The monetary boost doesn’t stop there, however. After every six-month period from the beginning of the program, which starts on March 4, the developer cut decreases 10 percent, down to the industry standard of 70 percent after two years.

This differs from the two other major Android app stores. Google offers a 70 percent cut in Google Play, as does Amazon’s Appstore but it generally retains more control over mobile app prices and therefore, developer revenues. For example, Amazon picks a free app each day and also can also lower app prices to match promotions in competing app stores.

I see no mention of exclusivity in the program, but even if it is required, it may not give developers a reason to shy away. Samsung devices account for the largest share of all Android phones sold: 42.5 percent of the global total last year, says Gartner research. The opportunity for a higher revenue percentage then could easily outweigh any audience limitations from keeping the app in the Samsung Apps store.

If nothing else, this may even provide some incentive for devs to bring their newest, best titles to Samsung devices first before offering them to others through Google Play or the Amazon Appstore. That could add more fuel to the growing fire between Samsung and Google as the Wall Street Journal recently reported that Google is already concerned by Samsung’s influence over the Android platform as a whole.

The “100% Indie” initiative kicks off on March 4 and the first 3,000 developers to sign up will be fast-tracked in the program.

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“I think people will snack all day [on mobile or social games] and have a full meal on the console at night,” Earl said at GigaOM’s Mobilize 2012 Conference on Thursday.  EA, in case you’re not a gamer, offers such games as Madden NFL, Resident Evil, SIMs3, and FIFA 2013.

With upwards of $4 billion in revenue, EA is in position to place many bets. But he also acknowledged that size and installed base have their downsides. For example, it took the company a long time to come around on the freemium game question. The company watched freemium model unfold for some time before making its move. “An aircraft carrier takes a long time to turn,” he said. “We were a little hesitant to wean ourselves off a great business and cut over to a new model. Face it, it’s scary.”

But the advantage can be huge. Freemium games — where people play for free and then may or may not update to paid versions or buy virtual items in the game — attract droves of new users.  And once they’re interested,  ”you can monetize them from a penny a head to $10,000, $20,000, $30,000. Yes. We do have whales,” he said. Just like Las Vegas.

He remains on the fence on the value of HTML5 as a platform for gaming compared to native apps, but again, he hasn’t written it off.

It will take 12 to 18 months for HTML5 performance to get up to snuff for games in terms of performance, he said.  ”Will there be a holy war between web-based gaming and mobile apps? Maybe,” he said. But again, he placed his chips on all the slots; “Maybe but we’re preparing for both.”

Check out the rest of our Mobilize 2012 coverage here, and the live stream can be found here.

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According to lawyer Sean Kane, 21 states and all 10 Canadian provinces are now vying for a slice of the video game pie. He says that many places are retooling incentive packages that were originally put in place to attract movie productions.

“A lot of jurisdictions like game companies better than films because the film industry is transient.” said Kane, who advises gaming clients about incentives at Pillsbury. He added that a gaming hub can mean hundreds of very well paid individuals settling down in an area.

While Northern California remains the pre-eminent hub for game developers, places like North Carolina and Rhode Island are creating hubs of their own through aggressive loan and tax incentives. In some states, like Louisiana, the incentives are in the form of cash subsidies that can be redeemed or exchanged.

Kane says the incentive led game giant Electronic Arts (NSDQ: ERTS) to build testing facilities near Louisiana State University that employ 600 people.

The subsidies are not universally popular and one New Orleans study suggested they are not worth it (in the case of films at least). As for Schilling’s 38 Studios, the Rhode Island governor initially questioned the wisdom of offering a $75 million loan guarantee to someone who he said might have faked a famous World Series incident involving bloody sock.

Schilling himself appears to be thriving in Rhode Island. His studio last month released “Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning,” a fantasy game designed by industry luminary R.A.Salvatore.

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I recently visited the headquarters of two Las Vegas startups, Romotive and Walls 360, that are busy making their own stuff. It was eye-opening to see to see how hardware and physical goods are made in an increasingly software-centric world. You can read more about what these companies are up to, or just check out this slideshow of what daily life looks like.

Eat, sleep, build robots

For Romotive, one of the startups that Zappos’ CEO Tony Hsieh has lured to Las Vegas, life is definitely interesting right now. The company, which is less than a year old and just raised $1.5 million from some prominent angel investors (including Hsieh), spent the month of February building around 2,000 mobile-phone-powered robots by hand in two apartment units that serve as both living and working space. When I stopped by, the apartment was packed with parts and shipping boxes, and marketing head Zach Buchanan told me there was more to come. On average, he said, it takes about 20 minutes to build a single robot, although the team assembles them in stages rather than doing one at time from start to finish.

Team Romotive. Credit: Andrew Seid.

The big order was the result of a successful CES outing, where it sold 80 of its $99 robots, which offset the cost of its booth space and generated some positive press. For the Christmas season, Co-Founder and CEO Keller Rinaudo told me a few days earlier, Romotive only had to build about 100 robots. Buchanan said the company was selling about 6 robots a day online before CES, but now is selling about 26 per day.

Romotive plans to move out of its apartment and into a co-working space Hsieh is building in downtown Las Vegas, but I was left wondering if shared space will suffice if the company scales as its investors think it can. Rinaudo suggested that a change in the company’s focus, which is now split about 50-50 between hardware and software, might change its need for space.

“We’re defining this new market of smartphone robotics,” he told me, and as the hardware part becomes commoditized and new form factors spring up to do new things, Romotive could be in the position to serve as the platform powering them. It wants to “bring the app store to robots,” he said, where Romotive apps would serve as the brains for whatever physical robots consumers want to buy.

Where artists and mechanics meet

The decision to come to Las Vegas was a little different for Walls 360, which creates high-resolution, stick-on wall art on special fabric that can be removed and replaced up to 200 times. It didn’t need Tony Hsieh’s money — Guy Kawasaki and a who’s-who of graphic arts already invested in its angel round — but it did need cheap space and lots of expertise in large-format printing. Las Vegas gave it both.

Tavia Campbell, avatar-style

Co-founders Tavia Campbell and John Doffing have actually been at this for a few years, previously working out of San Francisco and then Philadelphia, but when they decided last year to stop outsourcing and start printing their own products, they had to make a new business model and find a new home. Las Vegas has proven to be a great decision, Campbell told me, because the company’s only real costs now are administrative, ink and fabric — rent in the industrial sector (its neighbor is a crankshaft repair shop) is practically a non-factor — and the city actually has a great mix of artists and printing professionals that honed their skills working on projects for casinos and trade shows.

Walls 360′s other co-founder, Yiying Lu, lives in Australia. She’s best known as the graphic artist who designed Twitter’s infamous “fail whale.”

Right now, Walls 360 makes most of its money from partnerships like those with EA around its video games, from contract printing jobs for conventions and other events, and from individual sales of its custom prints. However, because individual orders are printed on demand, Campbell said the plan is to let customers upload their own images and have Walls 360 print them. She said Walls 360 is also thinking about leveraging cheap storefront space in downtown Las Vegas to open its own store, possibly doubling as a gallery where artists could display and sell their work as Walls 360 prints.

Life is a little more complex for startups when they have to account for stuff as well as staff, and when delivering a product means the workers — not their servers — have to deliver the goods. But it also creates some unique go-to market opportunities and might make it easier to convince consumers to buy a product. Apps are great, but there’s nothing quite like forking over some cash and having a new something in your hands.

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I sat down with Codecademy co-founder and CEO Zach Sims to hear about how the company got to this point so quickly, and what’s on deck for the months ahead. Here are a few key takeaways:

Necessity breeds invention

The idea behind Codecademy emerged out of the founding duo’s frustrations with the status quo of learning how to program. Co-founder Ryan Bubinski was already an experienced programmer who spent his weekends and free time during college teaching other students how to build web applications; but Sims was not nearly as familiar with coding. When the two entered Y Combinator’s summer 2011 class together in the hopes of launching a web startup, Sims tried to learn how to code on his own so that he could be of more help on the technical side of whatever business they founded.

“I was watching videos and tutorials and reading books,” Sims said. “But I found I learn best by building things and breaking things, not by just reading something. I wanted something interactive where I could learn in bite-sized pieces, and actually practice what I learned along the way.” So Sims and Bubinski decided to use their time at Y Combinator to build exactly that — and Codecademy was born. The company is now backed with $2.5 million in venture capital from a handful of elite investors including Union Square Ventures, O’Reilly Ventures, SV Angel and Yuri Milner.

Timing is everything

Codecademy’s message — that knowing how to write computer code is becoming just as important as knowing how to read or write — could not have come at a better time. While many sectors of the economy are suffering from layoffs and underemployment, the tech industry is having a full-on hiring crunch. Nearly every tech industry executive I talk to is currently looking to hire as many good engineers as he or she can find. The only problem is that not enough people right now have the programming skills necessary for those jobs.

Screenshot of an introductory Codecademy lesson (click to enlarge)

“Programming is the new literacy,” Sims said. “We’re all walking around with these phones in our pockets, using all these apps, but no one understands how any of it works. There are just not enough engineers, and this is the job of the future.” That Codecademy launched just when this started to become apparent on a larger scale has been key to its early success.

Listening to users — online and off

When Codecademy’s users started getting together offline by scheduling real-life meetups, the company decided to follow them. Last week saw the launch of official Codecademy meetups, and there are now official meetup groups in 171 regional areas worldwide to let people get together in person to discuss their progress learning how to code. Also last week Codecademy launched a Q&A feature within its web product to let people talk to each other via online forums while doing the Codecademy lessons.

Getting bigger, but staying scrappy

For now, Codecademy does not make any revenue, but in the future it could start charging for more advanced lessons and premium services, Sims said. Any revenue generation plans are a bit farther out on the horizon, as right now the company’s focus is on growing its user base and adding new lessons to the core free service. One thing is certain, though: Codecademy has no plans to become an accredited learning institution that charges for a degree.

Sims, who studied Political Science at Columbia University but dropped out several credits shy of graduation, said that Codecademy is founded on the belief that skills are the most important factor in getting good work — not educational credentials. “If you look at a lot of Silicon valley companies, they don’t hire based on a degree. A lot of the best programmers in the industry never even went to college at all,” he said. “Your skills should speak for themselves.” That sounds like a worthwhile lesson in itself.

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Terms of the deal haven’t been disclosed, but the five-year-old Escalation is a sizable company, with 33 full-time staff who are all joining 6L post-deal, bringing the company’s headcount to 210 worldwide. Escalation co-founders Tom Mustaine and Marc Tardiff will become design directors for 6L, while co-founder Shawn Green will become the company’s director of engineering. The Escalation team will continue to operate out of Dallas; the majority of 6L operates out of San Francisco and Hong Kong.

The acquisition is meant to get 6L more deeply into the mobile gaming space, which will be especially key as it is focusing on international growth. 6L Chief Product Officer Arjun Sethi said in an interview:

“We’re now the single largest publisher of games across multiple social networks, not just Facebook, and our activity is about 50 percent in the United States and 50 percent international. What’s made us successful on social, we want to adapt and make sure we can run full steam ahead on mobile.”

Despite its somewhat lackluster post-IPO stock market performance, Zynga is still the social gaming space’s clear leader. But it’s also clear 6L isn’t backing down from the opportunity to provide real competition in the space. By taking a stand in the booming international and mobile spaces, it looks like the company is playing its cards very wisely at the moment.

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