ReadWriteWeb

One term we've heard more of this past year is "gamification," the transfer of gaming activities and concepts to more mainstream enterprise software. Certainly, this isn't new: corporate games have been around for a long time; Maritz (the HR benefits company) has built a wonderful business using many gaming techniques. But this year it seemed that games were everywhere, and not just Foursquare badges and check-ins. Mainstream brands such as AOL and Dell adopted these techniques, we had the first ever gamification conference this year and Gartner even put it on their hype cycle. (Now we know the trend is already overused.) Big Door put together this infographic that summaries some of these points.

In the mobile application development space, there are a lot of companies that are shooting at the same target - to create actionable data that developers can use to inform their design and marketing decisions. There are a variety of ways to do this, from creating "predictive" analytics, adding a social layer to cross-platform apps or more traditional tracking and reporting. A new Italian startup called BeInToo thinks it can do better by adding gamefication.

BeInToo is more than just adding a SDK to an existing set of apps that adds game mechanics. It also helps developers act on the actionable data that BeInToo collects on its users. It helps developers track the reputation of their users, offer them rewards and market apps across platforms.

What do you get when you combine gamification, social and beer? No, the answer isn't just "a really geeky party." You get Untappd a social network with the motto, drink socially. Greg Avola, one of the founders for Untappd, was one of the first speakers today at Monktoberfest. Avola shared insights into what people drink, how to motivate trying new beers and Web development for mobile.

If you're not familiar with Untappd, Avola might describe it as "the Foursquare for beer," but with one difference – there's a point to Untappd. That is, instead of just checking into a location, you're checking into a beer and sharing that information with your friends.

Next week the Appquest 11 contest will showcase four different Salesforce.com CRM add-on apps and anoint the winner. We are profiling each of the finalists and today we'll talk about IActionable's Engage. We wrote earlier about another gaming app that is a finalist, Bunchball's Nitro, here.

When we had the chief scientist of Salesforce.com JP Rangaswami at our 2Way conference in New York earlier this summer, he spoke about how the gamification of apps will change the nature of work. And at the annual Dreamforce conference next week in San Francisco, you can see this happening with two of the finalists for their Appquest competition. Both IActionable's Engage and Bunchball's Nitro for Salesforce are work-orieneted games based on the Force.com platform.

It's common knowledge that gaming is one of the most popular activities on the Web, but we often don't have a good sense of what type of person a modern gamer is. A new research report from Latitude set out to answer the question: who is today's gamer?

As one participant in Latitude's study noted, traditionally gamers have been thought of as the "stereotypical, petulant and portly adult playing a viscerally violent game in his parents' basement." According to the report findings, that stereotype of the anti-social, immature gamer is outdated. Today's gamer is "social, tech-savvy, goal-oriented" and is much more social than they're usually given credit for. For example, 84% of the study participants use social media "at least several times per week."

Gartner is once again taking a look at the "hype cycle" for technologies and trying to assess where technologies lie along the bumpy road from technology trigger to productivity. This year, Gartner is adding big data, Internet of Things, gamification and consumerization to the Hype Cycle that weren't present in 2010. According to Gartner, private cloud computing has reached the peak level of hype, and cloud/Web platforms are slipping into the "trough of disillusionment" in the face of Platform as a Service (PaaS).

Game mechanics have found their way into many aspects of our lives, and the enterprise is poised to be next, according to Salesforce.com Chief Scientist JP Rangaswami.

In a session at ReadWriteWeb's 2Way Summit earlier this week, Rangaswami outlined how and why gamification will shape the future of work. As a new generation of knowledge workers land in jobs at organizations big and small, they're bringing with them different expectations and are motivated differently than workers once were.

We've covered several companies applying some of the latest trends in consumer to technology to the enterprise, such as Q&A services and location-based services. We've questioned the utility of augmented reality and gamification at work. We've considered whether some sort of Yelp-like review site will disrupt the analyst business. We haven't yet looked into group messaging, which actually grew out of BlackBerry Messenger, but a few enterprise mobile group messaging companies are on our radar. We haven't seen an Instagram or Color for the enterprise, but I suppose anything can happen.

Which of these consumer technologies do you think will catch on next in the enterprise?

Since Seth Priebatsch's keynote at this year's SXSW, excitement about adding a "game layer" to the world - liberating games from their traditional place on a computer screen and imposing game-like, social and situational constraints onto the real world (largely through mobile apps) - has positively erupted. There's been considerable interest from businesses across industries, educators, social innovators and techies alike.

Latitude Research (which partnered with ReadWriteWeb last year on a study about kids and future Web technology) has launched a new study on The Future of Gaming - they want to hear fresh perspectives from both game enthusiasts and non-gamers. What do you think the role of games will (or should) be in the future? Can they motivate and inspire people to reach personal or societal goals? Can they bring together online and offline experiences in meaningful ways?