Appirio’s CloudSpokes Badgeville and Salesforce.com Hackathon Selects a Winner

Recently, Badgeville customer Appirio held a hackathon and asked its development community to leverage Badgeville to improve the CloudSpokes gamification engine by integrating with SalesForce.com via its APEX REST API.

Appirio was adding a new gamification service to CloudSpokes using Badgeville. They enabled a Force.com integration using their Gamification SFDC Toolkit challenge but that left the integration part. When user events are generated in Force.com (registering for a challenge, winning money, posting a comment, etc.) they are dumped into a queue for processing. They needed to build a polling engine to retrieve these records from their gamification platform and send them to Badgeville. Thus, they sponsored another CloudSpokes Challenge: Gamification Integration with Badgeville.

Of the developers that participated in the hackathon, William Cheung came out on top. Congrats William!

We received a note from William regarding his experience developing on the Badgeville Platform… “I found using the Badgeville REST API from my Groovy code a cinch,” he said. “The more interesting part was integrating with Salesforce’s Force.com.” Even so, in only two days, William was able to make it work so well, he not only won the competition, they rolled his code into production.  “Since I was new to both Force and Badgeville, it was a little challenging,” William added.

Here is a video of the app he built: http://screencast.com/t/BTbbI5P70c8Z

You can read William’s blog post about the experience here: http://blog.cloudspokes.com/2012/02/ninja-badge-exchange-with-cloudfoundry.html

Appirio joins the growing ranks of Badgeville’s enterprise customers who are sponsoring hackathons to inspire developers to use the Badgeville Behavior Platform to solve engagement problems (and improve the bottom line). In 2011, Appirio launched CloudSpokes, a cloud-focused crowdsourcing community to match companies who need cloud development work with developers. To learn more about how CloudSpokes is leveraging gamification to identify technical expertise and improve the developer experience, visit their Badges page: http://www.cloudspokes.com/badges

You can read about the hackathon on CloudSpokes: http://www.cloudspokes.com/challenges/1350