Playmatics

Nicholas Fortugno, the CEO of Playmatics, is a well known game designer. Although he instinctively started building games at an early age, his most successful game was DinerDash.

He talked to us about the gaming industry as well as how he came about to begin his own company. His business partner, Margaret Wallace and him had started a company named Rebelmonkey which unfortunately was short lived. But after that came Playmatics.

Playmatics is still a small company, comprising of about 15 people. Nicholas talked about the composition of his team and each member's importance in the team. The programmers, the artists, the game designers and the producer each having special skills.

Nicholas had several interesting opinions about gaming in general and the industry. According to him, games came up as an art form but are a combination of creativity and programming. To get a job in the gaming industry, one just needs to build a game and make it popular. He had a very strong opinion that programmers and game designers must be prepared to face the fact that their first prototype will have to be chucked. Hence, one must work on rapid iterations of the prototype to build a good game.

He also spoke about technology in general, the classification of whether a technology is good or bad depending on whether one can imagine everyday life without it.

This trip gave a very interesting peek into the gaming industry and I would certainly like to explore it more even though at the moment I might not have the best qualifications for it.

LookBooks

LookBooks is a company offering digital marketing solutions to the fashion, fine arts, architecture and design industry. Their software provides a portfolio service acting as an intermediary between models, fashion brands, and other clients who require their data to be represented in the form of portfolios.
Fashionindie.com, a website for fashion enthusiasts, is also owned by LookBooks.

Ryan, the CEO of LookBooks, spoke about how he came to start up the company after at several different job profiles. One particular strategy that Ryan spoke about caught my attention since it was something unique and I had not heard it before; when they built their software, their primary target was the best and biggest brands. His strategy was that only after the software succeeds with these high profile brands, they would work to target the rest. The fact that this worked for them impressed me to a great extent because as a startup one would rarely go for the riskiest client.

Samantha, the editor of fashionindie.com, spoke about the content that is put up on the popular fashion blog and also that its important to build great content related to the industry in order to attract the audience.  Arun, the recent NYU Poly graduate, talked about the production and development of the core product. He mentioned that in any industry, it is important to first understand the already existing processes before building your own product.

Adam, the CTO, and Matthew, the Creative Director of LookBooks both gave us a brief idea about their backgrounds and how the came about to working with Ryan. Adam is of the opinion that setting a brand is important. He talked about the technologies that their software is based upon, namely mySql, PHP and javascript. Matthew had an interesting background, one of the things was being a part of the first ever off-planet art show.

Each of these people we met, specialize in their areas of interest and that is one extremely important factor you need to keep in mind when you are out to start your own company; to work with partners who each have something valuable to contribute to your company. A business person, a technical person and a creative person, I believe these people form the building blocks of a concrete new venture.

Vision Education & Media

Vision Education & Media is a New York based company which caters to the after-school educational needs of kids up to the age of 13. Their main focus is on using technology & multimedia to create an early awareness amongst the younger generation through hands-on knowledge. They conduct classes, camps and clubs where the students can learn about robotics, video game making, digital videos, etc.

Laura, the Founder of Vision Education & Media, believes that the most effective learning method is to start off with a child's circle of interest and then introduce new concepts once the child is engaged. I strongly support that opinion because in order to engage a child in a learning activity after school seems like a tough challenge; hence it is important that the child enjoys while he/she is learning.

RoboFun workshops are the classes where the students are introduced to Lego robotics. My first reaction to that was, how can kids that young understand the complex concepts of robotics? and why robotics of all the topics? But as Laura and her team talked more about it, I realized that the basic concepts of robotics were introduced to the children in a fun way and it led them through a constructive learning process. EJ, who was in charge of creating these interesting robo models showed us a couple of them that she was creating blueprints for.

The company's revenue model is partially fee-based and the rest is grant-based (90% for profit and 10% for non-profit). According to Laura's experience, gaining funds for a for-profit organization is much easier and hence the division of their revenue model. About 85% of their revenue is earned through the creative computer clubs. While their team is fairly sized, comprising mainly of part-timers and a few full time employees, they have a very basic marketing strategy.

The visit to Vision Education & Media gave a helpful insight into a small company which is not out only to earn revenue, but also to help kids have a well rounded learning experience.