• believing that you can engage users only by adding game features to an existing product is doomed to fail
• like social, gamification is a new “cargo cult”, an attempt to recreate successful outcomes by replicating features that worked for Facebook or Foursquare. Your product is different: why adding game features to it would “make you as successful as they’ve been”?
• instead, product designers should focus on providing a solid solution to people’s needs. Gamification can come on top of that to make the experience even better.

Best quotes:

• “Gamification is the monosodium glutamate of engagement: a low cost alternative to building something genuinely compelling for your users.”
• "Twitter doesn’t have game mechanics, and it’s truly engaging. Because users share things they care about, and Twitter does a great job getting out of the way and letting you do what you want to do."

Source: Teambox blog, Gamification, social and other cargo cults

On track to have more than $100M in funding six years after its creation, Box.net rethinks file sharing from scratch – directly targeting enterprise giants like Microsoft and Oracle. Its 26-year-old CEO, Aaron Levie, explains why you should target the B2B sector:

• Tech startups are generally consumer-focused because founders in their 20s try to solve problem they know about. Business issues are less familiar to them, clearing the way for startups like Box.

• It is easier to be disruptive in B2B: “if you compare Box to something like IBM Filenet, or Microsoft SharePoint, you get almost a 10x improvement on productivity, speed, time-to-market for new products”

• Traditional B2B companies don’t get it. They try to sell all-inclusive, bundled solutions for ERP, CRM, email… (see Microsoft 365), while their customers are looking for lightweight, dedicated tools. SaaS involves far less fixed costs than these traditional solutions.

Source: SAI, Business Insider, Matt Rosoff This 26-Year Old Founder Is Raising $100 Million To Take On Giants Like Microsoft

Photo credit: ajleon

In October of 2010 the site Monet 2010 was named Site Of The Month by the prestigious FWA. This marked the beginning of a series of awards with the Grand Prix Eurobest in the “interactive” category, the Award of the “Best Event Website” and the Special Award  of the Grand Prix Stratégie’s jury, as well as two “Webby Awards” in the « Best Visual Design » and « Best use of animation or motion graphics » categories. During the Lions of Cannes, the Grand Mass of the creatives of the communication Monet  2010 added a Silver Lion to their money bag in the “cyber Lions” category.

This harvest proves that the union of numeric creation and culture, tradition and modernity, can be source of a innovation able to highlight the French cultural patrimony to new publics. 

Pink - the venture capital company dedicated to the start of faberNovel - and many other business angels invested in CanoP, info mediator about wooden energy in France.

Created in 2007, CanoP edits and operates websites that connect and inform suppliers (bois-de-chauffage.net, poelesabois.com…).

Pink already is shareholder of af83, Chugulu, 22mars, C4M Prod, DoYouMultimedia, eXoplatform.