Sifteo is a pretty young company, but we’ve certainly got a history. It’s our anniversary, and a lot has happened in the last 3 years—not to mention in the many years leading up to the founding of Sifteo, Inc. Since people often ask where we came from and how we got where we are today, we thought we’d share the totally uncut Sifteo story, including all the digressions, hyperlinks, and bumps along the way. It goes something like this:

College: the early years

A few years ago in sunny Palo Alto, California, two guys named Dave and Jeevan rolled up for class at Stanford University. Dave was a surfer; Jeevan was into art and design. They had a few things in common, like their major (Symbolic Systems) and a serious enthusiasm for classic NES video games. Dave and Jeevan became friends.

They’re both pretty creative guys, and together they started a band called Wheels. Dave played guitar, Jeevan played bass, and the vision was simple—to be the kind of band that would open for Huey Lewis at the State Fair.

Wheels was pop-meets-classic rock and more than 50% ironic, but also super intense: it’s rumored that Jeevan played until his fingers bled at Battle of the Bands, and they also stole a car—Dave’s—to haul their gear around. It was a ’77 orange Volkswagen Beetle, which was exactly as retro as the Atari 2600 they played in their dorm rooms in their spare time.

College was fun.

The Media Lab

Later, after completing an MS degree in computer science (Dave) and a brief yet successful career as an actor in television commercials (Jeevan), the two friends both decided to go back to school at the MIT Media Lab. The creative duo was reunited—this time playing with circuit boards more often than guitars and Atari. They went to lectures and hung out with designers, engineers, artists, and scientists.

The Media Lab was really fun, and somewhere along the way Dave and Jeevan came up with the idea of Siftables, the Sifteo cube prototype. At his best, Dave-the-graduate-student could solder all the components on an entire Siftable circuit board in 4 hours (!!!).

The excellent TED adventure

One day, Dave’s advisor, Pattie Maes, was invited to give a TED talk about the various projects she was involved with at the Media Lab. TED curator Chris Anderson was especially curious about Siftables, and when Dave heard about the interest in his project, he volunteered to deliver that part of the talk himself.

It was a pretty bold move to say the least, and the next morning it resulted in an email from Anderson. The gist of it was, “you want to give the talk yourself? Prove it.”

In typical grad student fashion, Dave and Jeevan stayed awake for 24 hours drinking coffee and feverishly outlining the talk.

To their own amazement, it worked out: TED was happy to have Dave come to talk about Siftables…

…and not long afterward the talk went viral! It was definitely a galvanizing experience. Four months later, Dave and Jeevan found themselves back on the West Coast, where along with their friend Brent Fitzgerald they established Taco Lab in the dark weird basement of Electric Works, an art gallery in SOMA, San Francisco.

Starting up (AKA dark weird basement)

Taco Lab was the ultimate expression of entrepreneurial leanness. Humble brag? Maybe. It had one tiny frosted window and was located directly beneath an art gallery that doubled as a dance studio after hours, so meetings with corporate execs and venture capitalists often took place to the sound of 30 people prancing on wooden floors overhead:

Nevertheless, Dave and Jeevan founded Sifteo, Inc., raised some funding, and with a growing team of smart collaborators refined the Siftables concept into the current Sifteo cubes.

Then they moved the headquarters as soon as possible:

Other miscellaneous historical Sifteo facts:

• The Wheels 1977 Volkswagen Beetle was narrow enough to drive between the bollards strategically placed to keep cars out of certain parts of the university campus where the band often performed.
• The original Siftables prototypes used the same microcontrollers as game-console-on-chip Uzebox, and they cost about $200 (each!) to make
• A lot of the components of the early ”Siftables” prototypes came from Sparkfun.
• In early 2009, Dave and Jeevan went to China with Nathan Seidle, Eric Schweikardt, and a group of other Makers—led by Bunnie Huang—who were interested to learn how stuff gets made.
• Dave’s college Atari 2600 was played on an old-school, black and white, 10-inch TV with 2 knobs and rabbit ear antenna.
  • Matt Flannery, founder of Kiva, was a worthy (and daily) opponent in the game Joust.

At Sifteo, we’re celebrating!

February 16th is the 3-year anniversary of Dave Merrill’s first viral TED talk that set our founders in motion and resulted in the creation of Sifteo, Inc.

The occasion’s got us thinking: things are going really well here at Sifteo. We’ve got a bright, sunny office in the Dog Patch area of San Francisco, 23 fabulous employees, and 19 games for our ever-expanding game library. Everyday we get to connect with enthusiastic Sifteo users and every week we attend conferences and events, meeting the cool kids who are playing or developing on Sifteo cubes.

But of course, we also keep in mind that it hasn’t always been so good. In fact, it wasn’t so long ago that Dave and Jeevan started Sifteo in a dark, wonky basement in SOMA. It’s taken a lot of hard work and team effort to get where we are today and, looking back, we realize we’ve learned a lot along the way.

So considering our 3^rd anniversary is a pretty big milestone, we decided to ask Dave and Jeevan what the most important lessons have been and what advice they’d give to other startup companies going into business today. The following list represents the collected wisdom of some people our founders really admire—including Sifteo advisors, the founder of MakerBot, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and Jeevan’s mom.

Startup Advice from the founders of Sifteo

10.  Ordinary efforts yield ordinary results.

9. The cult of done: Done is in the engine of more. –B. Pettis of MakerBot

8. Be open to being wrong about anything at anytime. You have to be flexible and willing to change your mind.

7. Plans are worthless, but planning is everything. –Dwight D. Eisenhower

6. When in a leadership role, be the best version of yourself. It’s not your job to make everyone happy; rather, it’s to listen to them and make a reasonable decision as quickly as you can.

5. Make time for people to interact in ways that aren’t specifically about work.

4. Employees must know they can come up with ideas they can put into action.

3. If you have to do something, do it right then and there. (Jeevan’s mom’s critical advice we’d all like to be a little better about following…)

2. Great people are infinitely more important than great technology. Involve everyone on your team in the problem solving effort.

1. Treat your customers like you would treat your friends.

Have your own words of wisdom for fellow startup businesses and entrepreneurs? Please share by leaving your comments below!

Here at Sifteo we spend a lot of time thinking about what it means to be a good neighbor. After all, neighboring is one of the gestures that make Sifteo cubes so unique. We make sure that our gesture detection technology supports the best neighboring experience possible, fine-tuning how quickly neighbored cubes detect each other, the audio and visual feedback they provide when neighbored, and how we can use these capabilities to design the most awesome games.

After so much talk about neighboring (and shaking, flipping, pressing, and tilting, for that matter), we started to wonder if perhaps our understanding of the concept was just a little too narrow. What if Sifteo cubes weren’t the only good neighbors sitting around in our office and we, too, became great neighbors to our surrounding community? And especially to the kids who inspire so much of our work??

Thus, Sifteo’s Neighbor Initiative was born. Some might call this a corporate social responsibility (CSR) program, but we just call it good business. The Neighbor Initiative is officially due to launch next week on Sifteo’s 3rd anniversary, but we can’t help leaking the news a little early to our regular readers.

Basically, the Neighbor Initiative is a program designed to give support where youth, technology, and innovation intersect. It’s a special place where we want to develop opportunities for more young people to be imaginative and create; to cultivate skills and a passion for learning that will last a lifetime.

Like startups tend to do, we’re starting small but dreaming big—as Sifteo grows, we want to ensure that our giving program grows, too. Ultimately, we aspire to make contributions to educational and community-based programs for kids all over the country.

For the immediate future, however, we’re excited to make a donation of Sifteo cubes to a nonprofit organization here in Potrero Hill. Sifteo cubes are filling the computer labs of After School Enrichment Program (ASEP), which is designed to accomodate all grades levels with age-appropriate content, and is offered to students on a need-based sliding scale. We like how many students can benefit from ASEP, which is why we’ve chosen to partner with them to put cool technology in the hands of every student at the three locations their programs serve.

ASEP offers 1-on-1 and small group homework tutorials in addition to a wide range of elective classes, such as African dance and drumming, nutrition, beat-boxing, and Spanish language. They are looking forward to the donation to popularize its class on computational skills and to assist its students’ development in this key curricular field.

“Parents see the potential and always want their children to be exposed to technology in school,” said ASEP program director Grace de la Cruz. “And San Francisco schools are doing a huge push for literacy programs right now, especially to reach English Language Learners (ELL). At Daniel Webster, 90% of our students are ELL—Sifteo cubes will be a huge boost for those students because of the kinesthetic, hands-on experience.”

We think Sifteo is a fun, valuable tool for education because of the Intelligent play concept upon which our system is founded. Games like Mt. Brainiac, Cube Math, WordPlay, and Peano’s Vault have direct application in the classroom; the Creativity Kit has proven to be a tremendous resource for teachers, parents, and DIY game enthusiasts, who can easily create their own puzzles tailored to a specific idea or scholastic need.

And beyond the strictly academic, of course, we’re happy that Sifteo Cubes can offer ASEP students such a fun and unique play experience—after all, play is the best kind of reward for hard work!

We’ll be sure to say more about this in the next week or two to let you know more about the Neighbor Initiative, how you can get involved, and what’s new here in our neighborhood. Thanks for your interest in CSR! We welcome your feedback at neighbor@sifteo.com.

Some days we Sifteons wake up in the morning to go to work—say it’s still dark out and possibly raining, or it’s wintertime and it’s a Monday—and we’re grumpy about it. Some days we get the same idea that everyone does, which is that it might be better to just unplug the alarm and stay in bed until noon (or Saturday or June?).

But we also realize we have a slight motivational advantage, which is to remind ourselves of what we do. It goes something like, “Whoa, I make games for a living. It’s my job to make games—AWESOME!!” And then we caffeinate or eat breakfast or whatever and come down to the office recharged and ready to go.

In short, the Sifteo team is stoked about the work we do. From Game Night to PlayLab to tech events and Game Developer conventions, we sort of live and breathe our day jobs, and we’re crazy about it. But, as hard as it is to believe, we also realize that not everyone’s as ramped up about tech and gaming as we are. Fair enough. We try to shoot for socially acceptable levels of enthusiasm when possible, but sometimes it’s an awkward struggle.

Want to be entered to win a free pack of Sifteo cubes? Read on!

Back in December, the Children’s Creativity Museum hosted a Sifteo cube giveaway contest—participants were asked to come up with a creative application of Sifteo cubes and submit an illustration to explain their idea.

Over the past couple of weeks, we’ve been in touch with the big winner, Jackson (8), and his mother, Judith. We found their Sifteo story very inspirational, and we were excited to share it with you when they gave us permission to post it here on our blog.

It started one day when Judith sat down to surf the web; she was looking for ways to encourage her son to do something fun and sociable with technology. Sifteo cubes came up in her search, and coincidentally the contest at the Children’s Creativity Museum was going on.

Judith proposed that Jackson think about how he’d like to use Sifteo cubes, and she was thrilled to see Jackson’s intense interest in the project and the process required to submit his entry.

“During the contest, he was an active participant in all aspects, from concept to drawing, then on to scanning in his drawing to uploading it to the Children’s Creativity Museum’s Facebook page,” she said.

Jackson described his idea (pictured below) to his mother: “I would like to build molecules out of atoms,” and exemplified by saying, “when an H2O molecule bonds, it creates water and that shows up in the cube.” He even considered design elements and explained his illustration: “the water [shown on the cubes] is for decoration.”

We agree with the Children’s Creativity Museum, which selected Jackson as the winning contestant on December 21st, that this was a pretty fantastic idea. Of course, we had to ask—what was it like when Jackson found out the good news??

“When we checked the page and saw that he had won, he was extremely excited and very proud! It was hard for him to wait for the Sifteo cubes to arrive; he kept asking me to check the mail,” Judith said. “This is a huge confidence builder and it has a lasting impact.”

We are so happy to have partnered with the Children’s Creativity Museum to be able to reward Jackson’s ingenuity. And what’s more, it sounds like we’ve inadvertently catalyzed something even bigger for Jackson and Judith, who have downloaded the Software Developer’s Kit since receiving their Sifteo cubes and have both begun to learn how to code. Sounds like they’re well on their way to making Jackson’s molecule game a reality!

When Sifteo heard what was happening, we got to thinking about the awesome, transmissible powers of creativity and enthusiasm—and we wanted to keep the momentum going. Sifteo is hosting its own Facebook contest to give away another set of cubes.

To participate, “Like” Sifteo on Facebook and look on our wall for more information about the contest.

Good luck!

And thank you, Jackson, Judith, and the Children’s Creativity Museum for your inspiration.

As for the molecules game—we can’t wait .

We have AWESOME stuff in store for 2012. Come join us!

Contract 2D Game Artists Wanted

Sifteo is seeking contract 2D game artists at all levels of their career for several games in development. We are looking for trained digital artists who are eager to gain experience or expand upon their past experience working on commercial games, are passionate about games and game art, and are excited about building quality games for our innovative gaming platform. In short, you need to be able to create high-quality game art assets quickly and with an eye for polish.

Our team is fun, smart, and relentless. So are you. You’ll be working with a small team on a single game for our Sifteo cubes, and you will get an artist’s credit. There’s more art needs on the horizon so this could be just the beginning.

Sifteo cubes are wireless blocks with full color screens that interact with each other and respond to motion to unleash a whole new world of play and learning applications. The technology was spun out of the MIT Media Lab and has been featured on the Science and Discovery channels, presented at the TED conference, and showcased by The New York Times (David Pogue review), Time Magazine, CNN, Wired, Engadget and more. Adults love it! And kids love it, big time! For more information about our product, see https://sifteo.com/.

What we’re looking for:

• BFA or equivalent from a top art school
• excellent Photoshop skills
• strong portfolio of 2D and pixel art
• high standards for aesthetic and technical quality of game art
• excellent design skills, including effective use of color, form, shading, texture and composition
• proficient sprite animation skills, including effective use of timing and frame limitations
• ability to follow established visual identities
• strong understanding of UI design and usability
• playful and creative – we love visual puns and easter eggs
• seeks out and positively responds to feedback
• collaborative – enjoys working with others to identify solutions and learn
• pro-active, detailed, communicative and organized
• good taste, culturally savvy, loves games
• excited about Sifteo cubes, and ready to work hard with us
• Bay Area preferred, but remote is fine too
• 2-3+ month contracts per game
• about 50%-100% time on the game during your contract

Responsibilities:

• work with game designer/programmer to define the visual identity, spirit and narrative space of the game (for senior artists)
• work with the lead artist and producer to understand the requirements for the established visual identity, spirit and narrative of the game (for junior artists)
• understand asset requirements and specifications, and pro-actively call out missing items
• create art assets based on asset lists and specifications
• show drafts of work early and often
• art production and sprite animations for production-ready assets
• revise assets as needed based on player feedback and shifting game requirements
• create print-quality high-res versions of select game arts for marketing purposes (for senior artists)
• maintain an organized, shared directory of art assets and source files
• maintain organized, layered documents that can be easily shared with other artists

Bonus points for:

• aptitude for compression and other technical tricks to reduce asset size (we have some tricky limitations)
• strong character design skills
• art concepting abilities to help define the spirit and visual identity of a game
• game industry experience (mobile gaming is a plus)

Please send resumes in PDF only along with your hourly rate to jobs@sifteo.com with subject “contract 2D game artist.”

We have AWESOME stuff in store for 2012. Come join us!

Contract Content Designers Wanted

Sifteo is seeking contract content designers for several games in development. We are looking for someone who has proven expertise in understanding gameplay systems, has designed compelling maps and puzzles for commercial games, can write succinctly and with humor, works well with other game designers and programmers, is passionate about games, and is excited about building quality games for our innovative gaming platform. If you’ve admired what we do but aren’t looking to commit to a longterm position, this could be a perfect opportunity to be involved in crafting the future of gaming!

Our team is fun, smart, and relentless. So are you. You’ll be working with a small team on a single game for our Sifteo cubes, and you will get a design credit. There’s more content design needs on the horizon so this could be just the beginning.

Sifteo cubes are wireless blocks with full color screens that interact with each other and respond to motion to unleash a whole new world of play and learning applications. The technology was spun out of the MIT Media Lab and has been featured on the Science and Discovery channels, presented at the TED conference, and showcased by The New York Times (David Pogue review), Time Magazine, CNN, Wired, Engadget and more. Adults love it! And kids love it, big time! For more information about our product, see https://sifteo.com/.

What we’re looking for:

• 2+ years of professional experience designing levels, MAPS, puzzles and copy for games
• systems thinker – ability to quickly understand a game’s overall design and how content fits in
• general understanding of the game tech pipeline
• as comfortable designing within XML as designing with robust editing tools
• critical thinker – constantly suggest ways to improve a game’s content design approach
• collaborative – able to work within a multi-discipline team, offer constructive criticism as necessary, and feel comfortable commenting on areas of the game beyond your own immediate domain (if you need a yeti to design the  best possible puzzle in Map 3, you ask for it)
• sense of humor
• storytelling and copy writing skills – you’re brief, captivating and funny
• commitment to to an iterative design-test-refine cycle
• comfortable working in a fast paced, start-up environment in a small team
• pro-active, detailed, communicative and organized – you take pride in your work
• good taste, culturally savvy, loves games
• excited about Sifteo cubes, and ready to work hard with us
• Bay Area preferred, but remote is fine too – you’ll probably be about 50%-100% time on the game during your contract (usually 2-3 months per game), depending on factors like your own speed, scope, and project calendar

Responsibilities:

• work with producer and game designer/programmer to set up content design environment and understand game design vision as well as specific content design goals
• design a series of maps for a high-profile game
• write quests and dialog based on general guidelines defined by the lead designer
• regularly test your own work for appropriate sense of progression and challenge
• support playtests with content sets and questions as well as openness to resulting feedback

Bonus points for:

• boardgame geekery
• impressive gamer status
• math, film and/or architectural background
• previous design credits on a game we love

Please send resumes in PDF only to jobs@sifteo.com with subject “contract content designer.”

When we ask people how they heard about Sifteo, “TED!” is often the instantaneous reply.

Sifteo cofounder Dave Merrill gave a talk at TED back in February 2009, during which he introduced Siftables, the original Sifteo cube prototype, to a highly receptive audience worldwide; the general buzz and excitement around the idea put Dave and Jeevan in motion toward establishing Sifteo, Inc. We even mark Sifteo’s anniversary by that date, when well over a million people watched an early Sifteo vision for the future of interface technology. We’ve been working hard at improving upon and elaborating that vision ever since.

More recently, Dave spoke at TEDxMonterey, where he talked about technology, innovation, and the DIY renaissance taking place in our culture today:

This tribe of DIY enthusiasts and entrepreneurs matters a lot to Sifteo because that’s the culture we come from, too. It was great to be back for another TED event and sharing the things we’re most excited about.

Live in the San Francisco Bay Area? Want to help shape the future of Sifteo? Become a part of the Sifteo PlayLab! PlayLab members get a sneak peek at the latest games and projects in the works at Sifteo HQ by participating in 30- to 60-minute play sessions and providing feedback. Sifteo will use your insights to guide the future development of the cubes. We’re especially looking for smart kids ages 8-12 to check out our product, but everyone is welcome to participate!

To join the PlayLab, please take the following survey: https://docs.google.com/a/sifteo.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dGQyOFVCRVl3b3g3WFFzbUw4c0R3X2c6MQ