DES MOINES—Bunchball may be headquartered in Redwood City, Calif., but six members of its team call central Iowa home.
Now the company’s founder and Chief Product Officer Rajat Paharia is headed to Des Moines to share why harnessing the power of gamification can be valuable to companies, big or small.
“It’s Rajat’s first time in Iowa,” Bunchball director of engineering Kasey McCurdy told SPN. “We have a presence here, and we plan to grow it—our Iowa office started off as an experiment that’s gone right in all possible ways. It’d be great to show him some Iowa love.
“From a business standpoint, there are multitudes of people that are currently not motivated at their job, with their service provider or vendor, or even in life in general. From huge insurance and finance companies, to small startups and even state agencies, people are screaming out loud with what they want and what motivates them… You just have to know how to analyze and react to the data points they are generating.”
Join Paharia and the Iowa Bunchball team Wednesday, Oct. 15 at 5 p.m. at the Glen Oaks Country Club, 1425 Glen Oaks Drive in West Des Moines. The 45-minute presentation and Q&A will begin around 5:15 p.m. after cocktails and food. The event will partner with dmStartupDrinks, a monthly gathering of local entrepreneurs.
Bunchball created the gamification space in 2007 and continues to lead the industry with more than 400 implementations across 300 different companies, including Cisco, ESPN, USA Networks and more. Gamification is the process of taking something that already exists—a website, an enterprise application, an online community—and integrating game mechanics into it to motivate participation, engagement and loyalty.
“Your customers, employees and partners are ‘walking data generators,’ generating treasure-troves of data about their interests, behaviors and habits on a daily basis,” McCurdy said. “Amazon generally knows more about most employees than their employers do. In many cases, Netflix knows more about your customers than you do. Rajat will speak to smart, innovative ways to use this data to engage, retain and motivate your target audience. These techniques have been proven to help companies large and small to win in their markets.”
Paharia was recently announced as a speaker at the second annual I/OWA conference, along with Modest, Inc. CEO Harper Reed and Techstars managing director Nicole Glares.
Interested in attending Paharia’s presentation? Register for the free event online via Tikly.
