Archive for the ‘Related initiatives’ Category

Since last Wednesday (18/01/2012), developers who use Microsoft Visual Studio have a new way to highlight their skills, get recognition for the amazing work they do every day, and add some competitive fun to the development day by means of a new plugin called Visual Studio Achievements.

You can find all the information at http://blogs.technet.com/b/microsoft_blog/archive/2012/01/18/visual-studio-achievements-program-brings-gamification-to-development.aspx

Achivy adds some fun and gamification to your social life. Add Twitter, Tumblr, Foursquare, Gowalla , Flickr, Stackoverflow, Klout and many other applications to your profile to see how many achievements, badges,scores you have and follow your progress. You can keep up with your friends, and see the other people’s achievements and activities – achivies.

Achivy provides you to see your and your friends’:

• Achievement “badges”
• Achievement levels and scores
• Top and recent users for all applications
• Progress bars and analytics to see how close you are to complete your tasks that encourages you to earn new badges
• Challenge with your friends
• You can even have some gifts and join loyalty programmes.

They will be releasing their API (http://achivy.com/c/api) soon

The National Library of Finland has launched a national e-programme for the digitisation of Finland’s historical documents and material. The first of its kind in Europe, the e-programme Digitalkoot (Digital Volunteers) harnesses the power of crowdsourcing to mobilize people to help digitise millions of pages of archive material.

The e-programme technology provider is Microtask, whose automated platform splits dull repetitive tasks into tiny microtasks and distributes them over the internet. Once carried out by interested microworkers around Finland or around the world, Microtask puts the results back together into a completed assignment.

You can find all the information at http://www.nationallibrary.fi/infoe/uutiset/1297236955390.html

Wired.com released in June a very interesting article about how online companies are using game mechanics and psychological and sociological techniques to influence their users. You can find the whole article here: http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/06/ff_gamed/

Keas applies gamification to employee wellness. Have a look at their presentation video at http://vimeo.com/24576836

You can find all the information about the company at http://keas.com/