Jon Radoff is an American entrepreneur

Entrepreneur

An entrepreneur is an owner or manager of a business enterprise who makes money through risk and initiative.The term was originally a loanword from French and was first defined by the Irish-French economist Richard Cantillon. Entrepreneur in English is a term applied to a person who is willing to...

, author

Author

An author is broadly defined as "the person who originates or gives existence to anything" and that authorship determines responsibility for what is created. Narrowly defined, an author is the originator of any written work.-Legal significance:...

 and game designer. His work has focused on online communities, Internet media and computer games

Computer Games

"Computer Games" is a single by New Zealand group, Mi-Sex released in 1979 in Australia and New Zealand and in 1981 throughout Europe. It was the single that launched the band, and was hugely popular, particularly in Australia and New Zealand...

.

Radoff dropped out to found NovaLink, an early internet service provider. In 1991, while at NovaLink, he created Legends of Future Past

Legends of Future Past

Legends of Future Past was the first commercial text-based MMORPG to make the transition from a proprietary network provider to the Internet. It was designed by Jon Radoff and Angela Bull. . It was also notable in that it had paid Game Masters who conducted online events...

, one of the first commercial MMORPG

MMORPG

Massively multiplayer online role-playing game is a genre of role-playing video games in which a very large number of players interact with one another within a virtual game world....

s.

In 1997, he founded Eprise Corporation, a creator of Web content management software

Content management system

A content management system is a system providing a collection of procedures used to manage work flow in a collaborative environment. These procedures can be manual or computer-based...

. Eprise went public on the NASDAQ

NASDAQ

The NASDAQ Stock Market, also known as the NASDAQ, is an American stock exchange. "NASDAQ" originally stood for "National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations". It is the second-largest stock exchange by market capitalization in the world, after the New York Stock Exchange. As of...

 stock market in 2000 and was acquired by Divine Inc. in 2001.

On September 21, 2006, Radoff founded GamerDNA

GamerDNA

gamerDNA Inc. is a social media company for computer and video game players founded on 2006-09-21, acquired by Crispy Gamer in December 2009. The name is usually spelled with a lower case g: gamerDNA...

, a social media

Social media

The term Social Media refers to the use of web-based and mobile technologies to turn communication into an interactive dialogue. Andreas Kaplan and Michael Haenlein define social media as "a group of Internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0,...

 company working on creating a player-focused community for people who enjoy games. New York-based Crispy Gamer, an online video game review site, acquired GamerDNA, which built a community website that used real-time game play information to generate video game recommendations for community members.

In March 2010, it was revealed that Radoff was working on a new social game company that would be focused on roleplaying games from websites such as Facebook.

Writing

Radoff wrote Game On: Energize your Business with Social Games, which was published by Wiley in 2011. The book discusses social games, which Radoff views as a 5,000 year-old phenomena, and how games can be applied to businesses to make them more engaging and profitable. Radoff is generally critical of the gamification

Gamification

Gamification is the use of game design techniques and mechanics to solve problems and engage audiences. Typically gamification applies to non-game applications and processes , in order to encourage people to adopt them...

 trend, and explains to businesses that they must incorporate story and immersion into their businesses if they really want to take advantage of the unique engagement offered by games.

Early career

Radoff lived in Northborough

Northborough, Massachusetts

Northborough is a town in Worcester County, Massachusetts, United States. The official spelling of the town's name is "Northborough", but the shorter spelling "Northboro" is also used...

, Massachusetts

Massachusetts

The Commonwealth of Massachusetts is a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States of America. It is bordered by Rhode Island and Connecticut to the south, New York to the west, and Vermont and New Hampshire to the north; at its east lies the Atlantic Ocean. As of the 2010...

 and was a 1991 graduate of Algonquin Regional High School

Algonquin Regional High School

Algonquin Regional High School is a public high school located in Northborough, Massachusetts. The school serves the students of the Northborough-Southborough Regional School District comprising both Northborough and neighboring Southborough. Algonquin Regional's Superintendent is Charles E....

. During his high school years, he developed Space Empire Elite

Space Empire Elite

Space Empire Elite or SEE is a multi-player bulletin board system strategy game for Atari ST BBSes. In Space Empire Elite, players rule an empire which they expand by purchasing planets or conquering other empires. Players are responsible for maintenance of their military and planets as well as...

, a bulletin board system

Bulletin board system

A Bulletin Board System, or BBS, is a computer system running software that allows users to connect and log in to the system using a terminal program. Once logged in, a user can perform functions such as uploading and downloading software and data, reading news and bulletins, and exchanging...

 strategy game for Atari ST

Atari ST

The Atari ST is a home/personal computer that was released by Atari Corporation in 1985 and commercially available from that summer into the early 1990s. The "ST" officially stands for "Sixteen/Thirty-two", which referred to the Motorola 68000's 16-bit external bus and 32-bit internals...

 BBS systems. Also while in high school, Radoff purchased the rights to port the Atari ST

Atari ST

The Atari ST is a home/personal computer that was released by Atari Corporation in 1985 and commercially available from that summer into the early 1990s. The "ST" officially stands for "Sixteen/Thirty-two", which referred to the Motorola 68000's 16-bit external bus and 32-bit internals...

 BBS software StarLink, which supported FidoNet

FidoNet

FidoNet is a worldwide computer network that is used for communication between bulletin board systems. It was most popular in the early to mid 1990s, prior to the introduction of easy and affordable access to the Internet...

, to the Commodore Amiga; Radoff named the ported software Paragon BBS. After a brief time studying at Worcester Polytechnic Institute

Worcester Polytechnic Institute

Worcester Polytechnic Institute is a private university located in Worcester, Massachusetts, in the United States.Founded in 1865 in Worcester, WPI was one of the United States' first engineering and technology universities...

, Radoff dropped out to form his first company.

External links

• Jon Radoff's blog
• GamerDNA bio
• Interview with Gamasutra
  Gamasutra
  Gamasutra is a website founded in 1997 for video game developers. It is owned and operated by UBM TechWeb , a division of United Business Media, and acts as the online sister publication to the print magazine Game Developer...