Tandem’s Michael Silverwood spoke last night to 150 mobile developers at Apptualizate 2012 in Mexico City about how to start companies in the mobile industry. He has been in Mexico for the entirety of the event, watching all 150 developers work and sleep in the same room for 48 hours without a single person leaving before finishing their mobile projects.

For anyone who wasn’t present, or wants to check out the slides, here is the presentation Michael gave at the event on YouTube/Slideshare:

[Video is available in HD if you click the gear icon]

Also speaking at the event were Startup Weekend co-founder, Clint Nelson, Startup Labs partner, Tugce Ergul, DevToaster founder and ex-Apple iPhone SDK developer, Ryan Bruels, The Next Web writer and founder of #BlameDrewsCancer, Drew Olanoff, and founder of Raku, Norberto Ortigoza.

Michael also sat on a panel alongside Drew Olanoff and Ryan Bruels at the Institute of Science and Technology’s Technical Innovation Conference and Expo, to discuss the importance of mobile development and startups in Mexico.

In the end, what the trip made clear was that there is just as many talented developers and designers located in Mexico as anywhere else in the world, so it is only a matter of time before the next big tech company is started here.

In order to get some third generation iPads into the Tandem house and into the hands of Tandem companies, Michael will be reporting from the front lines all morning of the iPad 3 launch. He’ll be posting updates here with pictures and info from the rain soaked line at our local Burlingame Apple Store, one block away from Tandem. If you have any questions, or want to know if it’s worth it for you to join in the waiting, send Michael a tweet at @Michael_one or leave a comment in the post.

About 30 people in line the Apple store for the 3rd gen iPad 3 launch. And nice and rainy in Burlingame! post.ly/61aql—
Michael Silverwood (@michael_one) March 16, 2012

4:30am They’re taunting us with brand new iPads through the window.

5:30am The line is beginning to grow. Closing in on 50 soggy people waiting now in the rain.

The secret door into Tim Cook's chocolate factory post.ly/61fIx—
Michael Silverwood (@michael_one) March 16, 2012

6:40am The line continues to grow! Shorter line here in Burlingame than San Francisco though, apparently they already have hundreds.

6:45am Steve Wozniak has been spotted at an LA store (interview with Shira Lazar).

Video Source

7:30am Got our tickets! Almost iPad time.

Success!

8:30am Old iPad? Meet new iPad.

ZiGGURAT

Tim Rogers, veteran game designer and Kotaku writer, was at the Gimmie event to talk about his newest iOS game, ZiGGURAT, as well as some of his other upcoming projects. ZiGGURAT is the first title out of Tim’s new studio, Action Button Entertainment, but before starting out on his own he worked at Grasshopper Manufacture in Japan on triple A titles like No More Heroes.

Tim’s goal with ZiGGURAT, and most of the other upcoming games from Action Button Entertainment, was to first build a mechanic that worked really well on its own, and then build a game around it. In ZiGGURAT, that mechanic is swiping your finger along the bottom of your iPhone or iPad’s screen to aim at robotic alien skeletons jumping at you from either side. The game’s mechanic is simple and fun: just swipe left and right to aim, and let go to shoot. As cliched as it is to say, the game definitely has a really good balance between being easy to play, but difficult to master. And anyone with a soft spot for retro, pixel art graphics will appreciate the impressive art style and animations.

Action Button has already been working on building Gimmie into the next update of ZiGGURAT, so pretty soon you’ll be able to earn real rewards for blasting the most aliens. In posts on Kotaku, Tim has written about “Hamburger Moments” in games, and Gimmie fit the bill for creating these moments, where players feel like they are accomplishing something real, and being rewarded for it. When Tim first heard about Gimmie, he already had plans to include a similar method of rewarding players, and he liked that Gimmie’s approach was mindful of the consumer.

You can download ZiGGURAT on the app store here, and when you do, be sure to check out its unique leaderboards on Game Center where you can compete for seemingly arbitrary, yet fun things like most shots fired or most play time. And keep your eyes open for the next game from Action Button, Copter Wilde, a Diablo-esque social game about flying helicopters and collecting gems coming to the App Store at the end of 2012.

Peter Pog

We also got to talk to Shu Chiun Cheah of Geolopigs, about his recently released iOS game, Peter Pog. In the game you take control of a flying pig, and navigate your way through Miyazaki anime inspired levels. The game is a classic 2D shooter, but in addition to dodging bullets and shooting down enemy ships, you must also try to collect crates along the way.

Geolopigs is a two person team that is always looking for ways to increase engagement through social platforms, and are currently integrating Gimmie into their Goals system in order to give their players real world reasons to keep playing and unlocking new things.

Peter Pog is available on the App Store right now as a free, universal download for both iPhone and iPad.

Inkky Games

Stephen M. Levinson was also at the event, showing off his unannounced, first game for iOS. For his new gaming startup, Stephen is focusing on the characters first. He wants players of his games to form a real connection with the characters, and build fun game mechanics around aligning the player’s goals with the motivations of the character.

With regards to engagement and metrics, Stephen felt that both would play an important role in his upcoming games. The player’s experience with the characters and worlds he is creating is paramount, so he wants to take advantage of engagement metrics to continuously improve his games. Stephen is also adamantly against putting banner ads in a game that people have paid for, and has been looking for the best ways to make his games profitable without harming the user experience.

You can follow the development of Inkky’s first game on their Tumblr.

If you missed the first part of this post, you can read it here, and if you want to meet up with Tandem or any of the Tandem companies at GDC, send a tweet to @dougrenert.

Onwards, to GDC!

This post was contributed to by Michael Silverwood.

Last Wednesday night, Gimmie kicked off what is looking to be a massive GDC with an event focused on engagement in games. The event took place at Citizen Space in San Francisco, and drew a crowd of over 120 game developers and investors.

Panelists Jason Citron, Alex Marquez, and Sunil Bhargava, captured the audience’s attention with insights on the importance of game metrics to investors, and how to make a game that is engaging. Jason made sure to remind everyone that the whole point of a game is to engage and entertain the player, but that plays into one of the biggest reasons why metrics are so important: they give the developer an unbiased assessment of whether or not their game is actually fun, and help them determine what kinds of tweaks they can make to improve the experience.

Alex and Sunil also gave developers some perspective on what investors look for in the gaming industry. Alex talked about how VCs look for metrics that indicate future growth potential, and Sunil noted that while Tandem invests more in the teams of entrepreneurs themselves, he frequently helps companies determine the most important metrics to use when gauging the success of their business plans. Although the emphasis on metrics differs slightly from the seed stage up to series A and B, both agreed that engagement, and the tools to track engagement were critical for any mobile game or app.

Gimmie also made their real rewards platform proud by offering a ton of great prizes at the event including MusicSkins, Lyrix earjax, Cyderz iPhone cases, coupons for Milipower chargers, and an Xbox 360 for the winner of Gimmie’s hackathon that took place last week. They also promised that more events like this one will be in the pipeline, so if you missed out on this one, make sure to follow their updates to catch the next.

The Game Developer’s Conference officially starts today (March 5th) and runs to March 9th. Tandem and many of our companies will be at the event all week long. If you’d like to meet up with any of us, leave us a comment below, or send a tweet to @dougrenert.

And check out part 2 of this series for coverage of some of the games we got to see at Gimmie’s GDC event!

This post was contributed to by Michael Silverwood.

If you find it helpful or want to share your own tips or experiences with AngelList, let us know in the comments section below, or send us a tweet at @dougrenert.

Apple just blew past all expectations yet again for a record quarter in Q1 2012 lead by their mobile devices. iPhone sales hit 37 million (yep, in one single quarter) putting them on par with all Android phone sales combined, but what was slightly less talked about was the huge gain for iOS as a whole. Just last year, Apple sold 33.36 million iOS devices to consumers in its first quarter. This quarter: over 62 million. And the iPod Touch has virtually stopped contributing to this growth entirely.  Rather, it’s the less than two-year-old iPad that’s really helping the iPhone drive things, boasting 111% growth year over year.

Tim Cook’s comments during the Apple earnings call were telling. He of course sees a day in the not so distant future when tablets are more common than PCs (today iPads are already outselling desktop PCs). So this is all great news for Apple, but what does it mean for the mobile app businesses?

Well, there is huge opportunity on iOS, but the place to focus if you’re not already a top player is the iPad, not the iPhone. The iPhone’s App Store has become very crowded with well-known favorites such as Angry Birds, Instagram and Words With Friends. However, there are 55 million iPads now in the hands of consumers, all of whom are looking for new things to do on the device. But most app categories have yet to be disrupted with game-changing apps.

Take “Lifestyle” for example. The leading shopping apps there include eBay, Amazon Mobile and Gilt. But none of these make shopping truly entertaining and easy. None of them offer an experience vastly different than using a website with larger buttons. Developers are obviously still learning how to use the device’s new form factor to build the next generation of apps.

Also, not only does a quality iPad app have more of a chance to get to the top of the App Store charts, it typically does so with a price $1 greater than the equivalent iPhone app. And the outlook for free apps is similarly bright, with a top 25 list that exhibits far more variation and deference to new entries than the iPhone’s charts, which are currently dominated by free-to-play games from established publishers.

So, there is still a lot of room for category-defining apps to emerge and solidify their place on the iPad charts, but is this window quickly closing? It will be pretty soon. The iPad has accelerated far faster out of the gate than the original iPhone, and developers were not as caught off guard by its success. Already, before the end of its second year on the market, we’ve seen apps like Flipboard, Notability and Hipmunk, which use the large touch screen very effectively in their areas. If the iPad’s amazing growth rate is anything to go by, we should see innovative iOS developers gobble up the other opportunities out there far more quickly than they did on the iPhone. Now is the time to strike with that next disruptive iPad app – before someone else gets there first…

Contributed to by Michael Silverwood

It was somewhat inspired by this 1990 NYT article about Bill Gates’ plan for world domination:

With its Windows 3.0 software selling an estimated 30,000 copies a week, Microsoft had larger revenues in the last quarter than Computer Associates, which has been the nation’s largest software company….  Now Mr. Gates wants more. And at the Comdex/Fall trade show that opens Monday in Las Vegas, Nev., he promises to begin what he calls “a crusade” on behalf of a new way of using computers. Instantly Accessible Data.

Software engineers at Microsoft, whose headquarters is tucked here in the forests east of Seattle, call the concept “information at your fingertips.” Simply put, their idea is that all the data typically needed in business, school or any endeavor should be instantly accessible from a desktop personal computer.

The next 10 years will make the 1990′s look tame.  Now the update…

Tandem II September Update 

Since launching Tandem II in May, we’ve made some important decisions on where to focus our early stage investments and how to structure them.  We’re still applying our unique brand of Muscle Capital, but have decided to do so with a particular focus on mobile industry startups.  We are now Silicon Valley’s only mobile industry incubator and, as such, have made our first several new company investments, all in the last few weeks.

Billions of Taps

We believe that smartphones and tablets will bring billions of new users into the world of continuous computing and create a massive opportunity for business creation.

In 1990, when Computer Associates was the largest software company, Microsoft came up with a bold new plan – to deliver information at the click of a mouse.  Bill Gates’ vision played out well and drove innovation for years to come.

Today, over 20 years later, we’re at the forefront of another computing revolution.  Apple is the largest company on the planet because it makes entertainment and commerce (in addition to information) so easy to access.  Everything we want to see, play and buy is now just a tap or a swipe away.

This fundamental shift from the “Click Internet” to the “Touch Internet” changes creates a massive opportunity. The Click Internet brought Google, Yahoo, eBay and Amazon in the 90‘s and companies like LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and Zynga more recently. In this decade of the Touch Internet, an entirely new set of household brands will emerge as the leaders who drive how we consume information, purchase products and services, and entertain ourselves.

Billions of Customers

The Touch Internet belongs to billions of people like us – “users.”  The largest companies of the past, on the other hand, sold to just thousands of corporate “buyers.”  Buyers decide what users should use, and they looked for completeness. They want the most features from the fewest vendors at the cheapest price.  The vendors with the best sales forces won the war, capturing the largest shares of the largest wallets. We saw Cisco, IBM, Oracle and HP rise to the top while innovative mid-sized software companies failed to stay independent.

Now, however, Apple is not just the most valuable tech company in the world, but the most valuable company period.  Their customer is the individual user.  Millions and soon billions of people buy directly from them. It’s not the solution with the most features but rather the cleanest, simplest product that wins.  It no longer matters how large your sales force is; users just care about how easy and fun your product is.

The Touch Internet will belong to the companies that can sell directly and efficiently to the user.  Social Networks and mobile app stores have created an open and democratic environment, allowing millions of consumers to vote on the best products immediately with their fingers and wallets. Word of mouth is powerful and favors small, nimble teams that iterate fast and learn from their users.

[remainder of update omitted for confidentiality reasons]

Well, after four years of incubating a broad spectrum of consumer web, social and mobile companies, we (Tandem) decided to go “all in” on mobile.  So why the hell limit ourselves from finding that great non-mobile opportunity? Well, to steal a line from the wonderful Warren Buffet biography, Snowball, MOBILE is a golden haystack. There are so many potential game-changing opportunities in this market that you don’t have to kill yourself looking for needles — or for that matter sift through any other haystacks.

To throw in a mixed metaphor, the next five years will be to mobile startup successes what the steroid era in baseball was to home runs.  There’s just never been a better time to build a mobile business.

Yes, there’s a feast on the table – and look who’s coming to dinner!

We’ve all seen the impressive growth stats on app store revenue, and Apple’s market cap alone is a sign of the general giddiness over the mobile market.

But I hang my hat on a more simple and fundamental change – the broad spectrum of people who use mobile devices.  My kids, nephews and nieces can’t be dragged away from their phones. They’ll suck the battery life out of an iPhone in a flash if you let them. Meanwhile, I just ran into a friend’s 82-year-old mother in an Apple Store looking at iPads.  It was her third visit, and she wasn’t quite ready to buy it yet, “but was getting very close.”  This is a woman who’s never owned a computer in her life!

Obviously, this isn’t just true in the U.S. either. In China, India and Brazil, etc., hundreds of millions of people now have personal portals to high bandwidth, beautiful screen resolution, and endless entertainment. This is really the driving factor behind Mary Meeker’s oft-cited slide (what I call the Golden Haystack Chart) showing how much bigger the mobile explosion will be than the original Internet revolution. This should make entrepreneurs salivate.

The most level playing field ever

All of this opportunity wouldn’t do me much good if it were available only to the current kings of the mobile domain. Tandem is an incubator of early stage startups, after all.

Fortunately, there are platforms and APIs for everything.  Amazon Web Services is the obvious example, but there are also platforms for advertising, payments, social, analytics, location, 3D rendering, etc.  This means a small team can focus on whatever disruptive product they want to build and not worry about spending too much time or money getting it to market.

Meanwhile, the app stores are more or less open and democratic, allowing consumers to vote with their fingers and wallets. Even mobile platform and technology companies can sell to thousands of fast-moving app developers rather than a handful of traditional power brokers.

Entrepreneurs should love this pure meritocracy! Of course, there are all sorts of shortcuts and angles that businesses can use to gain traction, but the landscape evolves so quickly that they’re available to anyone who takes the initiative to learn them.

Why Tandem’s bet isn’t risky

As it turns out, I don’t feel like we’re taking much risk in this bet on mobile.  First of all, there are thousands of teams breaking ground each month on new mobile businesses.  For me, they represent a golden haystack of opportunities — from which I try to select just a few teams I particularly like.  I don’t want to mess around looking for needles in any other haystacks!

Plus, every tech business will eventually have some mobile aspect to it. Just about every device will be portable and connected at all times, and every site, service and application will take advantage of this.  In effect, “mobile” will no longer even qualify as a discrete investment space.  Damn – do I have to start looking for another golden haystack already?!