Launched Tuesday, Hakitzu is the first game from Kuato Studios, a London- and Palo Alto-based learning startup founded last year and backed by SRI International, the company behind Siri.

“We started to have a look at learning and education for the twenty-first century — what new techniques would we apply to learning, what technologies [could apply] to how kids are learning these days, “ said Frank Meehan, Kuato Studios’ founder and CEO, who formerly sat on the boards of SIRI and Spotify.

At the 25-person company, he added, he essentially “mashed up” artificial intelligence scientists, educators and game developers to produce games that have all punch of an Electronic Arts game, but the educational value of teacher-created lesson.

Hakitzu, which the company teased a bit last summer but didn’t release in its entirety until today, is meant to be the company’s showcase app, Meehan said, but future games will more deeply incorporate artificial intelligence.

Given the growing recognition that students’ skills are lagging in computer science, Kuato Studios decided to focus its first game on teaching kids to code. As a widely-circulated video released last month by Code.org emphasized, coding is a key tool for the digital age but one not enough students have mastered. Less than two percent of students study computer programming but programming jobs are growing at double the pace of other jobs, the nonprofit says.

Startups like Codecademy and Treehouse, as well as new startups Tynker and Hopscotch, which aim for a slightly younger audience, are similarly tackling the challenge of teaching programming to students.

But Hakitzu aims to provide a far more gamified experience. Players assemble and customize their robots in the Chop Shop, select their arena and then play against friends or others. The goal is to hack your opponent’s lit-up “terminal” on the opposite side of the arena. Here’s where the programming comes in: to manipulate their robots (or “Code Walkers”), they have to actually code in the commands, for example:

Move(“Forward”,3);

FireLaser();

Hack();

The game targets kids aged 11 to 16, but could likely appeal to an even wider audience. In tests in schools, Meehan said the game interested boys and girls fairly evenly (although, to me, the robo- and battle-centric graphics and language seem as if they’d be more interesting to boys).

On the engagement front, it’s easy to see how Hakitzu could capture and hold kids’ attention. But how effective is it in actually teaching them to code?  It could certainly help familiarize them with the basics of JavaScript, but typing in simple commands within the structure of a game is still a long way off from building a web site or programming an app.

Meehan said Hakitzu’s goal isn’t to impart deep coding skills, but to jumpstart their interest in the field — and it’s happy to point them to Codecademy and other sites with comprehensive programming lessons.

“We want them to get over the first hump of not knowing where to get started,” he said. “Further on down the track, what we want to do is push them off to other great coding companies.”

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On Thursday, the San Francisco-based maker of brain fitness games and neuroscience research company said that it had grown 150 percent year-over-year to reach more 35 million people worldwide. In January of this year alone, the company said the mobile app was downloaded nearly 50,000 times a day, with its website receiving more than 17 million unique U.S. visitors.

CEO Kunal Sarkar also said the company’s revenue has increased by more than 100 percent each year since its launch and reached $24 million in 2012.

That’s good news for the company, especially considering the more than $70 million Lumosity has raised in the last few years and the millions of dollars spent on marketing, including TV ads.

Created by neuroscientists and launched in 2007, Lumosity offers more than 40 games to members from around the world. People can start playing for free but must pay $80 a year or $15 a month to access most of the content, Its pitch is that by drawing from research from top neuroscientists, Lumosity’s games can help people improve their memory, attention and creativity.

Sarkar attributes much of the company’s growth to its emphasis on making the games interesting to learners of all ages.

While about 75 percent of Lumosity’s users are under the age of 40, he said, “We focused on making the product very appealing so that anyone, starting with a 10-year-old up to my dad [who’s] 72, can use it and feel like it’s relevant to them.”

As consumer appetite for health-related technology and digital content grows, it makes sense that people would be increasingly interested in products that enhance their mental fitness. Companies like Posit Science and Dakim (which targets those over 60) similarly promise brain training programs backed by neuroscience but seem to focus more on therapeutic applications and specific populations. While the brain training field has its skeptics who doubt brain games can improve overall cognitive function, Lumosity and its peers are used by some psychologists to help people diagnosed with cognitive disorders.

Lumosity doesn’t consider itself an education company in the traditional sense. But after noticing that teachers were using the games, the company in 2011 launched the Lumosity Educational Access Program to give teachers who meet a set of criteria access to free subscriptions. In return, the teachers contribute research data that helps explore the games’ effectives in the classroom. More than 12,000 students from 325 schools currently use Lumosity the company said.

Going forward, Sarkar said the company’s focus is on mobile and international expansion. It intends to launch a new app in the U.S. this quarter and, later this year, it plans to release foreign language versions of the app (about a third of Lumosity’s members are already international).

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Chartboost, a mobile advertising marketplace for game developers, is helping shed some light on where the opportunities are in acquiring users by providing comparative data on cost-per-clicks versus cost-per-installs in various countries. The numbers might not be a surprise to someone paying attention to a particular country but the larger picture is helpful in understanding what the global market looks like.

At the top of the market for cost per installs is Australia and Canada, which is ahead of the US. That’s likely because many app developers test their apps in those countries before expanding to the US and other markets. But because they’ve become popular for testing, those countries have become expensive places to advertise an app and acquire users. The numbers suggest that developers may want to look at other countries, perhaps New Zealand, Ireland, Singapore or other markets to test their apps.

China brings up the rear on CPI, but other Asian countries such as Japan, South Korea and Thailand are also on the lower end of the spectrum. China has its own challenges because its users don’t like to buy apps but there seems to be a lot of opportunity in acquiring users in Asia if developers put some work in localizing their apps. If a country has decent ARPU but the cost of acquisition is low, that might be where you want to invest in some advertising and localization.

“Mobile gaming is a global industry at this point. I think mobile game developers have to think about how they expand to international markets,” said Chartboost chief revenue officer Clay Kellog.

Chartboost found that Android bids are about 80 percent that of bids on iOS bids. But the gap has been closing recently as Android becomes better for driving revenue for developers, Kellog said.

Cost per install varies a lot between countries because of the relative return per user that developers can expect in each country. It’s a more pricey route but less risky for developers who want to gain the right kind of users. Cost per click is used more for driving overall volume, with less regard for finding lucrative users. The data was pulled from Chartboost’s network of more than 5,000 apps, which has 3 billion user sessions per month and about 105 million users in 100 countries.

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The physics-based game requires players to build contraptions and vehicles for the pigs that get them to their beloved eggs. Once the device is built, the player guides it toward a map of the eggs, with physics taking over. The title is available today on the iPhone (99 cents), iPad ($2.99), Android (free) and Mac ($4.99).

The game is built in the same art style of Angry Birds and should be familiar to fans of the series. But the title is more like Amazing Alex, which also let users set off physics-based chain reactions and create their own over-engineered devices. That title got off to a strong start but has fallen to #112 on the overall iTunes charts and #58 on the game charts, according to App Annie. Meanwhile, the original Angry Birds, three years old now, is #25 overall  in the iTunes App Store.

Bad Piggies will likely do better because of its Angry Birds heritage combined with the Rovio brand. But in playing the game this morning, I feel like it will also fall short of Angry Birds success, ultimately.

Angry Birds was pure simplicity when you first played it, but the payoff was visceral. It was so satisfying seeing the birds hurtling toward the pigs and seeing all their elaborate structures come tumbling down in different combinations. And all the unique birds with various capabilities created new game play that kept the title interesting.

Bad Piggies feels more complicated up front with less destructive joy. That’s by design, since you’re building something. But the whole act of putting something together in pretty much only one logical configuration and then pressing go is nowhere near as fun as just letting a bird rip in a slingshot. The results are less satisfying as well. If you deliver the pig to the map, you’re done. It’s a little fun to see if you make it there, but there’s not much variance in how a successful run goes. And there’s no glee in watching a big fortress come down.

This is not an in-depth review since I only played a dozen 20 levels this morning. But the early game play makes me doubt that Rovio will have a long-term success like Angry Birds. I haven’t played Amazing Alex in a long time and I don’t think I’m going to look forward to going back to Bad Piggies in the way that I did with Angry Birds. I could be wrong and this could turn out to be a huge hit over the long haul. That would be great considering Rovio raised $42 million on the premise it would be a hit maker. But increasingly, I’m seeing why Rovio stuck with Angry Birds so long: it’s a recipe that works.

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At GigaOM’s Mobilize conference in San Francisco on Thursday, Jack Buser, Sony’s senior director of PlayStation digital platforms, talked about why Sony developed the PlayStation Mobile platform for PlayStation games that can, for the first time, be played on devices not made by the Japanese company. The short answer to that is basically that they had to: Sony had to reach gamers on the devices they are already using.

“We embraced PlayStation Mobile because we know there are situations where gamers may only have their mobile device and we want to supply a PlayStation experience no matter what,” Buser said.

That list of devices includes smartphones and tablets made by HTC, Fujitsu and Sharp, among others. The theme? They’re all Android-based devices.

The benefit to participants is free marketing. For Android game makers that want to build for the PlayStation Mobile platform — which will play games on the PlayStation Vita as well as PlayStation-certified mobile devices — Sony will use all the marketing heft it has behind its multiple gaming channels to advertise and promote those games.

Recognizing the role of mobile, and that people are used to paying 99 cents and not $49.99 for games, Sony is rolling out a mobile subscription gaming plan too. PlayStation Plus is a subscription service for the PS3 and PS Vita. Five dollars per month delivers a new set of games to the user. They’ll be big titles, too, he promised. Not many casual games.

Sony is promoting “console games for console gamers,” Buser said, likely referencing mobile gaming leader Zynga, not “farm simulators.”

Update: This post was corrected at 9:49 a.m. on 9/21 to note that PS Plus is for PS 3 and PS Vita customers. It has not yet been announced whether the service will be available to other PS Mobile devices.

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Developers who tap the GameCircle APIs will be able to include achievements so gamers can track all kinds of trophies, badges and awards and receive message and updates without having to leave a game. They can just pause the action and check on their status before returning to the game. A new leaderboard feature will allow players to compare scores and rankings against other players inside the game.

True to Amazon’s cloud emphasis, GameCircle offers a syncing feature that saves the progress of players in the game in the cloud, so they can return to that point when starting up the game again. What’s cool is that it will remember your progress even when you switch tablets, which is not the case for many games played across multiple devices.

Amazon has tried to make the Kindle Fire a major target for developers. It’s built up its own Appstore for Android store, which has proven to be a big driver for many paid apps. Flurry reported in March that Amazon Appstore revenue per active user was 89 percent compared to iTunes App Store revenue and well ahead of Google’s app store. Google, by the way, is also reportedly looking at launching its own version of Game Center for Android. Amazon turned on in-app purchase in apps in April, enabling a key monetization tool for developers. More recently, it opened its Appstore to apps from UK, Germany, France, Italy and Spain in a move that suggests the Kindle Fire may be ready to move beyond the U.S.; its only market currently.

Now, expectations are high for Amazon to roll out new Kindle Fire devices. There is also a lot of speculation around Amazon launching its own smartphone, which could also take advantage of Appstore for Android and GameCircle.

If Amazon really wants to compete for developer attention, it makes sense to keep building out its suite of developer tools. Combined with a broader selection of devices, it can really start to appeal to a wider group of developers. We’ve been talking about whether Windows Phone or BlackBerry will be the third ecosystem to compete against iOS and Android. But Amazon is making moves suggesting it eventually wants to be that competitor.

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For 2011, Rovio pulled in earnings of $67.6 million before taxes, or 64 percent of total revenue last year. This was based on the performance of three games – Angry Birds, Angry Birds Seasons, and Angry Birds Rio – which helped Rovio push its total game downloads to 648 million through the end of last year. Overall, Rovio now has 200 million active monthly users spread out over a number of different gaming platforms.

For Rovio, the numbers could be a run up to an even bigger year in 2013, when it plans to go public in New York or Hong Kong. “This company is preparing itself and getting ready,” Anders Lindeberg, Rovio’s head of investor relations, told Reuters, referring to a public listing.

Angry Birds is another sign of how big apps are becoming, following Instagram’s $1 billion sale to Facebook. But it’s not just downloads, in-app purchases and advertising that are driving revenue. Rovio said merchandising and licensing income accounted for 30 percent of revenue in 2011. That shows that Rovio has been able to leverage its IP into a lot of new business opportunities. Rovio’s marketing boss Peter Vesterbacka has said in the past he believes Rovio can be more than a game maker; an entertainment brand on the order of Disney with more than 1 billion users.

Rovio raised $42 million last year and now has a valuation of $8 to $9 billion. That puts it in the same league as struggling phone maker Nokia. There is still a lot to prove for the Rovio, which is dependent on putting out hit after hit based on the same IP. So far, there hasn’t been any reason to doubt the Angry Birds franchise considering Angry Birds Space zoomed past the 50 million download mark in 35 days. But critics will still question whether the company can keep up the momentum in the years ahead and whether it can build another break out hit that’s not part of the Angry Birds line.

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This isn’t the first Zynga acquisition, of course, or even the first major franchise acquisition. It bought the ‘With Friends’ games from Newtoy for about $53 million a few years ago — a price that looks like an absolute steal today. But this is the first purchase of its size for Zynga.

For OMGPOP the deal is a culmination of six years of blood, sweat and tears, as it started primarily as a maker of Flash-based games for the desktop. But mobile and social changes everything: Putting Draw Something on a mobile device, making it accessible wherever and whenever and harnessing the power of Facebook to connect players and their friends has made OMGPOP an overnight powerhouse. And it’s not just Draw Something that Zynga is acquiring — it’s also getting another 35 titles from OMGPOP.

Here are a few key stats and figures from the OMGPOP’s Draw Something success:

• In the last week, more than 1 billion drawings have been created.
• Draw Something had three drawings per second the day the game launched.
• Yesterday, Draw Something has over 3,000 drawings per second at its peak.
• Draw Something is the #1 word game in 84 countries according to the Apple App Store – shout out to Sweden and Norway for being the first two countries to recognize Draw Something’s greatness. Nordic Love!
• The most popular words in Draw Something are: Starfish, pregnant, hangman, six pack, boom box
• The least popular word in Draw Something is latrine
• The best guessed words in Draw Something are: Rainbow, catfish, sun, fish, house, god tornado
• The least guessed words in Draw Something are: Oar, Metroid, Warhol, pounce, polaroid, meathead, Autobots

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A few weeks ago a sharp comment by me on Twitter about Zynga’s copy-cat games ended up in a meeting with Zynga founder and chief executive officer Mark Pincus. Of course, we chose to disagree on those issues. Regardless, it has taken nearly two weeks for me to get to actually writing about the conversation.

I have known Mark for a long time. The first time we met, he and Sunil Paul were busy running Freeloader. Later, when I relocated to San Francisco, we ran into each other often, for the post-bust Silicon Valley was a very small (and quite bleak) place.

Like many of my age, he has seen the tech economy behave like a yo-yo, where he has oscillated between success and failure. Freeloader was successful, but Tribe never realized its true potential even though it came much earlier than Facebook. He also started Support.com. But it wasn’t up until Facebook opened its platform in 2007 that Zynga actually started on a path to big time.

Our conversation, held against the backdrop of a very noisy Zynga cafeteria (with a sound system blasting Pumped up Kicks), followed two threads. One was about Zynga and the future of social gaming; the other was about how the past decade of success, failure and now mega success with Zynga has changed him as a person.

OM: Mark, so you have seen the ebb-and-flow that is startup life. How have you changed over past decade?

Mark Pincus: I had to go through a lot of change to be successful. For a while I thought it was about control and VC and things like that but I don’t think that the story served me at all. I needed to grow up. I needed to be a CEO and not an entrepreneur and a leader to be followed. My approach involved having to grow up and evolve.

OM: How?

MP: I have had to learn. In fact, I have to be constantly learning. If you don’t learn something new every week, you lose your edge and in the end you lose. You need to be aware of that in order to adapt as a CEO.

With Tribe, I didn’t do that — and I never changed Tribe and that we were an open social network like MySpace, when Facebook was clearly having success with its private, trust-based model. I was not changing. I was just trying harder.

OM: What is the biggest lesson learned of this past decade?

MP: I think the biggest lesson I have learned from the last decade is that to be a good leader, you don’t need to be liked or loved by everyone. I wanted to be liked by everyone. I think if you know what is the right course, you got to go full in, but also be willing to listen to the right input and most importantly listen to your customers.

OM: So what does success look like, say, on the consumer Internet?

MP: The other thing is being in the right place at the right time with the right currency.  That gets you a lot of leverage in the equation. I think when you know what success on the consumer internet) looks like – Google, Facebook, Amazon, Yahoo – you know that is real success. I think you need to have instincts to be right but you also show should be able to use data to prove those instincts.

I think the biggest single change is that I grew up and I want to build a family and career, in that order. (My wife Alison and) I have worked our ass off for last five years and are staying with it, every day. There are so many staging points for the entrepreneurs — highs and lows. You have to stay with it.

OM: Does the current startup environment worry you? I mean we have seen this over-funding environment before and that didn’t end well.

MP: The more things change, the more things remain the same. It looks familiar but in reality things are different. The market opportunity is very different that it was 12 years ago. Today reminds me of the Renaissance. It feels substantial and feels more than just a company. It is happening all around the world. It is awesome.

PART TWO: Future of social games and importance of mobile for Zynga

OM: So what is the biggest challenge for you right now?

MP: My biggest challenge is to deliver on the promise of social gaming. We haven’t yet convinced you (as in me) to play just yet. Social gaming has to get to a level where Facebook has gotten to — you just cannot avoid it. It is a social norm for connections and we want to get there with games. That is what we are doing (with) Word for Friends, so we can get to bigger, broader market and get to more people.

OM: My belief is that Zynga is in competition with not other games but more in competition with Hollywood as both businesses are based on capitalizing on our attention.

MP: [It is] just as television competed with radio! It didn’t replace radio, it just made the radio move over. Our research shows that  Research is that nearly 70 percent of people who are playing social games are also watching television. Our games are played inside a tab and that is a [brand] new behavior. I think we are part of a new category of gaming that is about stealing back lost time like when you are waiting in cabs or in the airport. We are playing these games when we are, say on a boring conference call.

Agreed, that the new business model is less about clicks and more towards engagement and entertainment. I think we have the benefit of being part of the newer trends like mobile. I think the real competition is between mobile and the television. If the smartphone replaces the television, then games are the entertainment. (Related: Zynga and the perils of becoming a platform.)

OM: Tell me more about your mobile plans?

MP: What I want us to do next is be a “poke with a purpose.” You are essentially SMS-ing people and that is carrying a more snack-y game experience. Even more casual games and an even more engaged experience. [Think of an even more atomized version of Words with Friends.] This is more of a different experience that we have now and an experience that is more vertical and more engaged and served up in a tiny container. I think that is the big story here.

OM: From my understanding, you guys are slow to mobile?

MP: One of the lessons we learned from the FarmVille for iPhone was that web and iOS are entirely different and have different mechanics. That is why we did FarmVille Express. The difference is that on mobile it is a 2-minute session versus a 45-minute session on the computer.

Words for Friends doesn’t do as well on Facebook as it does on the iPhone, because they are a mobile first experience. Our poker game does well on the mobile as well. Even Facebook is trying to figure it (mobile) out, we are all trying to figure it out. Instagram and Path are mobile first experiences and are different. I am liking the new Twitter application as well.

OM: From the way I see it, all web services (and not just games) should basically be instant start from the cloud but adapt to the screen they are being accessed. That has to be table stakes. Are you guys thinking along those lines?

MP: Right now we are building back-end technology, so that your game state can be saved and served up in difference screens/devices. The interaction cues will take from the different devices. In other words, you can play a game on a computer and call it up on XBox and you resume from the point you left off, except the game play will now be customized for the Xbox controller.

OM: Thanks, Mark.

.

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Draw Something, the No. 1 app right now on iOS and Android, is listed as a game and draws a lot of comparisons to the family game Pictionary. But the funny thing is that it’s not really a game at all.

It doesn’t have scores or leaderboards, and the players in the game aren’t actually competing against each other. They’re working together in a cooperative manner, but they’re not taking on anyone else or a computer.

Instead, it’s more of a social communications app masquerading as a game, said OMGPOP CEO and Draw Something game designer Dan Porter.

I sat down with Porter Friday at OMGPOP’s New York office and asked him about how he pulled off the immense success of Draw Something, which has racked up 30 million downloads on iOS and Android in about five weeks. The app has generated about 2 billion drawings and is still being played daily by more than half of its users, who are exchanging pictures at a rate of 2,000 to 3,000 a second. And Draw Something, which is adding more than 1 million users a day, is pulling in low six figures in revenue a day, Porter said, mostly from upgrades but also in-app purchases and advertising.

The game invites users to draw one of three items which their friend can guess. If the friend guesses right, the drawer earns gold coins. Then they switch places. The game doesn’t keep traditional score but it does keep track of a sequence of correct guesses. In fact, the game was originally titled Streaks when it was being designed.

Cooperation, not competition

Draw Something is the first game that Porter has ever designed. And it’s not actually inspired by Pictionary: he says he’s never played the game.

Porter said the spark for the design goes back to simpler things like playing catch or rock climbing, cooperative activities that don’t declare a winner. That’s been been part of the success of Draw Something, emphasizing social interaction over game mechanics.

“We’re taking game play and wrapping it in the framework of communication, sharing experiences and playing together,” he said. “I just wanted this to be something hilarious with no winner or loser. You think of party games like Charades. There’s an aspect of that I was trying to capture.”

Perhaps it goes deeper than that. Porter said he attended Friend Central school, run by the Quakers in Pennsylvania, who de-emphasize competition. Or perhaps it’s because this was Porter’s first stab at designing a game after presiding over OMGPOP for the last three years.

Since he wasn’t a game designer, he saw a simple way around the big challenge of creating a 1 vs 1 game in which a player was somehow dependent on their adversary to score. The temptation would be for a player to be less helpful or shut out their opponent in order to stay ahead in points. Porter got around the problem by just doing away with points altogether, something that may not have been as obvious to traditional game makers.

“I’m not a game designer and I don’t pretend to be one so I didn’t really think about the rules of making a game,” he said. “Most designers would have said you need scores or leaderboards but it didn’t feel right so I didn’t do them.”

Building a mainstream hit

Porter thinks the game is a hit because it exploits the ability of touch screen devices to accurately portray drawing. He said a lot of games are designed around tapping but there’s still a big opportunity to find new ways to use gesture-input technology on smartphones and tablets.

OMGPOP CEO Dan Porter

And of course, an awful lot of people like drawing. Some artists on Draw Something get incredibly detailed and paint backgrounds or fill in pictures with elaborate textures and colors.

But Porter’s creations are stick figures and that works just fine in the app. One of the joys when taking a turn as a guesser is seeing the painting of a picture replayed and figuring it out as it unfolds. And the original drawer gets the thrill of seeing how long it takes their friend to guess their picture.

Thankfully, all of this isn’t dependent on being a great artist. That’s one of the things that can be discouraging about turn-based games like Words with Friends. If you keep losing to better wordsmiths, the excitement can fade. But Draw Something’s decision to minimize competition in favor of communal achievement is what has helped it become a mainstream hit, appealing to mobile users who don’t typically download games, Porter said.

“We want to make games for people that don’t put games on their phone,” Porter said. “That’s how you get to massive scale.”

Competing with Zynga

The inevitable comparison to Zynga comes up. Zynga, which recently went public, has the third most downloaded app in Word with Friends, which it got through its acquisition of Newtoy. Porter won’t say if OMGPOP, which has taken $17 million in funding since starting in 2006, is capable of taking down Zynga. But he likes the path the company’s on now, after building a lot of resource-style games for Facebook that kept getting beat by Zynga’s versions.

The game maker has built more than 30 titles including its most recent game Puppy World but none have been a break-out hit like Draw Something. After toiling away in Zynga’s shadow, it was time for OMGPOP to try something different.

“We thought if we’re not going to be as successful as Zynga, let’s do some out-there (stuff). If people don’t like it, at least we can say we didn’t do a bad job of copying other people’s games,” Porter said.

Now, the question is about what OMGPOP has in mind for an encore. In the short term, the company plans more updates for Draw Something including chat functions and the ability to store and share pictures. There may be more traditional game elements added as well.

The bigger question is how to build off the bigger momentum of Draw Something. Porter said he’s been approached by a bunch of game show producers about taking the game to TV. He’s still debating that, trying to figure out if he can make a game that’s a true lean-forward experience in the living room that can also combine TV viewing with interactivity through a mobile device.

He’s also deciding where to go next with future games. Porter said the company has got four or five ideas on tap but the question is whether to pursue more Draw Something versions–like what Angry Birds has done–or build other unique games that draw on the same cooperative mechanic.

It’s all still up in the air as the 42-person company devotes most of its resources toward keeping the Draw Something express chugging along. And that’s fine for Porter, who’s enjoying a wild ride.

“I’m in Zen mode,” he said. “We’ll take it as it comes.”

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