Games That Make You Smarter

Start-up Diaries

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

What is the deal with expecting things for free? I mean I get people don’t want to pay for stuff, but I am really shocked over the amount of time in my professional career that people have asked me to do my work for free. So I just submitted a […]

You Generally Get What You Pay For

August 1, 2016 in 7GenGames / Start-up Diaries by Maria Burns Ortiz

House on fire — Start-up life can be a little crazy. No, make that a lot crazy. We incorporated as a business in 2013, making us middle-aged in start-up years. When start-ups die, they often just fade away. You see people at fewer meet-ups, get fewer emails or social media posts trying to entice […]

Well, THAT was some serious crazy business

August 1, 2016 in AnnMaria / Start-up Diaries by AnnMaria De Mars

Gonzalo hard at work — A little background – we have been building our games to run on the web and school computer labs (Mac and Windows) so that we can easily have the educational and game content tested by hundreds, sometimes thousands, of teachers and students. You can buy any of those games here. […]

TECH TIPS : Changing from Web Game to Android

July 24, 2016 in Code Talk / Educational Games / Start-up Diaries / Tech Tips by AnnMaria De Mars

Choices for Hosting Podcasts There are two main tasks involved in publishing podcasts; the production work involved in actually creating the podcasts, and hosting the podcasts — that is, making the audio program available to users online. This is a brief tech note on how we are performing the second […]

Tech Tips: Hosting Podcasts

July 19, 2016 in Start-up Diaries / Tech Tips by Dennis De Mars

Screen when recording — In our last (which also happened to be our first) Tech Tips newsletter I talked about the hardware we used for podcasting. What about the software? Glad you asked! You could use GarageBand, but I wouldn’t. Although it comes free with a Mac, I had found the sound quality using […]

Tech Tips: Software for Podcast Recording

July 11, 2016 in Start-up Diaries / Tech Tips by AnnMaria De Mars

menu for simulator showing movement options as if it was an actual phone — The new game we are developing is for iPhones, which presents a very slight problem or two. First, I have very bad eyesight so it is a hardship for me to test on the phone. Second, there are a lot of activities that would be so much simpler if I had […]

Quick Tech Tip: Your iPhone Simulator

July 10, 2016 in Start-up Diaries / Tech Tips by AnnMaria De Mars

very large, brown pig — Often when I say things like, “I’m going back to the reservation to get input from people who will use these games.” or “This game should be able to run on whatever bandwidth you can get next to a corn field.” people think I am speaking metaphorically. No. Picture of […]

Who Does Game Testing in a Corn Field?

July 9, 2016 in AnnMaria / Start-up Diaries by AnnMaria De Mars

Last week, I had the honor of attending the Small Business Administration’s Hispanic-American Entrepreneurship Summit in Washington, D.C. Organized by SBA Administrator Maria Contreras-Sweet and her office, the day-long Summit featured speakers at the highest levels in government, with the U.S. Secretaries of Commerce, Labor, Education, Agriculture and the Interior […]

Reflections on the SBA’s Hispanic-American Entrepreneurship Summit

July 6, 2016 in 7GenGames / Start-up Diaries by Maria Burns Ortiz

Podcast setup with mikes and headsets and audio boxes — Trying to decide what would be the best topics for our newsletters and blog posts, we surveyed our mailing list (I am a statistician, after all), asking people to pick from one of four choices why they follow 7 Generation Games on social media, read our newsletters, etc. Education Start-up/tech […]

Tech Tips: Podcasting 101

July 3, 2016 in Start-up Diaries / Tech Tips by AnnMaria De Mars

buildings — When I was a kid, I always wondered what people did in those big office buildings. How did they learn how to do those jobs, whatever they were? How did they get those jobs? What do they wear? I knew what teachers did, since I went to school, and doctors, […]

How We Can Help Your Kids Become Successful Entrepreneurs

June 29, 2016 in AnnMaria / Start-up Diaries by AnnMaria De Mars

cat — When I get discouraged about the pace of ‘traction’ at 7 Generation Games, I remember an interview with one of the founders of Google. He said that it did not bother him in the early years that Google did not have a lot of users because they were working on […]

Cats on the Head & Other Start-up Tales

June 19, 2016 in AnnMaria / Game Progress / Start-up Diaries by AnnMaria De Mars