Badgeville Celebrates One-Year Anniversary and Launches Social Fabric

MENLO PARK, CA--(Marketwire - Sep 12, 2011) - Badgeville, the leader in social loyalty and smart gamification, returns to the TechCrunch Stage on its one-year anniversary to announce the addition of a new product, Social Fabric, enhancing its portfolio of industry-leading loyalty and gamification solutions. Social Fabric is a groundbreaking technology that brings the social interactions found on Facebook, Twitter, and similar social sites to any web property, delivering relevant, real-time social experiences tied to site-specific user behaviors and content.

The technology redefines the gamification industry and the face of online content, commerce and enterprise web experiences, enabling businesses to not only showcase relevant real-time activity to the user, but also to automatically track and analyze contextual user behavior through The Behavior Graph, which captures user behavior information and connects that activity with similar behaviors, users, and objects across the site network. Compliant with Facebook's Open Graph Protocol, The Behavior Graph connects identity and object data through a deep network of behaviors relevant to a customer's specific site interactions.

"Showcasing real-time activity in social context is a missing ingredient of engagement on the web today," said Wanda Meloni, Founder and Senior Analyst, M2 Research. "Badgeville's product innovations represent the convergence of many significant emerging technologies for user-facing software beyond gamification, such as big data, activity feeds, social analytics and predictive analytics. By adding deep social functionality to the fast-growing gamification industry, the company transcends multiple technologies that will only continue to grow in significance and that are the heart of the modern web experience."

Badgeville was founded on the premise that every brand and online business should be able to elevate and tailor its customer loyalty strategy to take advantage of online interactions. Badgeville delivered the industry's most comprehensive smart gamification platform earlier this year with its launch of the patent-pending Dynamic Game Engine, the first-ever flexible platform for incorporating advanced game mechanics into the user experience across a brand's entire digital presence.

With Social Fabric, Badgeville has again revolutionized the market by combining the power of social networking, game mechanics, and behavioral economics. Now brands can act on user interactions with content to increase brand affinity and increase the Lifetime Value of each user. By applying Badgeville's real-time platform to a site and across digital footprints, brands can see a lift of up to 30% or more on key business objectives. Nearly 100 industry-leading brands, such as NBC, Deloitte Digital, The Active Network, TechCrunch, Bluefly.com, Beat the GMAT, Kings Hawaiian and more rely on Badgeville to power smart social loyalty programs that increase any user behaviors that the customers want to track and reward.

Badgeville customers across eCommerce, media, health, education, services and the enterprise agree that Social Fabric is a must-have for the modern web experience:

"Social Fabric is the sophisticated social experience we've been looking to add to our site for some time," said Zee Kane, Editor-in-Chief, The Next Web. "It brings an entirely new level of social interaction to our community and editorial content, making it possible for our readers to not only discover, share and connect with relevant content but also, perhaps more significantly, with fellow readers."

Social Fabric and the Behavior Graph
Social Fabric includes a collection of widgets that can be embedded into any site in minutes. It allows web sites and apps to surface relevant interactions to a user based on that user's action taken on a site, helping site visitors gain insight into other visitors' real-time interaction with the site and contributed content, updates since their last visit, and how other visitors have interacted with the pages or content they've also viewed. For example, if a user leaves a comment or review on a post or product, that user would be notified when another user replied to their comment, liked their post, or responded to the same item.

Badgeville automatically tracks and analyzes the behavioral interplay between users and delivers that information to users through a breakthrough technology called the Behavior Graph. The Behavior Graph captures users' identities and ties their behavior to that of the people within their online networks, information supplied from registration systems such as Facebook, Twitter, Janrain, or proprietary login systems. The technology surfaces relevant content to the user and provides the foundation for predictive content recommendations and suggestions. This creates a richer online experience for users, such as:

• My friend just reviewed an item in my cart, perhaps I should buy that item now
• Ten people responded to my earlier post, maybe I should respond to their reply
• Emily liked 10 of the same articles that I've liked, I should follow Emily

"The future of social loyalty has arrived," said Kris Duggan, CEO of Badgeville. "To reap the full benefits of gamification, businesses must add contextual social information to their rewards systems, and display real-time activity of any behavior, intrinsically motivating user behavior by showcasing what users are doing, along with relevant content, to their friends and other similar users. Social Fabric and The Behavior Graph make it easy for any website with a login system to add real-time notifications, activity streams, alert messages and follow functionality -- the same features that have made the most popular sites on the web today so successful."

• Follow the future of Social Loyalty on the Badgeville Blog
• Read more about the Social Fabric product in the Social Fabric product brief
• Can't wait to have it? Contact Badgeville to learn more about Social Fabric

About Badgeville

Badgeville, the leading Social Loyalty Platform, makes it easy for business leaders, marketers and innovative technologists to use smart gamification techniques to increase user loyalty and engagement across eCommerce, Media & Entertainment, Health, Education, Services and Enterprise web & mobile experiences. Using Badgeville, brands can reward users with real-time achievements and reputation, while at the same time driving user behavior, achieving specific business goals, and measuring and optimizing user engagement. Badgeville customers include NBC, Bluefly, Interscope Records, TechCrunch, Major League Gaming, Deloitte Digital, and The Active Network. Founded in 2010, Badgeville is based in Menlo Park, California and has offices in New York and Europe. For more information, visit Badgeville on the web @ www.badgeville.com