Games That Make You Smarter

Start-up Diaries

Muskrat — You would think as a company creating software for education, both in school and at home, that we would be discouraged by an article with the title “Why For-Profit Education Fails”. You would be wrong. In fact, I agree with pretty much all of the Atlantic article but I found […]

Why we won’t fail

October 14, 2016 in Start-up Diaries by AnnMaria De Mars

Accent Mark shown correctly — Since we just had our Latino tech meet up, this seems like the perfect time to give a tech tip on getting those Spanish-language accent marks right in your HTML. Look closely at this image below. It’s part of what was in one of our pretests that assess our game. […]

Tech tip: accent marks for Spanish text

October 13, 2016 in Start-up Diaries / Tech Tips by AnnMaria De Mars

Today we had probably our 10th meeting where we declared the iPad version of our upcoming app, Making Camp, “almost done.” That’s not our 10th overall meeting on Making Camp, mind you, but the 10th (or maybe 9th or 11th) time where we went over the game, assigned out tasks […]

When Your Video Game Is Almost, Almost, Almost Done

September 27, 2016 in 7GenGames / Start-up Diaries by Maria Burns Ortiz

Plane — Conferences are expensive. Even if you aren’t at one with a five – or six – figure registration fee, you still are taking days away from work. Probably, you are flying to another state, staying at a hotel and eating in restaurants. Why on earth would you spend all of […]

Four ways to waste your time at a conference

September 27, 2016 in Start-up Diaries by AnnMaria De Mars

Are you K12 edtech startup that has a commercial software product you’re looking to sell to schools? We’re looking for startups like ourselves that are past the idea stage, even past the MVP stage, and now at that less scary, but not any easier “we’ve got enough money and some […]

An EdTech Startup Sales Collective: Are You In?

September 12, 2016 in Start-up Diaries by Maria Burns Ortiz

woods by Devils Tower — This past month, I’ve been in North Dakota, South Dakota, Wyoming and Montana, not necessarily in that order, meeting with educators, social services and home school families interested in playing our games. On the way, I stopped a few times to go hiking. You can figure out a lot just […]

Start-up lessons from Devils Tower

August 27, 2016 in AnnMaria / Start-up Diaries by AnnMaria De Mars

making camp math page — There’s a lot of talk within the tech world about “What problem is your product solving?” And too often a lot of those problems aren’t actually problems. For example, food delivery is great. Trust me, probably utilize it more often than I should, but an app that integrates say my […]

Developing Technology to Solve Actual Problems

August 23, 2016 in 7GenGames / Start-up Diaries by Maria Burns Ortiz

flying chicken — Do a startup they said. It will be fun they said. Meanwhile over here, I’m doing my mad scientist laugh. It goes like this moo ha ha ha. There are some fun parts but look for another post on that as well as how to keep from going insane as […]

The depressing life of founders

August 21, 2016 in AnnMaria / Start-up Diaries by AnnMaria De Mars

My Darth Vader arm — Brief update on my personal life – after returning from my trip to North Dakota and Wyoming, I had surgery to reconstruct my thumb. You can see what my splint looks like below. I got the black one to look like Darth Vader because my granddaughter thinks he’s cool. I […]

Learning from everyone: software and disabilities

August 20, 2016 in AnnMaria / Start-up Diaries by AnnMaria De Mars

potato — Last month, we gave away our games at 90% off because we wanted to get more users before the beginning of school and get more feedback to make those games better. Why not free? I attended a talk at the Entertainment Finance Forum (see, learning from everyone) and the speaker, […]

Why not free?

August 15, 2016 in AnnMaria / Start-up Diaries by AnnMaria De Mars

My mom* isn’t the only one who thinks we’re cool! Yesterday, we learned Fish Lake got Greenlit on the game-distribution platform Steam. What does that mean? Well, some really cool things. First off, if you’re not familiar with Steam and its Greenlight process, Steam is a huge global game distribution platform. […]

Fish Lake Gets Greenlit on Steam!

August 12, 2016 in 7GenGames / Start-up Diaries by Maria Burns Ortiz

We thought readers of this blog might be interested in startups besides us. So, over the next few weeks, we’ll be featuring “Awesome startups who are not us”. To kick it off, we could think of no startup more appropriate than a new look at princesses. (This week’s judge of […]

Awesome Startup : Guardian Princesses

August 4, 2016 in Start-up Diaries by AnnMaria De Mars