The Game's Room

Yesterday, I had the chance to see all my nephews.
Like always, they run to the computer room in my parents' house to do what they always do – play.

As you can imagine, the big ones play while the young ones look and wait for their turn (which arrives after several rounds of the big ones … You can see the passion of the young ones to be a part of the games activity.

However, something in this situation is not right! Most of the portals offer plenty of games for children with no age filtering - this is what we (the parents) are trying to avoid.

The result is young children playing games that do not fit them – they contain violent and inappropriate content and sometimes difficult games that the young ones can't deal with.

So, this is part of what Tucoola is about – We are bringing the children the right games that fit their age and in addition that fits their level in the various skills. The bonus is the "connected games" tool, which exposes the children to content that helps them to improve their specific skills.

This is what we believe that young children need to find in the games arena in their first years – The years we can still direct them, influence them and help them manage in this world.

Fatherhood

It seems like all of us are parents.

Tucoola is a company that deals with children – you would think that this is the reason that we begin all our meetings talking about children...

I don't think so!

I think that it's quite simple – all of us have changed since the minute that this magic began.

The first few days, we were in shock!

The next few weeks, we were tired!

And then, it became our life - a new life!!!

Now that I have a kid and in the next few weeks a new baby girl, it seems like my life have prepared me to the moment I became a father.

Our influences begin from the good and bad things we saw at home, at our extended family, friends' houses, etc.

And then, one day, you grow up and you start to think about yourself as a parent – I'll do this and I'll do that, and then, your love of your life appears and – It happens, you have a baby .

In the beginning they don't do anything besides crying and sleeping.

After a few months they start to respond – the first smile is worth more than any smile you've received up till that moment.

And then they start walking, talking, developing and even bossing you around like no manager did before.

So let's go back to the beginning – we talk about them all day, because they are our life!

And from February 7th, 2008, I found a new life and a new purpose – Fatherhood !

Fulfillment Issue

Most of Tucoola's team don't come from the games world.
In the beginning, I lost sleep over this. Now I understand that this was one of the best things that happened to us.
Like in all other segments, a fresh point of view can generate new ideas, new products and new business.
Tucoola has become the start-up that everyone says "how come no one thought about it before" – I always had a dream to have a start-up that "took pleasure" from this praise.
When you combine the fresh point of view and the "praises", you get Tucoola.

Our status, less than a year after we obtained our first investment, is unbelievable:
We successfully transformed our algorithm from the notebook (a real one :)) to the technology and Tucoola's servers.
We have immense success with the games developers that view us as the new generation of distributors and a new money maker.
We have colossal success with the distributors and the portals that acknowledge Tucoola's benefit to them – innovation, new target market and new revenue stream.
We succeeded with the experts that join our belief that we supply an innovative way of delivering information to parents regarding their children's development progress and provide tools to improve it.

In spite of these successes, there is still a lot to do and a lot to prove:
We are still working on the new version of the Tucoola's Zone (the one for launch).
We are still working in the content arena to find the best content & partners for our target market.
We are still working on a new fund round and it seems to be challenging even in a time like this and even for a (so called) mature start-up.

These days the company is just like the sentence that my mom heard from my teachers – "The kid has potential but he needs to fulfill it".
I hope that soon, all these teachers think that both of us (the company and me) are OK on the "fulfillment issue" :).

My life as a father

I'm a father of one and soon I'll be of two.

When my firstborn arrived my life have changed like I couldn't even imagine.

Like all parents, my wife and I enjoy receiving compliments like: "he is great", "he is very mature" and we smile a lot because people think that he's smart.

Like everyone, everyday I find myself thinking about my family, work, health, money and yes, about my son's development progress.
Yes, this is part of my new life as a parent. I have evacuated an area in my brain when my child was born and now it is dedicated to thinking about him.
At the end of the day, it's really simple! I just want to hear that he is OK and on the right track. This is what Tucoola is about.

A few days ago, I had a meeting with two senior lecturers.
I'm trying to meet with as many experts as I can from the academic world in order to present Tucoola and get some feedback.

We have a great advisory board with the best people from every field in the Academy world, but still, it's important for me to share our life work with more experts, get more feedback, obtain new ideas, etc.

After meeting dozens of experts, it's official! They think that Tucoola is a nature product of the technology development in our days. They don’t think that it's too mechanical, they aren't threatened by Tucoola's technology and they understand that we don't want to take anyone's place - We just want to use the tools that the technology has given us and use it to understand and help our children.

Everyone agrees that monitoring and measuring children while playing games using Tucoola platform is a great solution for the new generation.
We are all interested in learning about our children's development progress, especially monitoring each child's personal advancement from the beginning to the end (with our famous graph that presents the development).

My son will be 2 years old this week and it's seems that soon, as a father, I'll be able to enjoy Tucoola :)!

Welcome

After a year of experience, we've decided at Tucoola, to share our adventures with you.

The last year was full of activity - between refining Tucoola's concept, finance investments and travelling, we were not able to find the time to sit and divulge all of the details.

A new site is always a good opportunity to "do it".

We promise to write and bring you everything new in the games arena and share with all of you our activities with various companies – from Us to the Netherlands, from France to Bosnia, from Turkey to the UK and from Brazil to Belgium.

So what is Tucoola?

Tucoola is focused on developing a platform and monitoring products aimed at enhancing the basic skills of children aged 2-8 by using popular on-line games, while at the same time enabling parents to monitor their kid’s development progress by reviewing parent’s reports.

Tucoola provides a technology platform, enabling game developers to integrate Tucoola's algorithm into their existing games without the need to make any changes to the existing game's code.

The Tucoola’s Zone offers Websites & game developers a new business model and new revenue stream - Tucoola's innovative zone provides on-line Flash games for children and an Information Center for parents.

Since we don't develop games and don't distribute the Tucoola's Zone to end users, we are working with plenty of games developers and distributers worldwide on a licensing & revenue share model.

Our platform allows games developers to integrate our algorithm in their exciting games in less than one hour while distributers can add the Tucoola's Zone as a white label to their site in a simple process. These reasons give rise to Tucoola's activity and helped us to approach the biggest players in the games industry in only a few months.

Every year 138 million babies are born! Parents are trying to make correct choices that will be beneficial for the development of their children - Tucoola offers an innovative solution for this challenge.

Researchers discovered that "time spent online among kids' increased by 63% in the last five years".

43% of the parents indicated that they don't play video games with their kids at all while 30% spend less than an hour a week playing video games with their children.

Tucoola is here for the children and their parents – we monitor, measure and improve children's skills using quality and filtered content.

We promise to return soon and inform you about our latest developments and bring some interesting guests to the blog.

Thanks,

Tucoola's Team!