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Comment by jeromec | Hacker News Reader

I thought it would be fun to judge along with the real judges and this was my winner too, although it was tough. The strongest companies for me at first were pinger, cloudflare, and badgeville. I thought those companies just had tons of potential -- actually do have it -- but qwiki was stuck in the back of my mind. To force out a winner I asked which would be the one company, if none could exist except for choosing one, to win. I felt I could find alternatives/workarounds to all except qwiki, which was the one I still really wanted to exist (the morning automated info stream is compelling). All finalists were strong to tell the truth, a really impressive, disruptive field.

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The field was good this year. The only company I didn't really like/get out of the finalists was Badgeville.

My favorite was Cloudflare because I had a similar idea years ago that I was going to do as a startup, but chose another idea instead.

The tl;dr version of it is a forwarding proxy for your website that speeds up page delivery (gzip, etag etc), filters out vulnerability and exploit attempts, filters out spammers, filters out mis-behaving bots etc.

I am not sure if Cloudflare is application aware. The way that I was going to do it was to build modules for popular web applications and optimize based on that (eg. it would recognize Wordpress and compress the JS/CSS, sideload images, etc.)

Clickable link: https://www.cloudflare.com/

That is an impressive website (even with flash disabled) and a welcome change to the standard screenshot/header/sub-menus/links in footer boilerplate that we see too often.

(As an aside, the winner, Qwiki, is co-founded by Louis Monier - link for those who don't know him or don't recognize the name: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Monier)

Badgeville is going to be huge. For some reason game mechanics really can affect user on-site behavior. For example, HN would still probably be just as awesome as it is without the karma counter, but there is something about having it there, even though it means absolutely nothing. I care way too much about it -- in a subconscious way. I don't let it affect my commenting, but I would be lying if I said I didn't glance at it, and wasn't aware of it in an almost hypnotic way. It's just there. Maybe it's growing up in the gamer generation that's permanently internalized any on screen score as being important. :) But, yeah, Badgeville has already signed up something like $50K (or was it 500K?) worth of new customer subscription revenues, including TechCrunch. They're just getting started.

You know what the sad thing is? I was going to apply for YC with this idea. Good thing I have backups..

There are at least five other companies, that I know of, all trying to do the same thing. Inevitably one or two companies will succeed in the e-wards market, while others will fail. At this point it is anybody's game - including yours.

TL;DR: Get going!

In truth, providing badge API's was corollary to my main idea, so it's not the end of it. Thanks for the pep-talk!

I don't see why that's sad. Sounds like great validation to me.

I suppose I mean "bitter-sweet"

I'm probably in the minority, but I don't know think badgeville will be as big as people think it will be. Sure it's kind of cool to earn little badges and unlock achievements, but it seems too gimmicky for me. Right now people are trying to "game-ify" everything like it's a magical pill that makes everything boring super exciting and addictive that people can't stop. They say the whole point of adding these features is to drive user engagement up on the site...or to focus users on the tasks that website owners want. If that was the case as a website owner I'd give out badges and virtual prizes for clicking on ads. "You just unlocked the ad clicker badge!"

Aside from that it seems silly after a while when the make the barrier so low to gaining badges and achievements. Once you start rewarding every little thing it starts becoming less meaningful. It's kind of like getting those Certificate of Participation awards at a science fair. Sure you got an award, but you just had to show up.

Next thing you know badgeville will try to expand into human behavior...creating achievements, points, and badges for every day human things. Stuff like Showering 5 Days in a row badge, Nose Picker badge, and Poop Twice a Day badge... Now that I think about it THAT actually might be more fun.

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