A tech company that recently made a substantial commitment to Kentucky is about to debut a gamification platform.
MyXR Inc. will officially announce the rollout of its Engage 3 platform on Thursday, Dec. 7. As KY Inno previously reported, the company held a ribbon cutting on a 1,600-square-foot office space on Aug. 29 at the Western Kentucky University Innovation Campus in Bowling Green.
Called a “behavior modification platform,” Engage 3 rewards users for their time on the sites that are built exclusively for clients and their particular campaigns.
“It gets things done. At the core, I think the underlying thing is that everyone is unfocused,” said MyXR Chairman and CEO Hans Koch said in an interview with Business First. “This focuses whoever the audience is to get things done — applicable to business, and it helps [facilitate] understanding, which means that revenues pick up.”
And mitigates “doom scrolling,” one can imagine?
“Exactly,” Koch said.
When I first spoke with Koch in July for my cover story in early September about all the burgeoning tech scene — and Bowling Green's growth in general — the platform was still going through its final development.
Koch, who is based in San Francisco, said he has been trying to get out to the new office space in Bowling Green twice a month for the last three months. The company is preparing to extend job offers to 15 people there who, ideally, will start by the end of the month.
“I think that office is going to be spectacular, and we want to get to 60 [employees] as soon as possible, but we want to make sure we are nice and tight with the Kentucky community,” said Koch, who hopes to be at that headcount by the end of the first quarter of 2024.
Speaking of Bowling Green, Koch revealed that one of Engage 3’s first clients was WKU. During a remote presentation, Koch provided a tour of a site that was built to help increase voter registration and participation among its students.
“So this reads like a website. Everything behind this … is gamified,” Koch said.
By clicking on different pages and watching videos and other content, users are able to accumulate rewards that are “experiences that would make people literally do something.” In this case, those can include concert tickets or tickets to a game of the Bowling Green Hot Rods game, the minor league baseball team in town.
“We’re excited about all that Engage 3 will offer for Western Kentucky University and we plan to use the platform to reinvigorate the way that students interact with the university,” said Molly Kerby, assistant provost for institutional effectiveness at WKU, in a news release. "We know the gamification and multi-use feature of MyXR Engage 3 will help us drive student engagement in a number of ways, driven by the use of smartphones which was further elevated by going entirely virtual during COVID-19. Engage 3 is providing us with the technology and tools we need to get students involved with the university and community again.”
Koch added that in terms of rewards, the determining factor on what a user can receive for completing certain tasks rests less with the level of difficulty and more with the frequency of how long they, dare I say, engage with the screen.
“You never want to have things that are so difficult that people don’t do it or they pop out,” he said.
As of a recent date, Koch said that his company was in the process of onboarding its first 40 clients, with six of those being universities. Another large group of interest, Koch said, are major corporations that want to reward employees for being aware of what is going on within the company through its internal communication platforms.
“This is something that was an unintended surprise for us. Everybody’s having trouble with connecting, communicating with and engaging with their fans, students [and] employees,” Koch said.
MyXR has also started to develop what Koch referred to as “channel partners” that will be offering the service to other potential clients. By this time next year, Koch and his team hope to have approximately 300 organizations/companies as clients.
Koch added that even though a client may sign on with MyXR for one particular campaign, they are able to then create other pages for other campaigns or objectives. Clients will sign either one- or two-year licenses that range from $50,000 to $250,000, he said.
The company is still in the process of finishing out a $1.5 million seed round by seeking local investors. This story may be updated.
