This is a great idea and has crossed my mind many times. In fact, it was one of the motivations behind our current startup. (http://blog.iactionable.com/ http:/

This is a great idea and has crossed my mind many times. In fact, it was one of the motivations behind our current startup. (http://blog.iactionable.com/ http://blog.iactionable.com/ & http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1126780 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1126780) I think (and hope) the achievement/badge trend will continue to grow and show up in all sorts of new places. The biggest hurdle we are facing is finding ways to 'hook' into the events which get tracked and converted into badges. Its pretty simple for websites, but for a company to setup or modify existing systems to automatically ping events is no small undertaking for that company. Maybe there's an opportunity for consulting here too? Then there's trying to decide what things are valuable for company X to track and award badges for. All this takes time and money. With a little backing info from research studies I could see companies giving this a shot. There are existing services which allow employees to give 'kudos' points to each other for things they do. This would be taking that to the next level and fully automating it.