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!

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!

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!

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

We like to call ToonTube our “Global Storytelling Network for Kids” and it’s cartoons like this that really show off the potential of an internationally connected storytelling community. “Moving to a New School” is a two-part epic from Indonesia and we were struck not just by its remarkable illustrations, but by the fact that we can all remember experiencing the EXACT same feelings when faced with switching schools growing up here in the US. Congratulations Bigbear on your wonderful cartoon and thank you for sharing your adventure with hundreds of thousands of kids around the world!

Craig Dunlap is a teacher at Miami Valley Christian Academy in Cincinnati, Ohio where he uses Toontastic regularly in the classroom. We asked him to share with us how his students have been bringing their stories to life as cartoons!

Like most educators with iPads, I’m constantly looking for apps and apptivities that I can use in my classroom to foster higher level thinking.  We had iPad training in the fall where I was introduced to Alice in New York.  This app is so creative, and I knew I wanted my kids to create something similar, but I had no idea how to do it.

I first heard of Toontastic before Christmas and downloaded it immediately.  Within minutes I could tell it was the app I was looking for.  I loved that the kids could animate and narrate their own stories.  We’ll get into that later.  However, I also appreciate that students begin by charting their story on a Story Arc.  We call it a plot hill in my room, but it’s the same concept.  They see that hill and they know what to do.  Brilliant!

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Working at Launchpad Toys has many great benefits (watching cartoons, building LEGOs, all-you-can-eat ice cream sundaes…), but one of the best has to be the emails we receive with drawings and suggestions for new characters from kids around the world. SO… drumroll please… we decided to host a drawing contest and the winning character will be released as part of next month’s Toontastic update!

So listen up you budding Picassos! Your mission, should you chose to accept it, is to draw us a picture of a creature that you think would fit in Family Portrait above, take a picture of it, and email it to howdy@launchpadtoys.com by Sunday March 25th! Or you can create your creature in Toontastic, upload it to ToonTube, and send us a link.

So what are you waiting for? Get doodling!