Thanks to all of you – and there were a lot of you! – who visited us at Maker Faire last weekend. We had a blast. Special thanks to Dale, Michelle and all the Maker Faire people for putting together such a great event and letting us be a part of it.

We got a lot of great questions – so for the interested reader, here’s a short Q&A:

Q: When can I get these Sifteo cubes??

A: Later this year! We are working hard on getting Sifteo cubes out to the world.

Q: Is there going to be an SDK?

A: YES! We feel strongly that all the MAKERS out there will create crazy, here-to-fore-unknown, useful, weird, silly, powerful, amazing applications with Sifteo cubes. We want to see it happen! We are also looking at ways to enable folks who may not have software development skills to customize and build games for their family’s and their friends’ use. Stay tuned.

Q: What games are you guys at Sifteo making now?

A: We’re constantly building new apps, and right now we are organizing the effort around the theme of “Intelligent Play“™ – the more we learn from our early users, the more we see that we ought to build games that engage adults and kids by challenging their thinking skills: whether that be spatial reasoning, symbol arrangement, and so on. (Really, so many great games from ancient times all the way to the present day work in that same way.) As we’ve known for awhile, Sifteo cubes’ unique combination of tactility and interactivity tap into something special about how people’s minds and hands work together – so we’re building games that work along that theme. We want to make games you can feel good about!

Q: Are these from MIT? Was there a TED talk?

A: Yes! Dave Merrill and Jeevan Kalanithi, the founders of Sifteo, created the initial idea behind Sifteo cubes with a project called “Siftables” – Dave debuted it at TED in 2009 when it was just a student research project. We’ve been crankin’ since then!