Akili Interactive Labs is a medical device company that makes mobile video games—and not the other way around.
That’s an important distinction for co-founder and CEO Eddie Martucci.
“We’re not a consumer company, nor do we want to be,” Martucci told me recently, as we chatted in a conference room at Akili’s new downtown Boston headquarters. “You have to be pretty focused as a company to do something well. And medical is a huge area to focus on.”
UIEvolution, a 13-year-old tech company, is trying its hand at augmented reality with the release of a mobile game called Shatter Isle.
The game users computer vision to weave the virtual and real world together in a seamless way, and the aim is to take the technology of augmented reality entertainment past the first generation of pop-up book visual effects.
Kids are buying into digital toys like Skylanders, a hybrid video game and toy product from Activision, in a big way. The number of children who want such smart toys — which provide both physical and digital entertainment — has topped 72 million worldwide, according to the GameByte study by market research firm Interpret.
Toys that integrate both physical toys and video games have a high chance for success across most major kids markets, according to Michael Cai, an analyst at Interpret. The demand is spread across on number of different geographic markets, based on surveys on demand among kids for smart toys.
Today, international investment firm Digi-Capital published its in-depth review of the global gaming space, giving us a sense of the size, breadth, and activity of the international gaming market in both a year-end retrospective of 2012 as well as what we can expect from the industry in the coming year.
