San Francisco!

Matmi jet setters James and Jeff were invited to attend the San Francisco Gamification Summit by our friends from RedCritter last week – we would like say a BIG thanks to Mike and Erika for looking after them and making it all possible, it was a great opportunity for Matmi to meet some of the big players in digital and do some serious Stateside networking with Sega, Unity and Microsoft.

The team at RedCritter invited Jeff to speak at the GSummit 2012, to discuss his thoughts and experiences with their brilliant gamified project management tool. We have been using RedCritter with great success internally for some time (see blog post) – so it was great to finally put faces to names and meet the guys who are behind this software, as well as checking out their newest ideas and meeting some great other companies and people in the industry.

Here are a few words from the big cheese himself about his State side experience:

“James and I really enjoyed our trip to San Francisco. It felt like a place of great opportunity, and it was brilliant to meet some of the brands we have always admired.”

We loved visiting the SEGA offices, it was fantastic to meet the Sonic & Monkey ball team in person, we look forward to working with them soon. We also visited Unity3D headquarters and I’d like to thank Tracy who has been helping us with our latest projects; they seemed pretty impressed with what we had to show them and its been a great pleasure to work together. If you don’t use Unity3D to make games yet – you should!

The Gamification Summit was fab – there are some brilliant new companies and products entering the digital space. The USA seem to be leading the way in gamification; we met Bunchball, Big Door, Badgeville, Gabe Zichermann (author of “Gamification by Design) along with the head of start up’s at Microsoft who was really excited by the Red Critter software, as well as the work Matmi has produced. Amazing!

We bumped into the famed US rapper Chamionillaire, who has been working with Big Door, and offered to make him a Matmi game, watch this space…

I’d like to say a big thanks to everyone we met with over in San Francisco I hope this is the first of many trips, and the beginning of some great new creative partnerships!”

Jeff Coghlan, CEO

Finally, next week Jeff is speaking at the Develop Conference in Brighton; we are really excited about this and hope to make it a talk with a bit of a twist…