A little over a month ago, we launched Sifteo’s Neighbor Initiative with a donation to the After School Enrichment Program (ASEP) at Daniel Webster Elementary in Potrero Hill. Today we went back to see how the kids are getting along with Sifteo–we think the pictures speak for themselves .

Computer Lab = awesome!!

It’s true: Sifteo loves Game Informer, and there is evidence of it all over our office. A copy of the magazine is practically everywhere you look.

For example, Game Informer waiting for morning coffee to be ready:

Game Informer hanging out with other cool stuff on our Bulletin board:

And peanut butter, jelly, and Game Informer, of course:

So we were pretty stoked when Game Informer wanted to run a contest to give away some FREE Sifteo cubes—here’s the blog entry about the Sifteo Sweepstakes and here’s how to enter to win. 5 winners will score a set of cubes plus one extra, which is enough to play our new awesome game, Miami Heist, by devs 5 Sided Square.

Enter to win before the contest closes on April 3rd! Good luck!

Last week during GDC, our new game, Miami Heist, was released with a great reception—our website and blog were temporarily down (presumably due to high traffic—sorry for the inconvenience!), and we’re excited about the all great response the game’s received so far.

So we decided to do an interview with Lily, Sifteo intern and game artist at 5 Sided Square, the group of developers who made Miami Heist. Read on to see what she has to say about the latest Sifteo game!

What was your role in the making of Miami Heist?

I was a coproducer and 2D artist. I did some producing but mostly I focused on graphic design and interaction design (UX). I handled a lot of the interactions for the game on the cube and I made all the print components (the board, buildings, cards, and tokens).

What was 5 Sided Square’s goal when undertaking this project?

Our objective was to make a finished, polished product. We started with just the idea to make a board game for Sifteo cubes—a take on Sifteo’s multiplayer tabletop experience—and we went from there.

Why Miami??

Good question! Basically because—and we’re drawing from Wikipedia here—Miami became a major hub for drug shipping in the 1980s, and all this illegal activity and ill-gotten money changed the city’s economy. Luxury car dealerships, five-star hotels, swanky nightclubs, and other major commercial developments started popping up all over the city. Miami had become very wealthy as a result of crime. It’s an interesting and weird recent history that seemed appropriate for our game concept.

Tell us about the characters in the game and the crime families they represent.

We wanted families. Instead of playing as a lonely criminal, we wanted the players to have backing, which is why the characters in the game are the heads of their respective crime organizations. This need to have a crime family instead of just an individual is something that came from expanding the game from the Sifteo cubes into a tabletop board game experience. Being able to select who is on your team is really interesting for the game mechanics.

On the cube, you just choose one character to play as, and this character represents a leader. In the board game version, each family has 4 different kinds of characters and they have special abilities that let them do specific things in the game. There are names on the cards for each character—the Insider, for example, can move the armored trucks.

Playing with just the cubes, the thing you’re going after is money; in the complete board game, there are three things: money, power, and family. The money still exists on the cubes, but on the board buildings represent your power in the city, and the cards your family. These are three things are the three winning conditions. (So the important difference between playing on the cubes versus playing on the board is that in the board game you don’t have to have the most money to win.)

What was the greatest challenge in making this game?

Finding a game that uses the Sifteo cube interactions appropriately in a short amount of time was definitely the hardest thing. Since it was a school project at the Entertainment Technology Center, we had just 12 weeks to develop the game. Halfway way through, we had 5 different game ideas and none of them were really nailing it. This was pretty stressful!

The concept out of which Miami Heist evolved was meant to be a tech demo. Back then it was called Thief and was much simpler—kind of a rock, paper, scissors thing. It was risky to go with the tech prototype and hard to justify going with the very first idea we generated.

Game ideas typically start big and you chop away until you arrive at the really fun part and everything else falls away from the design. We did the opposite: started small with the Thief concept and elaborated the idea into what is today Miami Heist.

What was your favorite part of the process?

My favorite part was when we finished and everything came together and it was really a fun game. Even other people found it fun! That was very gratifying.

We knew we wanted to have the three components, or winning conditions— money, power, and family—and all 3 game designers took one part to work on and design separately. We sit next to each other and we see each other every day, but dividing the labor like that is still another kind of design risk. Even if the parts work perfectly alone, it’s still hard to gauge what they will be like when they all come together.

Watching it come together was like magic.

Cool . Thanks, Lily and the rest of the team at 5 Sided Square! If you have any questions for them or comments about their game, leave them below! They’re happy to get back to you. Thanks for playing!

Sifteo is participating in the Get On The Shelf Contest! This is a really cool initiative by Walmart to help small businesses gain visibility and growth for their product. It’s the first time ever that Walmart has done a contest of this kind, and that makes two of us! It’s new territory for us, too, and as a DIY startup business, we’re excited about the potential.

“This contest is a way to introduce our product to people who may not know about us yet. For a startup like Sifteo, spreading the word actively is really important. I’m looking forward to seeing what happens!” Dave said.

So we submitted a video and description of Sifteo cubes to compete with over 4,000 other entries!

Of these 4,000 or so products entered in the contest, only 3 will be chosen to receive the following:

- a shot at selling on Walmart.com and enjoying valuable free marketing support;
- a chance to be carried by Walmart’s physical stores;
- guidance on scaling up production to meet Walmart demand.

We think it sounds like a great opportunity to get the word out about Sifteo and share the hands-on Intelligent Play that Sifteo cubes have to offer. Help Walmart help small businesses by voting for your favorite product! Vote for Sifteo online using your Facebook account, or by sending a text message. Here’s how:

1.) Online: Visit our product page for the Get On The Shelf contest and enter your vote by clicking on the button that says, “Vote using Facebook.” Vote online up to once per day!

2.) Text Message: Sifteo’s contest entry code number is 45. Send “45” in a text to 383838. Of course, you have be 18 years or older to send a text message to vote, or have permission from your parents. Vote using text message up to once per day!

Voting ends on April 3rd, so be sure to exercise your suffrage in the meantime .
Thanks so much for your support! And be sure to check out what other awesome products are being made by small businesses all over America.

We’re psyched to release Miami Heist, created for Sifteo Cubes by developers Five Sided Square!

Miami Heist is a multiplayer game of strategic thievery that rewards nefarious deeds and a good poker face. Playing as one of 5 international mobsters who make a killing as over-the-top villains, you’ll rob armored cars, pick pockets, and “assassinate” competing mobsters to win the game!

Tricked out in big hats, big hair, aviators, an eye patch, and a Russian military coat, the mobsters are a hilarious, stogy-smoking gang of adversaries vying to be the first to reach $300 million in ill-gotten gains. Conceal your criminal plans from the other players and score extra actions each turn as the game advances. When you take the lead, see your character celebrate with a martini and a red convertible joyride. Ahh, Miami…

When you’ve learned the standalone version of Miami Heist, expand the game and delve deeper into the debauched, beachside city of crime by downloading the printable board, cards, and buildings to construct the Miami downtown. There you’ll compete for the $300 million while you try to capture as much territory as you can, building your rep and your mobster empire. These downloads are totally free on the Five Sided Square website.

At Sifteo, we love both the standalone game as well as the creative, DIY expansion of Sifteo cubes into a multimedia cityscape. Like poker, Miami Heist is easy to learn but difficult to master; its combination of strategy, luck, and campy characters makes it a game that’s fun to play again and again.

Members of the team at Five Sided Square, who are students from the CMU Entertainment and Technology Center, will be around all week at #GDC. Like their game? Give a shout out @cmuetc or say hi to Miami Heist artist and Sifteo intern, @lilylingyli.

Also, watch their game trailer below:

Thanks for the awesome game 5SS—we can’t wait to let Sifteo players have a turn! At midnight tonight, Miami Heist will be available for free to download on your Sifteo cubes. Have fun!

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.