Bringing Gamification to the Cloud

Bringing Gamification to the Cloud

Gamification represents a push toward combining hands on entertainment, marketing and brand development. Trending toward gamification also increases competing company's opposition with one another, which in turn will generate even more benefits for consumers in the form of price cuts, bonus offers, rewards programs, memberships, and of course entertaining apps delivered via social media.

In other words, gamification is poised to usher in a new era of customer satisfaction and appreciation. Cloud computing is a groundbreaking computing / networking solution, which has the potential to change the world. The modern trend of gamification through social media is a revolutionary new way to generate consumer interest, drive, entertainment, and achievement.

Question: in what ways might these two concepts / technologies coalesce?

The most obvious application of gamification with regards to cloud computing would be in capturing new (cloud) users.

For example, gamification elements which might represent and function like real components of a cloud computing architecture can be isolated and delivered via social media. This is to say that certain applications normally attributed to a cloud could be 'gamified' and offered up as entertainment. In doing so, the functions, features and uses for said app(s) could be more easily disseminated to a mass audience. For example, let's say company A is offering a cloud computing service for online music access and storage. At some point company A decides to begin marketing via gamification and create a limited feature version of one of their flagship apps for deployment on various social media sites. The proposed app would load like any other game and allow users to, upload their own creations and market them to other users (soundcloud.com is a good example of this). Once individual users see the increased attention they're getting via this new gamification element they will often decide to purchase the full version of the product or subscribe to it.

In this way, potential cloud users could be targeted and sold on specific features inherent in cloud computing without bogging them down or confusing them with the dizzying number of potential uses. However, marketing is not the only area where gamification can be used to drive people into cloud computing.

Because there are very few dedicated cloud architectures in existence, there is quite a bit of room left for further improvements or establishments. Gamification could be integrated in hundreds of new ways to assist in managing, running, performing, and tabulating tasks/data on a cloud network.

For example; many cloud providers are apt to offer 'pay per use'-style cloud service where users only pay for the resources / bandwidth that they use or consume. In this sense, gamification could be used to not only help users keep a running tab on their monthly / weekly usage of resources, but also perhaps even win or unlock certain 'trophies or achievements' related to their usage.

This might also be combined with programs offered by the service provider which will reward users for particular actions (like in a video game) and offer them incentives like limited period reduced monthly costs, creation of additional user profiles, or other nifty possibilities. The point is that gamification can be used to capture new users but also secure a more loyal cloud client base (which is crucial for making long term business decisions).

Why is gamification crucial for landing new cloud users? Cloud computing is still in a transitional / developmental phase, most funding needs to be put toward the development of useful software, technology or infrastructure. What gamification offers cloud providers and developers is a way to secure new users via social media without having to invest exorbitant amounts of capital toward those ends. This is crucial for cloud computing because it will not only help an organization to finance itself, but to also greatly speed up the processes of development and adaptation as well.

Both cloud computing and gamification are designed to make better use of particular resources. In cloud computing, the idea is to create an elastic hardware / software solution that can expand and contract to meet any demand, be it the number of users or hardware requirements and resources. Gamification seeks to take smaller concepts and expand upon them, to add additional value to games or apps by means of using them to captivate an audience. Together, the two concepts (gamification and cloud computing) would be a very effective 'tag team' if you implemented properly, where one element (gamification) provides, and the other delivers (cloud computing).