When I worked in the Toy Industry, we spent a lot of time figuring out ways to convince Mom (yes, Mom) to purchase our product. We figured we had about 20 seconds in-aisle to sway her to buy Playskool over Fisher-Price, Spiderman over Batman. At $10, $20, and $30 dollars per toy, Mom was buying one or the other – a classic Zero-Sum game. The only way to get more pie for yourself was to steal it from your competitor.

Working through the business side of Launchpad Toys, we’re often asked who our biggest competitors are… which gives us pause. I can rattle off any number of apps or developers in our space, but we don’t actually think of them as competitors. At $.99 on a $500 platform, Moms AND DADS (praise be!) aren’t choosing one app over another – they’re buying EVERYTHING they can get their hands on. Our biggest hurdle as developers isn’t overcoming our competitors, it’s rising above the noise of the App Store and convincing parents to hand over their phones and tablets to their kids!

We stand at a critical juncture in Children’s Media: Competition or Collaboration. As developers, we can either continue to operate as individuals competing over the same small sliver of pie or we can work together to champion best practices, promote one another’s work, and build the ultimate platform for fun, engaging, and empowering children’s media. At Launchpad Toys, we choose Option B – and like many other developers each May we celebrate that choice with a pilgrimage to the Dust or Magic AppCamp in Monterey, CA to work with other developers to realize the incredible potential for mobile platforms to change how kids play, create, share, and learn.

Are you with us? Follow along on Twitter this weekend at #dustormagic or check out the talks at  http://youtube.com/childrenstech. We hope to see you there!

We’re kicking off a fun new contest today called “Piratepalooza” for all our friends of Toontastic!

We’re looking to add a little backstory to our Pirate characters and, rather than write everything ourselves, we thought we’d ask YOUR KIDS to help us out. So every day for the next week, we’ll be posting one Toontastic character on our FB page and we’d like you and your kids to dream up zany, absurd, and downright preposterous character descriptions (with your help posting to Facebook of course). The winner each day will receive one FREE TOONTASTIC PLAYSET of your choice.

Our inaugural entry is the very first character we made for Toontastic: Crazy Bearde!

Q1: How’d Crazy Bearde get his Peg Leg?

Q2: What’s his favorite thing to do?

Q3: If Crazy Bearde were an ice cream flavor, which flavor would he be (and why)?

Submit your entry today by 1) Liking this contest on Facebook and 2) Answering the above questions in a comment on the post. We’ll announce a new winner each day. We can’t wait to see what your kids dream up!

Having run the entrepreneurship gamut ourselves, we have a soft spot in our hearts here at LPT Galactic Headquarters for young entrepreneurs hustling to get their ideas out to the world. Our Weekly Top ‘Toon celebrates just that – one young ‘tooner kicking off his very own contest for the rest of the ToonTube community. We can’t wait to see all the submissions! Brilliant idea Smartfoxtails!

The title says it all. Instead of the go to nature narrator, David Attenborough, BBC America made this video of kids narrating the awesome nature documentary series Planet Earth. Brilliant. As the kid says at the end: “That was cool! Yeahhhh”

Ryhthm game fans unite! Direct from Mother Russia (courtesy of our friends at SONY PlayStation), it’s Patapon 3 on ToonTube! We were AMAZED by Katya’s drawings and special effects (check out the battle-gear transformation in the second scene) and were simply entranced by the timing of the music. Really nicely done Katya!

This is creativity at play: “A 9 year old boy – who built an elaborate cardboard arcade inside his dad’s used auto part store – is about to have the best day of his life.”

We had a nice surprise here at Launchpad Toys Galactic Headquarters over the weekend: Toontastic featured on CNN as one of their “Top 5 Free Apps for Springtime”… inching us one step closer to our dream of being introduced by James “This is CNN”/”People Will Come”/”I AM Your Father” Earl Jones.

Like most lovers of all things LEGO, we’re big fans of Minecraft here at Launchpad Toys Galactic Headquarters and so were instantly drawn to this week’s Top ‘Toon: Minecraft Tutorial. Congratulations SkiSwim on an excellent walkthrough of the game – we’re all much the wiser thanks to your wonderfully educational tutorial. And remember folks: keep that pick-axe handy for when the Zombies come to get ya!

Interested in building the next generation of toys on digital devices such as the iPad? That’s what we’re doing here at Launchpad Toys with apps like Toontastic (Named one of the “Top 10 iPad Apps of 2011” by the New York Times and was recently added to the iTunes Hall of Fame) and an awesome suite of others we have under development. We’re looking for creative and playful coders that have made games or highly visual apps/sites in the past for our two open development positions. As a kid, you probably played with Legos endlessly and grew up to be a hacker because you still love building things. Sounds like you? Email us at howdy@launchpadtoys.com with a couple links to some projects and code that we can look at along with your resume. Be prepared to present/defend a dissertation on your favorite ice cream flavor. And just a little info on us… we’re a Y Combinator backed and well funded startup with revenue and a team of five already in place. Our SOMA SF office is a one block walk from the Civic Center BART stop.

iOS Developer
- Five years experience working in a software development team producing consumer products
- Objective-C / iOS / Mac development ideal but if you’re a stellar programmer, we’d love to talk
- Loves problem solving
- Kid at heart
- Published multiple iOS or Mac apps
- Highly familiar with the iOS toolchain
- Solid background with OpenGL
- Flair for UI and polish
- Network stack (Device to Server / Device to Device)
- Works on open source projects or writes about code
- Desire to make code read and work as beautiful as our products
- Experience with other languages
- Demonstrated initiative in other parts in life
- Passion for building tools that enable others to express themselves
- Audio tool development a plus
- Game development or passion for gaming a plus
- Interest or experience developing on other platforms a nicety

Full Stack Web Developer
- Three years experience working in a software development team producing consumer products
- Full stack web developer
- Ruby on Rails
- AWS / Heroku server setup and admin
- Solid HTML / CSS / JS background
- General knowledge about server side video & audio encoding, image manipulation
- Flair for UI and polish
- Kid at heart
- Experience with other languages such as Node.js
- Tangential knowledge about iOS development a super plus
- Works on open source projects or writes about code
- Demonstrated initiative in other parts in life
- Passion for building tools that enable others to express themselves
- Desire to make code read and work as beautiful as our products

Last week, we asked Toontastic Nation to join together in the Creature Creator Contest and design our newest character! The response was overwhelming – 264 hand-drawn creatures – and for the past two days the votes have been pouring in.

Today, we’re very excited to announce our winner. The creature’s name is “Macavity” – designed by Maetus Svasti Low, age 6, from Thailand. As you can see in the diagram above (and in the original submission below), Macavity has 8 arms, three eyes, two ears, a mouth with purple teeth, feet (not sure how many), and a belly button. We can’t wait to see Macavity come to life in our upcoming update.

Congratulations and THANK YOU to all 260+ creators for your AMAZING artwork. As always, we were blown away by your imagination, skill, and humor… you make everyday so very fun to come to work.

- Your Friends at Launchpad Toys

Here in the Bay Area, we have a wonderful TV show called NBC Class Action that airs each Sunday  focusing on tools and technology in education. A few weeks back, we took a trip down to San Jose with Diane Darrow to talk with their crew about using Toontastic in the classroom. Check it out!

Last Wednesday we announced our “Toontastic Creature Creator Contest” for kids around the world to draw and submit a design to be converted into a new character in our upcoming release of Toontastic. We were really looking forward to seeing maybe a dozen or so beautifully drawn characters… and then the email flood started… and never stopped. This morning, we woke up to find  232  kid-created drawings in our mailbox. Wow.

Given that there’s no way for us to judge this many drawings, we decided to put it to you, Playful Storytellers around the world, to vote on your favorite. Here’s the voting page – head over today because the polls are only open until Wednesday March 28th! We’ll present the winner here on our blog on Friday March 3oth!

Thank you to all the kids who submitted drawings and to all you parents out there for your tireless photography. We’re blown away (and quite humbled) by the awesome response.

-Your Friends at Launchpad Toys