Sifteo launches intelligent blocks as a new form of entertainment

I've played with these and I think they're interesting. Currently, they suffer from the problem that the games on there are only really engaging for the first 30 minutes or so and then you feel no need to ever come back. They're in a tough spot right now, being both a hardware company and a games developer. They're launching an API and hoping 3rd party devs get on board but we'll see if they can get enough of an ecosystem to have it really thrive.

My hope is that they'll get the price down low enough that hardware hackers will do to it what they did to the kinect and it'll end up being used for all sorts of non-game purposes. It's got a high dpi screen, proximity sensors, tilt sensors, wireless capabilities and a single button input in a tiny package that could be used for all sorts of things.

Green Goose is another promising startup that's trying to attack that space: http://www.greengoose.com/

David Merill is a really smart guy and had been working on Sifteo for some time. I had a long discussion when he came to Berkeley to give guest lectures on User Interface Design and Tangible User Interface. He has a great vision about the company and this could become something huge.

Pretty sure I've seen this years back.