Social currency and virtual goods have kept online gamers locked in their basements for years. Then Facebook introduced us to the virtual gift, and digital birthday cakes became badges of honor. Now game dynamics are becoming an increasingly popular way to encourage behavior online and on mobile, turning life into one big game.
A new startup called Viximo is looking to help smaller social sites build their own virtual goods platforms. Their turnkey solution includes an embeddable gift store, showcase and microtransaction system.
"Our virtual goods solution is designed to provide social networks with a powerful solution they can grow with, yet spend only a week integrating," said Brian Balfour Founder and VP of Product Marketing at Viximo. "This allows web publishers to focus on their core business--engaging their audience--while we provide their users with targeted and merchandised virtual goods through a well vetted and integrated system."
Viximo's solution supports various types of virtual currencies including cash, reward, mixed, or dual currency systems, and aggregates the best payment methods including one click credit card purchasing, PayPal, mobile, and CPA offers.
Techcrunch points out that Viximo’s ‘universal giftbox’ option, which allows for a gift given on one site to also appear on another site, could be both confusing and ugly. This is a good point, but it would be great to see some standardization across networks, not just for virtual goods but for all the gaming elements we're seeing built into social networks and media sites.
Thought Starter:
With the proliferation of “leaderboards” – the hot new SNS accessory that quantify site activity (see Foursquare, Fashism, Hypemachine, Learnvest…)—there’s an opportunity to create a points exchange. So just like you can use your frequent flier miles on partner airlines, you could redeem currencies on partner sites. Or how about a platform that aggregates social currencies and lets you redeem them for branded rewards?
The Google Wave invite rollout extravaganza started more than a month ago. While in some respects the buzz around Google Wave has started to subside, the term is still constantly one of the top trending topics on Twitter, and new gadgets, extensions, and applications are now starting to appear on a daily basis.
Each day more and more people are opening up their email inbox to find an invite to Google Wave (). With that shiny new invite comes the inevitable quest for ideas about to how to put the medium to good use.
Should you happen to be one of those people, we’ve got a number of different resources that you can use to get up to speed with Google Wave. This time around, however, we wanted to look at how people are actually using it now. From process modelling and customer service, to project collaboration, annotation, and gaming, the examples listed here highlight the power of the newborn medium, and in part, showcase what we can expect as the platform matures.
1. SAP Gravity: Modeling within Google Wave
Understanding the power of real-time collaboration and its relevance to clients, SAP Research in Australia () has developed a business process modeling tool called Gravity that works within Google Wave.
The sophisticated tool, which can be embedded within a Wave as a gadget, allows for team members to remotely build complex models in unison, or after catching up via playback, without having to leave Google Wave.
Gravity and Google Wave work together harmoniously to create a modeling environment that appears to be just as robust as, if not more flexible than, expensive desktop software built for the same purpose.
We think SAP is certainly on to something here, and we encourage you to watch the video demonstration of Gravity in Google Wave in action.
2. Salesforce: Google Wave for Customer Service
Salesforce, like SAP, has figured out that they can use the Google Wave platform to support client needs and tackle real-life problems. As such, Salesforce has created a Google Wave extension that clients can use to help automate, and even personalize, the customer service experience.
Watch the demonstration video to see how the Salesforce extension gives customers the ability to use Google Wave to interact with an automated support robot. Of course, customers can request assistance from a human within the Wave as well.
What makes this example stand out is the fact that not only is the Google Wave dialogue being stored as a case record within Salesforce, but, because the robot is connected to the Salesforce Service Cloud, the robot can access previously stored customer data for tailored service. Ultimately, Salesforce has found a way to potentially save clients money on customer service efforts, all the while maintaining active records, with the assistance of Google Wave.
3. Mingle: Integrated Project Collaboration
Mingle is a project management and team collaboration tool developed by ThoughtWorks Studios, who realized that they could add Mingle’s project management metadata to conversations in Google Wave.
The integration is still a work in progress, but a demonstration of the concept was highlighted at Enterprise 2.0, and the basic idea is to give Google Wave users/Mingle clients the ability to bring their Mingle task data, which takes the form of cards, into Google Wave. Existing Mingle cards can be embedded into Wave conversation threads, and new Mingle cards/tasks can be created within Google Wave.
This particular use case highlights how Google Wave can work with existing project management systems for more streamlined and cohesive communication, creating parity regardless of where the user is accessing project data.
4. Ecomm Conference: Annotating a Live Event
Just last week our CEO, Pete Cashmore, wrote about how the savvy people behind the Ecomm conference doled out Wave accounts to attendees so that they could collaborate, in real-time, to annotate presentation content. The result was arguably a much better way to consume conference content than attempting to follow hashtag tweets on Twitter ().
You can read the full account, which was documented by Charlie Osmond, on the FreshNetworks blog, but here’s an excerpt that we think drives home the utility of the use case.
“Here’s what happened: an audience member would create a Google Wave and others in the audience would edit the wave during the presentation. The result would be a crowd-sourced write-up of the presentation: a transcript of key points and a record of audience comments.”
We happen to think this particular use case is genius, especially for content-rich seminars and events where attendees are typically taking their own individual notes. With the shared Google Wave experience they can combine forces to create a more meaningful and accurate recounting of information shared in conference sessions.
5. Gamers: Google Wave RPGs
A very detailed Ars Technica post highlights that there’s a growing collection of Google Wave users who are using the medium to play wave-borne RPGs (role playing games). As mentioned in the post, there’s a even a Wave dedicated to serving as an index for all the Wave RPGs currently in existence, and the last time we counted it included upwards of 300 contributing members, and a combination of 30 different ideas or full-fledged games.
According to Jon Stokes, the author of the post, Google Wave is adequate for some RPGs, but it could certainly be improved to allow for a more enjoyable experience. In the excerpt below, Stokes describes the current RPG () experience within Google Wave:
“The few games I’m following typically have at least three waves: one for recruiting and general discussion, another for out-of-character interactions (”table talk”), and the main wave where the actual in-character gaming takes place. Individual players are also encouraged to start waves between themselves for any conversations that the GM shouldn’t be privy to. Character sheets can be posted in a private wave between a player and the GM, and character biographies can go anywhere where the other players can get access to them.
The waves are persistent, accessible to anyone who’s added to them, and include the ability to track changes, so they ultimately work quite well as a medium for the non-tactical parts of an RPG. A newcomer can jump right in and get up-to-speed on past interactions, and a GM or industrious player can constantly maintain the official record of play by going back and fixing errors, formatting text, adding and deleting material, and reorganizing posts. Character generation seems to work quite well in Wave, since players can develop the shared character sheet at their own pace with periodic feedback from the GM.”
