Badger Media Inc.

Considering the ineviatable onset of Hurricane Irene, we’ve featured the Hurricane badge for this weekend. Be sure to snap photos of the hurricane as well as any damage you see, we’ll be sending this badge along with all content to media outlets and the authorities to assess damages in the area.

We’ve also made some minor tweaks to the app on our end. The “Badges” tab on the iPhone will now display competitions along with one relevant featured badge. You will now also see other popular badges, these are marked with a *, as well as a few new and curated ones, also marked with a *.

In short, if you want your badge up there, tell the world, tweet about it when submitting content, and post it to your facebook wall. To do this just connect your FB / Twitter accounts under “profile” in the app.

This change also affects photo submissions. To submit to the badges you’ve made that aren’t trending, scroll down, you can also hit the top right search icon (red box in the photo), and search for any badge not in your collection. This is a move to make submissions to your badges along with the trending ones as easy as possible.

In short, we’re trying things out, and working on providing you guys with the best experience possible, so by all means if you have anything you would like to see augmented in the upload process, or otherwise, do let us know. Just e-mail us at info[at]playbadger.com or visit the feedback page.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Badger Media launches group photo sharing and location based exploration app.

NEW YORK, NEW YORK, August 12, 2011 – Make a badge and start a movement! Badger is the only social photo-sharing app that allows you to create location-based badges for your interests, then share them with a community and develop commentary around them. Take a picture or video, tag the geographic location via GPS, and share with followers – as a user said, “It’s like a map for my personal photos!” But Badger is so much more. It’s a tool that lets you share your photos and videos around common interests – it’s about connecting with other like-minded people, visually and geographically!

The Badger app is extremely easy to use – it tags a location by using your mobile device’s GPS, posts a photo or video, and is browsable by themes (art, cheap drinks, museums, parks, transit, sunsets). For example, if you love street art, add the “street art badge” to your badge wallet and you’ve got access to the hottest graffiti being posted. And don’t forget to start the conversation – snap a photo of your own and add it to the badge for others to see! It’s like a crowd-sourced photo blog of the things you’re interested in, all geographically linked. Create your own map or badge and incorporate other users’ feedback and commentary, then you can share via e-mail, Facebook and Twitter.

The Badger App also partners with brands that people love, generating excitement through contests, giving prizes, and building a rapport between brand and consumer. “People effectively care about the brands they’re most passionate about, they define them. We are changing the traditional location-based social networking standard by allowing an outside brand to reward their most valuable evangelists, initiating new relationships. Each brand is unique and we want to work with them to get the most out of our platform, and provide the most value to their consumers and our users.” Says Jacek Grebski, COO of Badger Media.

Badger is available for mobile devices and traditional web browsers. Download the app on iTunes or visit the website at http://www.playbadger.com/.

App Link: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/badger/id454487060?mt=8

Badger has gone through quite a few cosmetic changes since we started with an initial idea in the spring of 2009. In those days foursquare was in its infancy and ideas like gamification, game mechanics, and achievements were barely starting to blip in the tech world. But before gamification went mainstream there was an incredible amount of experimentation and innovation going on in places like ITP (Interactive Telecommunications Program), Area code, Social Bomb, and a whole host of digital/interactive agencies.

Our first iteration of Badger was highly influenced by that environment and I think we’ve learned an incredible amount in the process of its ideation. Our starting point was one of motivation. We wanted to create something that would encourage people to try new experiences and explore the world in new ways. We also wanted to codify these experiences so that they were easily communicable, searchable, and explorable.

That’s when we stumbled upon the idea of Badges. See badges are perhaps the most pervasive and purest of iconic forms. The history of the badge form goes back to medieval days when knights would ride into battle with a coat of arms on their shields. If you look at family crests you almost always see the form of the shield in there along with lions, tigers, and bears or other battle worthy animals.

In contemporary times we see badges used by everyone from emergency services, boy scouts, soccer teams, and even of brands and corporations. Check out our super meta Badge called Badge Spotting to see what I mean: playbadger.com/badges/Badge_Spotting

After realizing all this we knew the choice was clear: Badges are the perfect form for communicating everything from allegiance, achievement, and experience. As we’ve shown in our last post on the Badger sandbox, the Badges you create can represent anything you desire. A badge is like a bucket for holding all the things you find that are relevant to a particular idea or experience.

The badger platform opens up the world of badges for everyone and we are extremely excited to see what people create with our soon to be released iphone app.

Stay tuned to see what we have in store for the future. Its going to be an exciting ride.

Not sure where you’re reading this from, but here in NY it’s brutal outside. This morning on the way to work temps were at 90F (32 C) and now, as I write this the mercury’s hit 103F (39 C), a tad bit on the warm side, and in short meaning that it’s officially hotter in NYC right now than it is in Dubai.

Other parts of the U.S. are also experiencing similar heatpocalyptic phenomena, and while staying indoors and power chilling to the cool hum of air conditioning sounds absolutely amazing, it’s simply not always the case, so, dear reader, in order to put some fun into the hotness, we’ve made a heatpocalypse badge, and we’d absofrekkinlutely love to see how everyone is dealing with the oven like temperatures outside. Skip over and check out the new and clearly awesome #heatpocalypse badge, and most definitely submit some content. Let’s have some fun with this heat, in which case….

Take me to the HEATPOCALYPSE!!!

Now, being that it’s super hot outside, we figured, it’d be pretty nifty if we were to share something we’ve been working on that we think is pretty cool, it’s our new “tentatively” final App Icon. Since we think you guys are all super cool for supporting this project, we’d like to get your idea and feedback on it. Well that as well as show off a preview of what will hopefully be a very often clicked on digital square block. So without further ado.

And there it is, sleek, stands out, vines in the background show the interconnectivity of the people involved with each Badge and the B, well that’s for Badger.

Until next time. Badger team out!