Aaah, the good, old times … never were. And "ye good olde" Gamification Summit? Never existed! I can say that, because I have attended all four of them. With the first one in January 2011 and the most recent one just last week in San Francisco. From 300 attendees with 12 agenda items to 77(!) talks, panels, workshops vying for the attention of 600+ attendees, the GSummit has come a long way.

In the first year, Gabe Zichermann, "grey-eminence" and gamification guru #1 had to beg people to fill the slots and a full day of conference, with a then still mind-bending roster of speakers (including Jane McGonigal for the keynote) and topics. For me at least, it was the revelation that I had come to the right place and met the very people that I could talk to without feeling odd or out-of-place. What a relief to speak to people who could relate to the challenges that I faced at work. The only thing that I missed back then were the enterprise gamification speakers – of which there was not really anyone that Gabe could ask. This discipline and the speakers who could cover that topic were non-exist.

Ladies and Gentlemen, start your engines!
You have less than 90 days to turn a new recruit into a productive employee.

Sure, you have a well-established Onboarding process.
But it is BORING and the new recruits consider it a burden.

How to gain faster time-to-productivity?

How to engage your new recruit in the Onboarding process?

How to reduce failure and early-attrition rates?

The concept of Gamification might help to improve the process.

Gamification, involves applying Gaming dynamics and mechanisms in a non-game environment for the purpose of improving engagement.

Let’s dive into the process with Martin. Martin is a seasoned sales person, he just signed the contract and should join our company in 30 days.

When the goCatch team saw the first time a taxi-driver fist-pumping, they knew they were on to something. The reason for the happy taxi-driver was not a great tip or a good fare that he had gotten, but the level up on the goCatch-taxi-app that has been soaring in popularity in Australia.

When Andrew Campbell co-founded the peer-to-peer taxi booking app in Sydney with Ned Moorfield, they didn't plan to gamify the apps. The drivers downloaded their app to see customers waiting for taxis, the customers can see on a map taxis in their vicinity and order them and tell the destination. But drivers started cherry-picking only the long and more valuable fares, and ignored the short ones. The goCatch-team had to come up with an incentive-system in order to encourage the drivers to pick the short fares as well.

And the solution was: points and badges. Yes, I know, it sounds stupid and we are always pointing out not to just simply "pointsificate" or "badgify" and app, but the goCatch-team had to do something. And this fast. For each fare the drivers accepted, they earned points, with the short fares worth relatively more points than the large ones. The points translated into badges reflecting level-ups, which then gave higher ranked drivers priority access to the more valuable fares. Drivers accepting shorter fares can level-up faster.

Swedish company Alien Interactive is making a big entry in the US-market with the launch of their BizPart Engage platform. The platform is targeting companies with vast reseller networks, where sales and support agents of these resellers need to be trained on the products and brand.

A company like a well-known, large South Korean multinational conglomerate with thousands of resellers, faces the challenge that such an extended salesforce represents the brand and are the public face of the products. As a global brand you want to make sure that they represent the brand properly and knowledgable. These are the first people that customers go to when they want information or need solutions. With such a diverse workforce, similar challenges are faced by call center operators like LiveOps, who have been using gamified training and sales systems successfully.

Alien Interactive CEO and founder Martin Bråkenhielm has been working in the past years in getting the platform ready, and after extensive testing with thousands of users in the nordic countries, he is now ready to push into new markets. That's why he relocated just two week ago to the Silicon Valley, to find partners, customers, and build up a network.