Spigit Offers Web Startups a Simulation Game
July 23, 2007 |
Spigit is a new social community and game that aims to provide a network of support for start-ups and their founders. It is being marketed as a "virtual game" that can simulate the real-life process of starting and building a startup service on the web.
According to the site, the community "provides professionals the ability to showcase new ideas and innovations and in the process build their professional network… through our proprietary simulation they can build and refine an idea, find the right resources to contribute, create buzz, and calculate a multitude of targeted metrics to provide insight into viability and simulate the likelihood of success."
Basically, new web start-up services can post their service to spigit to see how well it might be accepted and to gauge its usefulness. Spigit does a great job of describing the details of how it works through its FAQ and game rules.
Spigit aims to work primarily through crowdsourcing, allowing ideas and startup services to evolve and through the contribution and participation of the site's audience. This will provide entrepreneurs with the ability to gain feedback from customers, potential partners and investors.
There are three stages of the Spigit simulation process; incubation, validation and emergence. Badges are used to rank users and services in the community. This allows for experts to be created and relied upon within the community. Approval badges are awarded to startups for various results such as number of views, buzz percentile, and expert approval. Another badge that is awarded is the completion badge, at the end of each stage. This allows a startup to move to the next level of the game.
You can participate in the community as a general participant, as the founder of an idea or company, or as an expert or moderator in various subject areas or sectors. You can add your own insight by interacting with the community, offering feedback, and helping the idea to become either more or less popular. The structure of spigit allows users to support or deny an idea, write a review, offer up resources, or add it to your watch list.
According to a recent press release, " the company's mission is to help people gain insight and develop meaningful relationships around their professional experience through analysis of online interactions and contributions." By using metrics and allowing input from a community, Spigit hopes to provide a sort of "breeding ground" for startups to get focused and find out what is best for users.
This service will probably be most used by early adopters, developers, and investors. After all, nowadays a lot of money is being offered for the most promising services because there is a lot of money to be made. This new game and networking tool should be very helpful for many startups that would probably otherwise go without notice. My only concern is, will the Spigit service gain enough traction itself to be useful?
