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!

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

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!

We had just started a group project in my fifth grade Reading class where students had to act out a chapter of a book.  One of my students was sick that week and could not participate in the group activity, so I assigned him a Toontastic project instead.  He finished it and could not wait to show his classmates. They were all as amazed as I was, and I was happy that I found an app that could enable my students to create animated stories quickly and easily.

We played with Toontastic a week or so later during a station day.  (I created Station Day years ago as an opportunity to use centers in the classroom.  It seemed that my students never had the opportunity to do centers on a daily basis, so I brought the centers to one lesson.  Students have roughly ten minutes at each station and can learn through a more laid back activity.)  Each student was asked to experiment with Toontastic and give me their impressions.  The feedback was unanimous.  We had a winner! The only complaint I got from the kids during station day was that it was too loud in the room to do the voices.

After the holiday, we embarked upon our class wide Toontastic project.  For this first project, I gave the kids wide parameters, basically allowing them to write whatever story they wanted to.  I did, however, require them to create a Story Arc and a script before they got into the animation.

Unfortunately, I got called into more professional development halfway through this project, so a sub handled a lot of the production phase.  We tried to counter the noise problem by utilizing different classrooms in my hallway.  Two of the rooms are rarely used so we could divide and conquer.  The times I was able to be in the room with the kids, it was the organized chaos I love so much.  I had small groups of kids gathering around iPads helping each other with their projects, lending their voices.  I even got to be a voice in one boy’s cartoon.  I was a Golden Tusk, and I was honored to help out.

We had one day where all the iPads were on student desks, and the kids went around watching each other’s presentations.  They loved it!  I’m recommending that a few kids publish their cartoons on the app but leaving that up to their parents.

I gave them a questionnaire about the experience.  In general, everyone loved the project because they could create their own story and help each other.  I also saw comments about enjoying the stock characters and props and music background.  My favorite comment… “It was fun to see my drawings move around and talk.”  I also asked then to think outside the box and tell me how we can use this app in other classes.  Most kids talked about using it to reenact historical events in history class, but I also got suggestions for using it to animate chapters in a book or teaching scientific principles.

I’m excited to use Toontastic again in the near future.  It’s great to have a tool at my disposal that the kids enjoy and can help them think creatively.

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!

We’re big fans of the Children’s Creativity Museum here at LPT Galactic Headquarters and spend a lot of our weekends testing our software in the museum’s Innovation Lab. Last week, while testing at the museum, we ran into a TV crew from CNBC’s Tech Check. Lights, Camera, PLAY!

As our many faithful playful storytellers can attest, Toontastic features a wide array of virtual playsets chock full of characters and settings to spark the imagination. Pirates and Robots and Rock Stars OH MY!

Of course, we want everyone to have as many toys as possible to inspire even more remarkable cartoons on ToonTube… so we created an All-Access Pass that unlocks all current AND future playsets for one flat price of $9.99. Easy right? We thought so. Unleashing your kids’ imagination is as simple as opening up the app, tapping the “Toy Store” icon, purchasing the All-Access Pass, and stepping back to watch the TOYSPIRATION unfold. Happy ‘Tooning!

It’s time to plug in your amp and bust out those all-too-tight acid-wash jeans, we just released Toontastic v1.71: Rock Stars! With this release (free to update on iTunes), you and your kids can start your own garage band featuring Fiona Starr, Dyna Mite, M.C. Hi-Tops, and many more. Perform well enough at the Star Amphitheater and you might even score an interview with Magnus O’Doyle on the “Way Past Your Bedtime Show”!

All 32 Playsets are available now (once you update) for individual purchase or you can buy our brand-new ALL ACCESS PASS – unlocking every current AND future playset for a one-time price of $9.99. That’s over 60% off!

As always, the crew here at Launchpad Toys Galactic Headquarters would like to send a mega big (infinity +1) thank you to you and your kids. Your creativity and stories ROCK OUR SOCKS OFF every single day (seriously, we watch a lot of cartoons).

Phew! Swing over to iTunes right now and download version 1.71 for a fix for this crashing issue. Again, thank you for bearing with us on this bug.

Attention Afficionados of ‘Toon: Toontastic v1.7 (just released to iTunes) has been causing problems for folks updating their apps (new installs are fine). We’re so sorry for the inconvenience – it’s a particularly wily database bug, but our crack team of gumshoes is hot on the trail and we look forward to having a fix out to all of you very shortly.

In the meantime, PLEASE DO NOT DELETE THE APP as this will erase your kids’ wonderful cartoons. Again, please accept our apologies for the inconvenience.

-Your Friends at Launchpad Toys

Lovers of Children’s Literature rejoice: we finally have a sequel to The Witch of Blackbird Pond (must have been an extraordinary snowmelt/rainfall this year). Special thanks to Ccc71499 (?!#?) for a great story chock full of gripping dialogue, an adorable “police monkey”, and a terrifying witch’s howl. Wow. Well done.

The San Diego Union-Tribune recently showcased one of our illustriously imaginative ‘tooning teachers, Benjamin Black of Hilltop Middle School… or as all of you ToonTube addicts might know him: Adaptations. His class recently created a series of cartoons on Newtons Three Laws, one of which we’ve included above.

We reached out to Benjamin after the article to ask if he’d share his thoughts on using Toontastic in the classroom. Here’s what he had to say:

“Toontastic is a great tool for assessing student understanding of more complex theory and topics.  I have used Toontastic in the classroom to give students an opportunity to be creative, have fun, and demonstrate their true understanding of topics such as Newton’s Laws.  The skills necessary to create an animated short demonstrating the mastery of the topic being covered require higher level thinking and can be used to help others in class understand the topic better when shared.  This is also a fun activity for students and the teacher and once the students become familiar with the program they can create a new animation in minutes.  Apps like this make the iPad an amazing addition to the classroom!”

We’ve seen our fair share of epic adventure tales here at LPT Galactic Headquarters, but this one TAKES THE CAKE! Lily123, most multifaceted of acting talents (playing the roles of Monkey, King Kong, Lion, AND Crocodile), we salute you. Not since The Last Crusade have we found ourselves so gripped to our seats… er, office chairs.

We get a lot of great emails here at Launchpad Toys Galactic Headquarters, but none better than the drawings we receive as suggestions for new characters and playsets. In fact, we love them so much that we’ve decided to build out a special page on our website for all the great photos and drawings you, wise cartoon makers of Toontastic Nation, are creating each day.

So what are you waiting for kids? Send your photos and drawings to support@launchpadtoys.com today and we’ll share them with the rest of the world!

It’s Oscar Sunday and that can only mean two things here at Launchpad Toys Galactic Headquarters: LOTS of buttery popcorn and the unveiling of the Golden Monkey Award Winners! For the 2nd straight year, voting was nail-bitingly close for each of our five categories: Most Playful, Wildest Imagination, Top Drawing and Animation, Fantastic Foreign-Language Film, and Best Story. Congratulations to all of our winners and nominees. Your creativity, humor, and imagination never fail to overwhelm and inspire us all.

It’s a brave new (cartesian) world. Manualtoon, wise storytelling teacher of Algebra 1, we salute your creativity. What’s that you say? The Princess is in danger? No fear young mathematicians, simply break out y=mx+b and you’ll be good to go.

If you’re interested in learning more about storytelling in Math Class, check out Jennie Cho Magiera’s piece: Toontastic is Mathtastic!

We’re very excited to announce today the nominations for our 2nd Annual Golden Monkey Awards, celebrating top ToonTube cartoons from around the world. Voting begins today and winners will be announced Oscar Sunday: 2/26/12!

There are four nominations for each of our five categories: Most Playful Cartoon, Wildest Imagination, Top Drawing and Animation, Fantastic Foreign-Language Film, and Best Story. We think you’ll agree: these cartoons are AMAZING. Vote Today!

We’re speechless… much like Stinkpants, director of Silent Movie 4. Seriously, between the B&W recoloring and the handwritten segues and the (spoiler alert!) pop of color at the end, we were blown away by this ToonTube gem (not to mention the sheer genius of the director name). Bravo Stinkpants, Chaplin couldn’t have done it better himself.

Just three days ’til the Golden Monkey Award Nominations, we’re celebrating #4 of our 5 Daily Top ‘Toons: Day Dream by Bolt. It’s a great story for sure, but what really amazed us about Bolt’s cartoon was the DRAWING! Perspective, Bold Saturated Colors, Great Character Designs… the list goes on! Oh, and the collaborative storytelling too. Our (tri-corned pirate) hats go off to this dynamic duo.

We’re big fans of Chris O’Shea’s work here at LPT Galactic Headquarters and he’s just released a new app, MakeGo, that turns your iPhone into a LEGO car. Genius!

Today’s DAILY Top ‘Toon (we’re getting fired up for the Golden Monkey Award Nominations) comes from Rock_e, a budding geometry scholar and fan of the classic cape/caper serials. To our good friends (and fellow LDT alums) down the street at Motion Math: eat your  heart out! We’ve got math covered!