’s sitting next to me as I type this too.  –Conor Ryan