We at Sifteo are lucky to have support from the National Science Foundation (NSF), in the form of a Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant. The NSF is a federal governmental organization charged with promoting science and engineering research and education, and it’s cool that they felt Sifteo was worth promoting.

I (Jeevan) am currently at NSF grantee meeting in Baltimore and I’m having good conversations with friends old and new that also have received NSF grants. Thank you NSF!

As a special thank-you to all of our Early Access members, we’re giving away all the Early Access games for free! This gives you a chance to play the games you haven’t tried yet – and helps us make better and better games in the future.

So – check out those games that caught your eye and take them for a spin. We’d love to hear from you about what you like and what you don’t! Send us your feedback over email (support@sifteo.com), on our forums, on our facebook page, or tweet us (@sifteo).

Q: How do I get the free games?
A: We’re granting each Early Access member 2500 bonus points which covers the cost of all the games in the store right now. With your original 1000 points, you have plenty of points for the games currently in the store, plus a few extra for our upcoming games too. You’ll still need to go through the purchase process to add a game to your account – it’s just that you’ll be doing it with our free points!

Q: But I already bought a bunch of points!?!
A: For those of you who took that leap and bought points, instead of free bonus points, you’ll be getting a refund for the points you already purchased, up to $25 in value (2500 points). If you purchased less than $25 in extra points, you’ll get some free bonus points and some cash back. Please allow up to 10 business days to see this credit on your billing statement.

Q: Do I get to keep my purchased points and get the extra 2500 bonus points too?
A: Our goal is to give everyone 2500 in free bonus points. If you purchased 1000 points, you’ll get $10 cash back and 1500 bonus points. If you purchased 3000 points, you’ll get $25 cash back and no extra points. Any points in your account stay there – and any points already spent will remain spent.

Remember to use SiftRunner to purchase, download and play your games!

Normally, we highlight some of our media coverage on the press page of the Sifteo blog, but we wanted to let you know about a new TV segment! Last month, CNN paid a visit to the office and brought some cameras with them to do an interview for a new segment called “Start Small, Think Big.”

We invited some bright young minds to come to the office to play with the Sifteo cubes and offer their feedback on film. CNN also sat down with Dave and me to learn more about our background, what we are doing at Sifteo, and to hear some of our deep thoughts about The Future.

We’re happy to announce that the segment will air twice tomorrow, (Saturday) April 30, 2011.

You can catch it on CNN during the 8 – 9AM ET hour (5 – 6AM PT) and on HLN (Headline News) between 2:30 – 3PM ET (11:30AM – 12PM PT).We hope that you can watch the segment, and if you do, please let us know what you thought of it by leaving a comment below, writing on our wall (facebook.com/sifteo) or sending us a tweet @sifteo.

Exciting times here at Sifteo – we are receiving Sifteo cubes from the factory, and we’ll begin shipping sets out to our Early Access members this month. Our official cartons with our official markings are now arriving at our warehouse in Fremont, CA.

We’re eager to get Sifteo cubes in to the hands of the game players, parents, kids, educators, gadget lovers and everyone else that makes up our Early Access community. We’re also eager to talk with you all, learn what you like and make the Sifteo cubes even better.

Tally ho!

We’re always making new games for the Sifteo cubes, and thanks to some performance upgrades our crack engineering team has put into the system, our game team — specifically Chris March, our newest developer — has been experimenting with some new mechanics and dynamics.

For your viewing pleasure, here are some (raw) prototypes of bouncing ball / Pong inspired Sifteo games: variations on a theme.

Inquiring minds want to know – what do those guys and gals do at Sifteo all day?

Well, we spend lots and lots of time working on the cubes and working on the games, working to get everything right.

We also do PROJECTS.

Thanks to Bre Pettis, our buddy and co-founder of Makerbot, some of the team knocked off a little early on Friday and started building our very own Makerbot DIY 3D printer.

While we were consumed by project fervor, we went ahead and set up a super large format projector near one the electronics benches. You’ll see that happening in the background.

Can’t wait to get the Makerbot finished. The game studio team is itching to make a 3D model of Owlbear, the dastardly villain of Booker the Penguin.

(Also, alternate sad version of video below) ~

We had a great time at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last week. Thanks to everyone who showed up to check out Sifteo.

We got a lot of great coverage in the media and won some nifty awards. But most important, we launched pre-orders for our Early Access program, which will get the first batch of sets out to users. Actually, we sold out overnight, before the show even started. Apologies to all those who couldn’t get a set – we’ll let you know when we have general availability.

Check out some photos from our CES adventure, and talk to you later!

Dave is talking about Sifteo to a lot of people

Our booth was packed!

We’ve made it into the final 10 of the Last Gadget Standing contest – huzzah! Last Gadget Standing is a fun, competitive contest that starts with lots and lots of products and is whittled down to just 10 by online voting. So we’ve already made it pretty far. (Good job, Team Sifteo!)

That last 10 are invited to a live demo contest – and may the best gadget win.

If you’re at CES, come check out our demo and cheer us on to victory – the winner is determined by applause-o-meter. (Really!)

When: Saturday, 10:30 a.m., Jan. 8, 2011

Where: Room N257, LVCC, North Hall, 2011 International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas Convention Center.

There’s an online voting component too – so check out the Last Gadget Standing website and lend us your vote.

We’re pleased to announce our Early Access Program! We’re making a limited, exclusive run of Sifteo cubes available at a discounted price, and with some perks.

We’re looking forward to having our Early Access customers give us lots of good feedback before we make the product generally available later this year. You can help shape the future of Sifteo by telling us which games you like and which games you don’t. We want to focus on developing apps that you’ll love. We’ll be posting a full press release on the blog too.

You can pre-order your Sifteo cubes now, and we’ll ship them in Q1 of this year. We won’t charge your credit card until the order ships. Learn more by visiting our website.

Sincere thanks to all of you who have been supporting us since we showed our student prototype in 2009, way before we even had a company. We think we’ve come a long way, but there’s lots more exciting work ahead. Tally Ho!

I returned recently from a visit to our contract manufacturing partner in China – I always enjoy going there and seeing how things are progressing. I could write at length about the ways that start ups like us can and do work with massive, highly resourced, highly skilled factories in the Far East – but I’ll save that for another post.

I’d instead like to share with you some photos and thoughts about “Shanzhai” products being made in China. (Bunnie Huang has written extensively about the Shanzhai and I jotted some notes down a while back as well. Google the term for more info.)

In a nutshell, “Shanzhai” refers to groups of engineers, designers, hackers and manufacturers operating in China that build electronic products for gray-to-black markets: knock-off “iFones”and the like. These guys are not just simple counterfeiters though; they are creating all kinds of new (and often strange) products outside the normal channels of large companies.

Because they don’t care about obeying IP or trademark restrictions, they do some stuff you won’t see in your local Target or Best Buy. And because they operate outside the law, they do some crazy brand mash-ups too.

Walk around the electronics markets in Shenzhen and you’ll see these devices. I saw a great iRobot-branded iPad knock-off with the Android character on it, which was a pretty excellent combination of three brands.

But here’s one I really liked:  the G1-on-the-outside + iPhone-on-the-inside smartphone. (Apologies for the picture quality, I took them with my very official iPhone 3G):

The creators of the device faithfully recreate icons and interactions down to the tiniest detail, but they do deviate in interesting ways. First, the real last-mile polish is just not there. The touchscreen is just difficult to use: you have to scrape with your fingernail and really push. I think they used a cheaper resistive touchscreen.

But it has a fully working TV tuner: straight-up rabbit ears! You can tune in to local TV and watch it on your phone. The antenna even rotates so you can watch in landscape mode.

It’s easy to dismiss these products as the work of cheats and counterfeiters, but that is only half the story. A lot of innovation is occurring in the Pearl River Delta, unencumbered by law and protocol. As an entrepreneur here in the USA, it is fascinating to observe this kind of hardscrabble creativity playing out in different ways in different places.