"Mobile games are, along with social games, the hottest sector of the video game industry by far," said Dennis Ryan, executive vice president of Worldwide Publishing at PopCap, which says it derives nearly a third of its overall revenues from sales of popular mobile games like Bejeweled and . "As more people purchase smartphones and the entire process of finding, purchasing and playing mobile games becomes as simple as browsing the internet, the mobile games market is going to accelerate even more."

Rewarding the Sales Staff

Given this increase in , it's not too surprising that businesses and organizations are increasingly trying to tap into consumers' growing gaming interests. Digitalkoot, for example--a joint project run by the National Library of Finland and distributed work platform Microtask--now offers two games on its site to crowdsource help on a national archives indexing effort, according to a on the Springwise blog. (Full disclosure: I write for Springwise as well.)

Similarly, is an app that converts consumers' to-do lists into games, while Deal Machine uses game mechanics to motivate and reward corporate sales staffs.

How can you bring an element of gaming into your own offerings? You might try a platform like Gamify, which recently completed its beta period and can now be used to incorporate game-like reward programs, customizable game mechanics and widgets into any Web-enabled service or application. Using Gamify, you can add a "game layer" to any site, service or application, for example, offering a fun, branded experience for users, with real-time analytics for your own purposes.