Saying Hi from Silicon Valley – Wilson Farrar

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Wilson Farrar is a Silicon Valley Entrepreneur having co-founded and sold two technology companies..  For the past eight years she has consulted to individuals, start-ups and large corporations such as Hewlett-Packard and Adobe on Innovation, Strategy and Market Development.  Wilson is a mentor for Stanford University’s New Venture Creation class with the National University of Singapore and a recent panelist for the Global Initiative for the Leading Corporate Entreprenuership Danish Executive Program.  Most recently she mentored one of the winning teams for The California CleanTech Open.  Wilson resides in Saratoga, California with her horse Scooter.

Event now free for students!

Hey everyone! Thanks to our partners and supporters, we are now able to make the event free for all students!

Be sure to register here as there are limited tickets left! Select the “student” option and bring your matriculation/student card this Saturday. See you there!

And don’t forget to thank our partners and supporters

*For students who have bought tickets earlier, you will be refunded at the registration booth

Play with Locally Developed Game for Xbox LIVE!

There have been quite a few promising young graduates emerging from the NTU School of Arts, Design and Media in its relatively short history, and we’re happy to be featuring one of their students, Joanne Loo with her project, Warpy Boy.

Warpy Boy is a 2D Shape-Matching Puzzle Platformer, set to be launched on the Xbox LIVE Indie Games! Funded by the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research & Technology (SMART), the Studio Tone Deaf team was formed and is now working hard at finishing Warpy Boy by the end of year 2010.

Although not fully launched, we had a chance to play around with the game during our pre-conference event on 28th August. If you want to try out the game, come down for TTC and you’ll get to play Warpy Boy and other games on display.

You can check out some photos below and in the gallery. Find out what other projects we have in our projects page or just sign up here immediately!!

Competition – Idea Board!

Have a great idea for Mobile/Augmented Reality/Games lingering somewhere at the back of your head? Submit your ideas here (within 200 words) under any of these categories and stand a chance to win free tickets to our very own Tertiary Tech Conference 2010! There will be 10 lucky winners for each category.

Furthermore, you can choose to be one of 5 additional lucky winners by simply sharing news of this competition or sharing your ideas with your friends on:

1. Facebook – To qualify, you must ensure your status update includes “Tertiary Tech Conference” in your header for us to track your posts.

2. Double your chances of winning by tweeting it out as well! To qualify, use #ttc10

We look forward to seeing your ideas and good luck!

How to Add Fun to Traditional Labour

In our daily lives, we do our shopping at the usual stores, buy a meal at our favourite fast food chain or visit our usual watering holes. We are rewarded by being loyal customers and we know when and how to get things at a cheaper price. Turning our attention online to social networking services like Facebook and LinkedIn, you’ll see the number of friends you have implicitly considered as a scoreboard, while the profile completion progress meter would look like feedback in the leveling process, all of which are game mechanics that tease our psychological urges. Casual games hosted on these platforms like Farmville and Mafia Wars are making us go back and play them every 30 minutes or so.

These forces, or what we refer to as game dynamics or mechanics, are what influence us into subconsciously performing actions or completing certain tasks. As usage and engagement becomes the focus of many technology services today, there is a demand and need to infuse game mechanics in these products.

Find out from Kevin Lim, our local friendly social cyborg and tech blogger at Theory is the Reason, on how to harness the addictive elements of video games and embed these game mechanics into a traditional system or product to make it fun and to encourage prolonged and frequent use.

Kevin has been experimenting with the concept of productive games in the classroom environment, by using Amy Jo Kim’s game mechanics as a means of steering user motivations. He has also been invited to present his research papers and also to speak at numerous corporate and academic conferences. Be sure not to miss him by registering for the Tertiary Tech Conference today!

Additional video resources:

• Seth Priebatsch: The Game Layer on top of the World
• Jesse Schell: When Games Invade Real Life

Flying airplanes with cards

Ever got tired of using your mouse and keyboard to play those airplane simulation games? What if there was another way for you to play such games – using a toilet roll stuck to a piece of cardboard?

Check out one of our featured projects, PaperFlight, for yourself!

Read more about PaperFlight and the other projects that will be featured here.

Check out the projects!

Hola! We have some student projects up on our “Projects Page” – check it out to see what keeps Singapore’s best talents awake at night. Here are some to give you an idea:

Warpy Boy is an art-focused 2D puzzle platform game that emphasizes heavily on the visual and interactive aesthetics of games, and games as an art form. It is an experimental game that plays with the transformation of the character and how players can use these different abilities to interact with the game environment, in a challenging puzzle game of shape-matching.

Virtual Sandbox is an educational game for 4-6 year olds that aim to create a creative and interactive environment to learn English vocabulary. The goal of the game is to build your city and populate it with people. Children use physical cards that are similar to flash cards to place and construct buildings in their city and populate these buildings with characters of the right job/occupation.

AppyZoo makes iPad apps for kids to learn and play. We were kids once and think children’s media is ready for a revolution. Share timeless morals and educate lifetime values through classic fables such as the Boy Who Cried Wolf, the Hare and the Tortoise or the Fox and the Grapes.

>> Head on to the Projects page for more…