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Tag Archives: Wins

Regina King, Zendaya Emmy Wins Highlight Historic Year For Black Actors

September 30, 2020   Humor
 Regina King, Zendaya Emmy Wins Highlight Historic Year For Black Actors

After an unprecedented number of Black performers received Emmy nominations this year, a record number of Black performers also picked up actual Emmy trophies.

Out of the 18 acting awards handed out at the 72nd Annual Primetime Emmy Awards, nine of them went to Black actors, which gives the performer parity with white actors, as no other people of color won this year.

This is a notable increase from last year, when 11.11% of acting winners were Black (16.67% BIPOC winners overall). All in all, the Television Academy has come a long way in the last few years: in 2013 there were zero BIPOC winners in the acting categories.

History was also made with Zendaya’s lead drama actress win for HBO’s “Euphoria.” It was also only the second time in the awards’ seven-plus decade history that a Black woman won that category. The first was Viola Davis in 2015 for “How To Get Away With Murder.”

Additionally, Rudolph picked up not only her first-ever Emmy win but also her second: She won the character voice-over and guest comedy actress awards, for Netflix’s “Big Mouth” and NBC’s “Saturday Night Live,” respectively during the Creative Arts ceremonies. And, Ron Cephas Jones picked up his second-ever Emmy for NBC’s “This Is Us” (in the guest drama actor category) while his real-life daughter Jasmine Cephas Jones won the short form comedy or drama statue for Quibi’s “#FreeRayShawn”; they were the first parent-child duo to win an Emmy during the same ceremony, receiving their awards on the final night of the Creative Arts ceremonies on Saturday. (However, “Schitt’s Creek’s” Eugene Levy and Daniel Levy followed this up immediately on Sunday.)

“Black-ish” star Anthony Anderson appeared during the Emmys broadcast to talk about the record year and explain that this weekend was supposed to be like an NBC All-Star Weekend for Black entertainment industry professionals. But “because of COVID we can’t even get in the damn building,” he said. “These Emmys would have been so Black, it would have been like hot sauce in your purse Black, Howard University homecoming Black, ‘you fit the description’ Black. We would have had speeches quoting our great poets like Maya Angelou, Langston Hughes, Cardi B.”

Instead “of that sexy melanated energy,” he continued, “here I am alone in a sterilized green room trying not to sneeze on a damn llama.” (Kimmel corrected him that it was actually an alpaca that had appeared on the show.)

“This isn’t what it should have been, but I’m still rooting for everybody black because black stories, black performances and black lives matter,” Anderson said.

Out of six writing categories at the Emmys, Black winners made up 33.33%, BIPOC winners made up 50% and female winners made up 16.67% Out of the seven directing categories at the Emmys this year, Black winners made up 14%, BIPOC winners made up 28.6% and female winners made up 28.6% winners overall.

These categories are often won by multiple people sharing a nomination, so when it came to individual people, the breakdown was 2.13% Black, 3.2% BIPOC overall and 3.2% women in writing overall, and 2.1% Black, 4.2% BIPOC and 4.2% women in directing overall.

“I don’t want to discount what it means for Black performers to be recognized in ways that they should be recognized and to have opportunities for their work to be seen and appreciated and respected the way it should be. But I do think that what we have to recognize is that we can’t mistake presence for power,” Color of Change president Rashad Robinson previously told Variety. “Power is the ability to change the rules. Presence is not bad, but when we mistake presence for power, we can sometimes think something has happened that hasn’t actually happened.”

He continued: “As we think about API and Latinx communities and the dismal representation they have on television and at awards shows, I do think in so many ways it illustrates a supremacy in terms of who’s in charge, what is normal and what is additive. It’s like, ‘Oh we’re going to do something for this community this year,’ but even the act of doing something for someone else creates who is mainstream and who is [on the] margins — who is inside and who needs to be let in.”

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JourneyTEAM wins Microsoft’s 2020 Partner of the Year Award for Media & Communication Industry | Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement

August 25, 2020   Microsoft Dynamics CRM

Microsoft recognized JourneyTEAM as one of the top partners who demonstrated excellence and leadership in Microsoft technologies, specifically for Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement (Media & Communication).

 

Over the past year, JourneyTEAM has seen enormous success. In addition to aligning with Microsoft’s vision, JourneyTEAM has increased employee trainings, headcount, and solution offerings. Recognizing their successes, Microsoft awarded them the 2020 MSUS Partner of the Year Award for Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement (Media & Communication).

x2020 08 24 15 29 32 625x487.jpeg.pagespeed.ic.3Rx ywQOnI JourneyTEAM wins Microsoft’s 2020 Partner of the Year Award for Media & Communication Industry | Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement

Several of Microsoft’s partners were honored at this event for showing greatness in solution innovation, customer impact, leadership, deployment, and an incredible application of Microsoft technologies. Winners were chosen from a pool of over 3,300 nominees from hundreds of countries around the world.

“Their work to enable our mutual customers to achieve more shows JourneyTEAM’s dedication to success and they stand out as a model other US Partners,” David Willis, Corporate Vice President, US Partner Group at Microsoft said as he explained why JourneyTEAM was selected as a winner.

JourneyTEAM’s work with PBS affiliate WGBH and other organizations was a major factor in securing this award. Microsoft numbers showed that JourneyTEAM’s Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement team saw year-over-year growth of 47% of client wins and total revenue.

“Recognition as Microsoft’s top partner for Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement underscores JourneyTeam’s focus on helping organizations achieve successful digital transformation,” said Eric Beins, JourneyTEAM’s Head of Dynamics Customer Engagement and Insights. “We’ve selected top talent and streamlined efforts internally, worked with Microsoft, and collaborated with customers to rapidly deploy Dynamics projects.”

Eagle Crystal Award and Other Recognitions

JourneyTEAM was also presented with the Eagle Crystal Trophy, which is given to Microsoft partners who have the highest number of customer adds in Dynamics 365 Business Central. JourneyTEAM saw a 258% year-over-year growth in this solution.

“It’s an honor to be recognized as one of the top Microsoft partners,” JourneyTEAM COO Brain Tenney said. “Especially in the category of Dynamics 365. This award shows that we are headed in the right direction and recognizes all of the great work we are delivering to our clients.”

You can see additional MSUS Partner Award winners here. Every winner was honored during the general session of the 2020 Microsoft Inspire conference.

Contact JourneyTEAM today to see how we can help you with your next project.


140x195x2020 08 24 15 32 44.jpeg.pagespeed.ic.3T aL6xg9o JourneyTEAM wins Microsoft’s 2020 Partner of the Year Award for Media & Communication Industry | Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement

Article by: Dave Bollard – Head of Marketing | 801-436-6636

JourneyTEAM is an award-winning consulting firm with proven technology and measurable results. They take Microsoft products; Dynamics 365, SharePoint intranet, Office 365, Azure, CRM, GP, NAV, SL, AX, and modify them to work for you. The team has expert level, Microsoft Gold certified consultants that dive deep into the dynamics of your organization and solve complex issues. They have solutions for sales, marketing, productivity, collaboration, analytics, accounting, security and more. www.journeyteam.com

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PowerObjects, an HCL Technologies Company, Wins 2020 Global Microsoft Partner of the Year Award… Again!

August 3, 2020   Microsoft Dynamics CRM

We’ve got exciting news to share in today’s blogpost. On July 13, 2020, Microsoft announced their global Partner of the Year winners and finalists. We are pleased to report that we won one award and were a finalist for another! The Microsoft Partner of the Year Awards recognize Microsoft partners that have developed and delivered exceptional Microsoft-based solutions during the past year.

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Communities Wins Silver Stevie Award for Innovation

December 13, 2019   Self-Service BI

Sandy Rivas, Senior Community Manager at Microsoft, was in New York City on November 15th to receive a Silver Stevie® Award for Women in Business in the Best New Product of the Year category.

The award was given in recognition of an innovation that Sandy and her team implemented across Microsoft’s Business Applications Communities, called Intelligent Content Syndication™ (ICS). Learn more about this powerful tool by reading the full article in the Power BI community.

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UPS wins full FCC approval to start commercial drone deliveries

October 2, 2019   Big Data
 UPS wins full FCC approval to start commercial drone deliveries

(Reuters) — UPS on Tuesday said it won the U.S. government’s first full approval to operate a drone airline, which gave it a lead in the nascent U.S. drone delivery business over rivals Amazon and Alphabet.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) granted UPS’ Flight Forward drone subsidiary a Part 135 Standard certification on Friday. The company said the certificate allows it to expand its delivery service in campus settings such as hospitals and universities, but added that residential deliveries are years away.

The certification allows UPS pilots to fly drones beyond their line of sight and opens the door for the delivery company to expand Flight Forward. The fledgling unit is immediately doubling the number of drone flights it does for its flagship customer, Raleigh, North Carolina’s WakeMed Health & Hospitals.

“We’ll easily get to 20-plus flights per day, per drone,” said Scott Price, UPS’ chief strategy and transformation officer.

“It’s a business, it’s not a prototype or a test,” Price said of Flight Forward, which is paid to ferry blood and tissue samples to WakeMed’s central laboratory from points around its main hospital campus.

UPS said its latest certification clears the way for Flight Forward to add other campus delivery projects without seeking government approvals for each one.

“There are hundreds of campuses in the United States,” said Price, who added that UPS is eyeing drone deliveries on hospital, corporate and university campuses as it builds Flight Forward.

“This is a big step forward in safely integrating unmanned aircraft systems into our airspace,” U.S. Secretary of Transportation Elaine Chao said in a statement.

Under the new FAA approval, UPS Flight Forward pilots may now operate multiple drones under one certificate.

Earlier this year, Alphabet’s Wing, the sister unit of search engine Google, was the first company to get U.S. air carrier certification for a single-pilot drone operation. It is testing home deliveries in a rural area around Blacksburg, Virginia.

Amazon, known for its splashy drone delivery tests, also has won experimental certifications to test its drones.

The FAA is writing rules for drone operations, including guidelines for sharing airspace with passenger planes and flying over populated areas.

Residential deliveries, Price said, are “years out.”

(Reporting by Lisa Baertlein in Los Angeles; Editing by David Gregorio)

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Carnegie Mellon and Oregon State team wins first leg of DARPA Subterranean Challenge robot competition

August 22, 2019   Big Data
 Carnegie Mellon and Oregon State team wins first leg of DARPA Subterranean Challenge robot competition

The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) kicked off the Subterranean Challenge in December 2017, with the goal of equipping future warfighters and first responders with tools to rapidly map, navigate, and search hazardous underground environments. The final winner of the four-event competition won’t be selected until 2021, but Team Explorer from Carnegie Mellon University and Oregon State University managed to best rivals for the initial prize.

On four occasions during the eight-day Tunnel Circuit event, which concluded today, each team deployed multiple robots into National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health research mines in South Park Township, Pennsylvania, tasked with autonomously navigating mud and water and communicating with each other and a base station for an hour at a time as they searched for objects. Team Explorer’s roughly 30 university faculty, students, and staff members leveraged two ground robots and two drones to find 25 artifacts in its two best runs (14 more than any other team), managing to identify and locate a backpack within 20 centimeters of its actual position.

“Mobility was a big advantage for us,” said team co-leader Sebastian Scherer, associate research professor in Carnegie Mellon’s Robotics Institute, in a statement. “The testing [prior to the event, at Tour-Ed Mine in Tarentum, Pennsylvania] was brutal at the end, but it paid off in the end. We were prepared for this … We had big wheels and lots of power, and autonomy that just wouldn’t quit.”

Team Explorer — which has the backing of the Richard King Mellon Foundation, Schlumberger, Microsoft, Boeing, Flir Systems, Near Earth Autonomy, Epson, Lord, and Doodle Labs — is one of 11 teams competing for a portion of the Subterranean Challenge’s combined $ 4.5 million prize pool. Future events will involve an Urban Circuit, where robots will explore complex underground facilities, and a Cave Circuit, where the robots will operate in natural caves.

“All the teams worked very hard to get here, and each took a slightly different approach to the problem,” said Team Explorer co-leader Matt Travers, a system scientist at CMU’s Robotics Institute. “This was a great experience for all of us and we are proud of the performance by our team members and our robots.”

The Subterranean Challenge also includes the Virtual track, in which DARPA-funded and self-funded teams are developing software using models of systems, environments, and terrain to compete in simulation-based events and explore larger-scale runs. The winner will earn up to $ 1.5 million in the final event, with additional prizes of up to $ 500,000 for self-funded teams in each of four Virtual Circuit events.

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UBS Card Center Wins Security Innovation Award with FICO AI

May 12, 2019   FICO
UBS Security Innovation Award UBS Card Center Wins Security Innovation Award with FICO AI

Congratulations to UBS Card Center on winning the Security Innovation of the Year award at the Retail Banker International Awards. UBS Card Center’s fraud team used the latest artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities in the FICO® Falcon® Platform to stop 84 percent more fraudulent transactions last year than in 2015.

“We are combining our deep expertise in analyzing fraud trends and the latest breakthroughs in AI and machine learning from FICO to keep losses and false-positives low and customer satisfaction high,” said Marcel Drescher, Head of Fraud Services, UBS Card Center (shown above with Manuela Spillmann). “We are gratified by this industry award recognizing our success in stopping fraud.”

UBS Card Center processes roughly 25 percent of all credit cards in Switzerland. The need to optimise costs in the face of fierce competition meant UBS Card Center had to keep fraud write-offs to the very minimum. They were facing new fraud attack volumes but needed to uphold the highest standards for customer experience and satisfaction. This required the use of machine learning to minimize consumer interruptions while investigating more potential cases of fraud, all without adding staff.

To tackle this multi-dimensional problem, fraud experts at UBS Card Center used the free-form rule writing within the FICO Falcon Platform to create complex rules that deployed multiple AI techniques, including adaptive analytics. Adaptive analytics use the results of recent fraud investigations to automatically fine-tune the underlying neural networks in order to accurately reflect the latest fraud landscape. These custom rules, combined with the advanced analytics, were the only way to improve false-positives and fraud detection rates.

Using FICO AI and machine learning, UBS Card Center managed to investigate and resolve 42 percent more fraud alerts without bringing in new staff resources.

“UBS Card Center has reduced the amount of fraud write-offs per compromised card, stopped more fraudulent transactions and mitigated false-positive rates using the FICO Falcon Platform,” said Douglas Blakey, Group Editor Consumer Finance at Timetric Financial Services, which hosted the awards.

You can read more about UBS Card Center’s achievements and Security Innovation award in this Electronic Payments International article.

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Energy Optimization: Ørsted Wins FICO Decisions Award

February 18, 2019   FICO
Orsted Optimization FICO Decisions Award Energy Optimization: Ørsted Wins FICO Decisions Award

I have written about the power of optimization — here is a great case study showing how it can solve problems that previously seemed unsolvable. Ørsted, the world’s leading offshore wind farm developer, has used FICO® Xpress Optimization to develop a novel digital energy optimization solution for designing an important part of their wind farms. For its achievement, Ørsted was awarded a 2018 FICO® Decisions Award for AI, Machine Learning & Optimization.

This Danish company has 30 wind farms in operation or under construction, so improving efficiency has a big payoff. In this case, they were able to achieve significant savings while reducing overall design time and improving its ability to investigate different scenarios.

What did they do? In offshore wind farms, the power produced by the turbines is sent via cables to transformer substations, where the power is bundled and sent to shore. With our technology, Ørsted developed a tool called OptiArray to optimally design the cable layout connecting the turbines to the substations.

What does this mean for the business?

  • Ørsted realized significant savings which are applicable across their entire business.
  • Ørsted engineers can look for new ways to drive down cost of electricity by testing many “what-if” scenarios.
  • The success proved the power of mathematical programming in general and FICO Xpress in particular, encouraging other parts of the business to use the power of optimal decision making.

But it’s not just Ørsted that benefits from breakthroughs in energy optimization. As Sid Dash, research director at Chartis Research, noted, “Innovations like this will help to make renewables a bigger piece of the global energy supply picture.” Indeed, wind farm design is a hot area for the use of optimization — two years ago, another FICO customer, Wind Farm Designs, won the same FICO Decisions Award.

Congratulations to the whole Ørsted team!

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A look back at some of AI’s biggest video game wins in 2018

December 29, 2018   Big Data

For decades, games have served as benchmarks for artificial intelligence (AI).

In 1996, IBM famously set loose Deep Blue on chess, and it became the first program to defeat a reigning world champion (Garry Kasparov) under regular time controls. But things really kicked into gear in 2013 — the year Google subsidiary DeepMind demonstrated an AI system that could play Pong, Breakout, Space Invaders, Seaquest, Beamrider, Enduro, and Q*bert at superhuman levels. In March 2016, DeepMind’s AlphaGo won a three-game match of Go against Lee Sedol, one of the highest-ranked players in the world. And only a year later, an improved version of the system (AlphaZero) handily defeated champions at chess, a Japanese variant of chess called shogi, and Go.

The advancements aren’t merely advancing game design, according to folks like DeepMind cofounder Demis Hassabis. Rather, they’re informing the development of systems that might one day diagnose illnesses, predict complicated protein structures, and segment CT scans. “AlphaZero is a stepping stone for us all the way to general AI,” Hassabis told VentureBeat in a recent interview. “The reason we test ourselves and all these games is … that [they’re] a very convenient proving ground for us to develop our algorithms. … Ultimately, [we’re developing algorithms that can be] translate[ed] into the real world to work on really challenging problems … and help experts in those areas.”

With that in mind, and with 2019 fast approaching, we’ve taken a look back at some of 2018’s AI in games highlights. Here they are for your reading pleasure, in no particular order.

Montezuma’s Revenge

 A look back at some of AI’s biggest video game wins in 2018

Above: Map of level one in Montezuma’s Revenge.

Image Credit: Wikimedia Foundation

In Montezuma’s Revenge, a 1984 platformer from publisher Parker Brothers for the Atari 2600, Apple II, Commodore 64, and a host of other platforms, players assume the role of intrepid explorer Panama Joe as he spelunks across Aztec emperor Montezuma II’s labyrinthine temple. The stages, of which there are 99 across three levels, are filled with obstacles like laser gates, conveyor belts, ropes, ladders, disappearing floors, and fire pits — not to mention skulls, snakes, spiders, torches, and swords. The goal is to reach the Treasure Chamber and rack up points along the way by finding jewels, killing enemies, and revealing keys that open doors to hidden stages.

Montezuma’s Revenge has a reputation for being difficult (the first level alone consists of 24 rooms), but AI systems have long had a particularly tough go of it. DeepMind’s groundbreaking Deep-Q learning network in 2015 — one which surpassed human experts on Breakout, Enduro, and Pong — scored a 0 percent of the average human score of 4,700 in Montezuma’s Revenge.

Researchers peg the blame on the game’s “spare rewards.” Completing a stage requires learning complex tasks with infrequent feedback. As a result, even the best-trained AI agents tend to maximize rewards in the short term rather than work toward a big-picture goal — for example, hitting an enemy repeatedly instead of climbing a rope close to the exit. But some AI systems this year managed to avoid that trap.

DeepMind

In a paper published on the preprint server Arxiv.org in May (“Playing hard exploration games by watching YouTube“), DeepMind described a machine learning model that could, in effect, learn to master Montezuma’s Revenge from YouTube videos. After “watching” clips of expert players and by using a method that embedded game state observations into a common embedding space, it completed the first level with a score of 41,000.

In a second paper published online the same month (“Observe and Look Further: Achieving Consistent Performance on Atari“), DeepMind scientists proposed improvements to the aforementioned Deep-Q model that increased its stability and capability. Most importantly, they enabled the algorithm to account for reward signals of “varying densities and scales,” extending its agents’ effective planning horizon. Additionally, they used human demonstrations to augment agents’ exploration process.

In the end, it achieved a score of 38,000 on the game’s first level.

OpenAI

 A look back at some of AI’s biggest video game wins in 2018

Above: An agent controlling the player character.

Image Credit: OpenAI

In June, OpenAI — a nonprofit, San Francisco-based AI research company backed by Elon Musk, Reid Hoffman, and Peter Thiel — shared in a blog post a method for training a Montezuma’s Revenge-beating AI system. Novelly, it tapped human demonstrations to “restart” agents: AI player characters began near the end of the game and moved backward through human players’ trajectories on every restart. This exposed them to parts of the game which humans had already cleared, and helped them to achieve a score of 74,500.

In August, building on its previous work, OpenAI described in a paper (“Large-Scale Study of Curiosity-Driven Learning“) a model that could best most human players. The top-performing version found 22 of the 24 rooms in the first level, and occasionally discovered all 24.

What set it apart was a reinforcement learning technique called Random Network Distillation (RND), which used a bonus reward that incentivized agents to explore areas of the game map they normally wouldn’t have. RND also addressed another common issue in reinforcement learning schemes — the so-called noisy TV problem — in which an AI agent becomes stuck looking for patterns in random data.

“Curiosity drives the agent to discover new rooms and find ways of increasing the in-game score, and this extrinsic reward drives it to revisit those rooms later in the training,” OpenAI explained in a blog post. “Curiosity gives us an easier way to teach agents to interact with any environment, rather than via an extensively engineered task-specific reward function that we hope corresponds to solving a task.”

On average, OpenAI’s agents scored 10,000 over nine runs with a best mean return of 14,500. A longer-running test yielded a run that hit 17,500.

Uber

OpenAI and DeepMind aren’t the only ones that managed to craft skilled Montezuma’s Revenge-playing AI this year. In a paper and accompanying blog post published in late November, researchers at San Francisco ride-sharing company Uber unveiled Go-Explore, a family of so-called quality diversity AI models capable of posting scores of over 2,000,000 and average scores over 400,000. In testing, the models were able to “reliably” solve the entire game up to level 159 and reach an average of 37 rooms.

To reach those sky-high numbers, the researchers implemented an innovative training method consisting of two parts: exploration and robustification. In the exploration phase, Go-Explore built an archive of different game states — cells — and the various trajectories, or scores, that lead to them. It chose a cell, returned to that cell, explored the cell, and, for all cells it visited, swapped in a given new trajectory if it was better (i.e., the score was higher).

This “exploration” stage conferred several advantages. Thanks to the aforementioned archive, Go-Explore was able to remember and return to “promising” areas for exploration. By first returning to cells (by loading the game state) before exploring from them, it avoided over-exploring easily reached places. And because Go-Explore was able to visit all reachable states, it was less susceptible to deceptive reward functions.

The robustification step, meanwhile, acted as a shield against noise. If Go-Explore’s solutions were not robust to noise, it robustified them into a deep neural network with an imitation learning algorithm.

“Go-Explore’s max score is substantially higher than the human world record of 1,219,200, achieving even the strictest definition of ‘superhuman performance,’” the team said. “This shatters the state of the art on Montezuma’s Revenge both for traditional RL algorithms and imitation learning algorithms that were given the solution in the form of a human demonstration.”

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With Gamification, Everyone Wins

November 12, 2018   CRM News and Info

This story was originally published on the E-Commerce Times on July 23, 2018, and is brought to you today as part of our Best of ECT News series.

Gamification is one of the hottest trends in the business world. Incorporating game elements can be a great way to motivate and engage customers and employees alike — using an activity that has appealed to humankind since its beginnings.

“Humans have been playing games for thousands of years. Some argue that games predate culture,” said Brandon Marsala, creative director of content and strategy at
Mindspace.

“Knucklebone dice and painted stones were used by ancient peoples to hone skills, develop critical thinking, or just pass the time,” he told the E-Commerce Times. “Games are a part of us. Whether it’s competition with others or competition with ourselves, games are miniature versions of our lives: We strive to achieve — to overcome challenges.”

The appeal of games is due, at least in part, to how the brain is wired.

“Winning is tied into the pleasure circuits of the brain,” said Marsala. “Every time we achieve, dopamine is released — achieve bigger goals, release larger amounts of dopamine. In this way, humans are hardwired to want to play games.”

Customize for Your Customers

If you’ve ever earned airline miles or shopping points, you’ve participated in gamification. Increasing numbers of businesses have been using gamified strategies like these to increase customer engagement and help sales.

The basic principle behind gamification for customers is to make shopping fun — reward them for their participation, encourage them to continue interacting with your brand, and foster a sense of loyalty.

In addition to offering basic rewards programs, businesses can weave game psychology, principles and mechanics into all of their content, including their sales and marketing strategies.

“Advanced gamification is about adding value, serving the needs of the content, and achieving behavior change,” noted Marsala.

“Appointment dynamics” is an example of this kind of advanced gamification, he said.

“This is a dynamic in which to succeed, one must return at a predefined time to take some action, explained Marsala. “This can be implemented easily by offering bonuses or rewards for coming back to an experience on a certain day or at a certain time of day.”

What gamification strategies are best for your customers depends your particular business, products and audience. It’s important to customize them for each business.

“Gamification will continue to become much more custom and refined to meet an organization’s unique needs and goals,” said Marsala.

“Points, badges and leaderboards will still continue to be used, but they will no longer be seen as checking the box on gamification. They might be a starting point, but they are far from a complete gamification solution,” he added.

“Marketers and learning and development organizations alike will continue to see the value in gamifying their content and developing custom gamification strategies that motivate and inspire their increasingly distracted audiences,” Marsala predicted.

Boost Morale, Boost Sales

In addition to increasing sales, gamification can also be used internally to boost morale and increase engagement of employees.

“Gamification in business is a fantastic way to promote transparency and maximize participation within the company,” said John Kampas, CEO of
Empist.

“This can be done either company-wide or by department,” he told the E-Commerce Times. “In my experience, people love this method because it builds a healthy level of competition with measurable goals based on quantifiable indicators. Everyone likes to be rewarded.”

There are many ways to incorporate gaming into the everyday working lives of employees, and you can start by looking for places within your business that need a little extra help.

“Identify the areas within your company that may need a boost,” Kampas advised.

“For instance, sales might be one of them. Gamification can be used to transform disengaged people into top performers,” he pointed out.

“For a sales team, you can incorporate a rewards program for your team based on sales KPIs –key performance indicators — to meet and exceed your goals,” suggested Kampas. “When the KPIs are achieved, people can get points and redeem them for cool perks. This can be in the form of gift cards, company swag, or an extra day off, to name a few options.”

At its best, gamification works in tandem with other strategies related to employee psychology and motivation.

“Games appeal to people’s core psychological drives, like the desire for social recognition, sense of ownership and accomplishment,” observed Tal Valler, director of global marketing at
GamEffective.

“As you advance in levels and make achievements, you become more involved and more protective of your achievements,” he told the E-Commerce Times.

“While playing a game, you get instant feedback on your activities and have clear goals and a clear path to them,” Valler said. “Gamification, when done well, can take all these elements and use them to make learning or work activities more exciting and give them additional meaning.”

Make Games Winnable

Both external and internal gamification strategies must make sense in relation to your business’ overall values and mission. They shouldn’t feel, in other words, like they’re tacked onto existing structures, with no sense of coherence or continuity.

“Build gamification directly into your core values,” said Empist’s Kampas.

“Employee and customer gamification have some of the same principles, but they will each be rewarded differently,” he noted.

“The programs need to be easy to play and winnable,” Kampas advised. “A lengthy process or extensive rules can be unappealing to participants. You must also clearly outline the details of the challenge and the reward before starting the game.”

It’s also important that any gamification elements be accessible through mobile devices.

“Make sure it is optimized for mobile, because integrating it with social media is a great way to increase your brand exposure and company awareness,” suggested Kampas. “A social gamification example could be awarding points with a social share or like.”

Gamification shows tremendous promise, and it can be an effective way to motivate both customers and employees. As it evolves, it likely will take new forms, adapting to new technologies and trends. It shows no signs of slowing down.

“We are seeing an amazing impact with gamification for businesses,” said Kampas.

“There are many platforms out there that make it easy for a company to incorporate gamification and recognition into their businesses, both for employees and customers,” he added. “The good thing is you don’t need to recreate the wheel to be successful at this method — but if you are not thinking about gamification at this point, you definitely need to. It’s more than just a buzzword. It has become a proven tool to engage customers and employees.”
end enn With Gamification, Everyone Wins


Vivian%20Wagner With Gamification, Everyone Wins
Vivian Wagner has been an ECT News Network reporter since 2008. Her main areas of focus are technology, business, CRM, e-commerce, privacy, security, arts, culture and diversity. She has extensive experience reporting on business and technology for a variety
of outlets, including The Atlantic, The Establishment and O, The Oprah Magazine. She holds a PhD in English with a specialty in modern American literature and culture. She received a first-place feature reporting award from the Ohio Society of Professional Journalists.
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