Kids, it’s time to start bugging your parents about the new Skylanders. Adults, it’s time to start bugging your credit-card company to raise your limit.

Activision is unleashing its third wave of toys for Skylanders Giants, according to publisher spokesperson Dan Amrich. Here’s what Skylanders fans can start checking local Walmarts for:

• Eye-Brawl
• Thumpback
• Shroomboom
• Legendary Chill
• Hot Dog
• Eruptor
• Prism Break
• Stealth Elf
• Lighting Rod
• Zap
• Scorpion Striker Catapult

For the unaware, Skylanders is a series of video games that use a special device to connect real-world toys with a video game. You can then go to the store to buy new toys to use in your Skylanders games.

It’s a lucrative spin on “downloadable content,” as the toy sales have generated huge revenues for Activision.

This isn’t the final wave. Activision still has a handful of previously announced characters from Giants’ roster that it hasn’t shipped to stores.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Attacknids, sold by Wow! Stuff, have been under development for the past eight years and are the first in a line of fighting robots called Combat Creatures, invented by Jaimie Mantzel. The Attacknids are spider-like robots with six legs. They can fire weapons up to 30 feet and can rotate 360 degrees.

Each comes with Bolt ‘N’ Battle Combat Armor that explodes off when hit by something. You can stage a battle between robots until there is only one left standing. The Attacknids cost under $100.

The weapon projectiles include the Snyper Dart, Destroyer Spheres, and Dissector Discs. You can control up to 40 robots at a time using a wireless remote control handset with 2.4 gigahertz wireless technology.

Check out our video of the Attacknids in action.

Attacknids from VentureBeat on Vimeo.

According to a new poll by Nielsen, kids just want iDevices … and a Wii U. Half want an iPad, and roughly a third of all kids also want an iPod Touch, iPad Mini, or an iPhone under the tree. Almost 40 percent also want a new Nintendo Wii U, and 31 percent want a Kinect for the Xbox 360 they got last year.

Source: Nielsen

Toys kids 6-12 want most

Of course, some kids still absolutely need an Xbox 360 or a Sony PlayStation 3: almost a quarter of all kids want one of the major console games this winter. And another 29 percent want a non-Apple tablet to waste Christmas break on.

Older kids, however, have somewhat different tastes. Or they’ve learned to control their burning desire for new techie toys to a degree.

Electronics still top the list, but for kids aged 13 and older, only 21 percent want an iPad, with a computer coming in at second place with 19 percent of the vote. A non-Apple tablet is proportionately much more in demand with teens: 18 percent want an Android or other type of tablet – just three percent fewer those who want an iPad.

Microsoft Surface, alas, languishes in the hearts and minds of  just 3 percent of teens — although six percent of kids age 6-12 want Microsoft’s new tablet.

Source: Nielsen

What teens want most …

The question now is whether what kids want will translate into the products parents buy.

Somehow — speaking as a parent — it usually does.

photo credit: ze_bear via photopin cc

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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The good news for online retailers is that a third of shoppers plan to spend more, according to FatWallet’s consumer survey of 600 consumers across the U.S, while 54 percent are planning to spend the same amount. And most shoppers — 62 percent —  believe they’re going to get the best deals of the holiday season at the beginning of next week.

(One caveat on those numbers: they’re based on a subset of consumers who plan to shop on Cyber Monday, so they likely de-emphasize those with skinnier wallets to begin with. On the other hand, of those who plan to shop online this Cyber Monday, only three-quarters said they did the same last year.)

50% of people are looking for toy deals on Cyber Monday

But it’s a bit surprising to see what people are looking to buy on Cyber Monday. It’s not technology, at least primarily. Here’s what people will be shopping for next week:

• 70%: clothing deals
• 50%: toy deals
• 34%: appliance deals
• 32%: tablet deals
• 32%: laptop deals
• 26%: HDTV deals
• 23%: smartphone deals
• 26%: other deals

Clothing, toys, and appliances. Ignoring the fact that the main point of Cyber Monday is online shopping, there’s not a lot of technology showing up … especially the traditional technology purchases such as computers, smartphones, TVs, and home stereo systems.

Which I guess is the good news for online retailers: online shopping is now truly widespread.

photo credit: Kevin Marks via photopin cc, spieri_sf via photopin cc

When Alice Brooks was a little girl, she asked her father for a Barbie doll. He gave her a saw, which she used to hack a dollhouse.

Alice, now 24, excelled at school and went on to study mechanical engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). This summer, while enrolled in graduate school at Stanford University, a project has been brewing: can a toy inspire the next generation of young girls to love science, technology, engineering and math?

Convinced of the merits of the idea, Alice teamed up with two fellow grad students, Bettina Chen and Jennifer Kessler, to form a ‘toys for girls’ company known as “Maykah”. As grad students at Stanford, and throughout their academic careers, the women noticed that in all their courses (advanced linear algebra, electromagnetic engineering, and so on) very few of their classmates were female.

“As we got further into our educations and careers, we saw the number of women around us decreasing,” said Brooks, in an interview with VentureBeat.

The founders believe the problem is rooted in childhood. “When we looked around at girls’ toys today, we did not see the kinds of toys that inspired us when we were young,” the girls explained in a blog post for Women 2.0, an organization dedicated to increasing the number of female entrepreneurs. “We build toys to inspire the next generation of female technology innovators.”

They are designing prototypes for the toys at StartX, a highly competitive accelerator for Stanford students. Roominate, their first toy, was inspired by that early dollhouse memory (see video, below).

As an alternative to playing with dolls, Roominate lets young girls attach and custom-build a miniature room with working circuits.

When the three founders launched the idea for Roominate on Kickstarter, a website to crowdsource funding for projects, and proclaimed that every girl should grow up with a love of all subjects and the skills to become “an engineer, architect, and a visionary,” they far exceeded their $25,000 funding goal. On the page, they cite statistics than 11 percent of engineers are women, and only 15 percent of college freshman intend to major in scientific or engineering discipline.

Maykah pulled in $85,965 to build and mass-market a toy to inspire young girls who are great at solving, deducing, and experimenting.

The founders of Maykah, a toy company for girls.

Maykah has struck a chord in Silicon Valley, one of the many tech hubs that is experiencing a dearth of female engineers and designers. According to the National Center for Women and Information Technology, a nonprofit, only 25 percent of the tech industry’s workforce are women.

Alice and her cofounders say they were exposed to technology and engineering at a young age. Rather than playing with princesses or dolls, Bettina build hundreds of lego creations with her older brother, and Jennifer recalls solving math riddles in her head with her dad. ”We believe there is a connection,” they wrote on their Kickstarter page.

Roominate is available for parents to order online on Monday. The founders have not yet determined the final price.

Images via Kickstarter 

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Five startups showed off their tablet apps at MobileBeat 2012 today, but only NukoToys impressed the judges enough to win our startup tablet competition.

The company has developed interactive tablet apps that work together with trading cards, making them perfect fodder for kids obsessed with collectable toys like Pokémon cards and Skylanders figures. NukoToys fashioned itself as “Silicon Valley’s toy company” when we covered it two years ago, but today we caught a glimpse and just how the company could earn that lofty title.

Founder Rodger Raderman showed how he could simply tap a trading card to an iPad and make a virtual animal appear within an app. It took him a few tries before the app recognized the card, but the harsh stage lighting likely didn’t help his demo. Parents and kids can also buy virtual versions of the trading cards, but Raderman pointed out that the trading cards are more in line with the kinesthetic play kids are used to.

For winning the competition, NukoToys bagged our Tesla Prize, which is named after Nikola Tesla, the scientist who developed early mobile communication. The company will receive a two-hour business strategy session from three principals at Tandem Capital, as well as 10,000 Business ExtrAA points from American Airlines (or around five domestic round-trip tickets).

We want to thank the industry leaders that are supporting MobileBeat 2012: W3i as Platinum Sponsor; Box as Corporate Sponsor; Flurry, Tapjoy & YouWeb as Gold Sponsors; Greystripe, Nokia Developer, LifeStreet Media, Ludei & Sequoia Capital as Silver Sponsors; Game Insight, Apsalar, Kontagent, GREE, Nexage, Pontiflex, Swrve, Urban Airship, PayPal, Betable, Xyologic, and Tandem as Event Sponsors; and MyPref & PubNub as Contributing Sponsors.

Photo: Devindra Hardawar/VentureBeat

Augmented reality, combining real world views and digital information, is not particularly new, but it is still considered in its infancy. The technology has been used in a variety of ways, from GPS systems to fitness apps, though entertainment seems to be the most popular.

GamesBeat had a chance to sit down with Scott Jochim, president of Digital Tech Frontier and Popar Toys, to discuss his company’s line of augmented reality children’s books, which are paving the way for affordable household 3D experiences.

GamesBeat: Can you elaborate on what your company does?

Scott Jochim: The background of Digital Tech Frontier, my firm, is that for the last 15 years we’ve been working in the entertainment, training, and educational realms of technology. Finding different ways to not only influence, but educate and entertain through technology. Human interface devices have been a very important part of our technology — anything that involves both emotion and intellect, and if you can have fun with it, that helps as well.

Our products have included everything from NASCAR simulators for General Motors and Toyota to cancer therapy simulators, to help patients get through some different pain modalities, such as dialysis or burn treatment centers or even anxiety through chemotherapy. Our products have done everything from 3D stereoscopic imaging to natural, surprisingly enough, aromatherapy technology, allowing scent to be dispensed for different ride films or entertainment venues, so people see, hear, smell, and feel the experience.

In the last five years we’ve been concentrating on a product the Virtual Reality Development Lab, allowing virtual worlds created by students and teachers and be shared outside and inside the classroom, creating an engaging way to take information and package it for an environmental and spatial technology forum. These technologies have created what our current technology infrastructure is, which is the Popar Toys lines of products. We feel that a convergence of a virtual environment and a real environment, that augmented reality, the transference of being able to place objects or experiences from the real world in the virtual environment, and vice versa, is a very important aspect of where we’re converging to with technology.

GamesBeat: Can you give me some specifics of what products Popar Toys will be debuting and selling?

Jochim: Well, we figured we’d want to come out with four products to debut into the market. Trying to cover a lot of different individuals. It’s hard, as a child at heart, coming out with one core product. The first product we came out with was called Planets 3D. Myself, I wanted to be an astronaut, until Virgin Galactic gets off the ground I don’t have tickets yet, but my hope is there one day. Rich Branson, if he could send me a ticket, that’d be awesome. Are you familiar with that?

GamesBeat: Yes.

Jochim: Yeah. Hopefully you’ll get a ticket, maybe you will, you can write a report on it and tell me how cool it is.

GamesBeat: Journalists get a lot of free perks but I don’t know if I’d take it. I have a hard enough time flying from San Francisco to Las Vegas, so I think going up in the atmosphere would be kinda rough.

Jochim: Yeah, it could be rough, but it’s all worth the patch, man, the patch that says you’re an astronaut, it’d be very cool.

GamesBeat: I think when I’m like 85 and really old and have beaten Skyrim and everything, I’d maybe give it a go.

Jochim: Fair enough, fair enough. I’m sure my employees would not want to hear that I want to go to space, they’d probably want their paychecks before I went there.

So we decided to create Planets 3D, giving every kid the ability to be the explorer for the first time. If I read a current book, or trading cards or something from NASA or about a space explorer or even Stephen Hawking, you flip through the pages, you see some pictures, some text, maybe you could kick on the Discovery Channel on TV and listen to William Shatner talk about space and the final frontier. But our books do something completely different, you’ll actually open up the pages of the book and the earth will rise out of the book and spin around you. If you bring an object into the book, we call it an “I-paddle,” I for interactive, and bring that close to the earth, you’ll actually fly above the earth into the ISS space station and you’ll see that traveling above the earth’s atmosphere.

Every page of the book that you open up, something different will occur. On Mars you’ll see the Spirit rover traveling over the Martian landscape. You can explore that landscape or the Mars atmosphere. There’s even a page that’s called “Into Orbit,” as you open the page you see a space shuttle launch off the page and into your world. Allowing yourself to not only read it and see it, but become the process as well. That’s an important aspect of our books, we feel that you can read about the book, you can see the book come alive, but now you can actually become the astronaut as you’re reading it. As I’m watching this space shuttle launch off the pages of the book, I can look at myself in the book and see myself as an astronaut. There’s a helmet on my head.

GamesBeat: What technology, in addition to the books, is required to have these experiences?

Jochim: A laptop computer or desktop computer, Mac or PC, and a webcam. That’s it.

GamesBeat: I was watching a video that you sent along to me, it showed a few children playing with the books. I was wondering, in what ways is this really different from… Especially on the videogame side and especially on iPhones, there’s a lot of augmented reality that came onto the scene about two years ago, and over the past two years has blown up a little bit. The iPhone, PlayStation Vita, they all have augmented reality programs and games, the space has been explored reasonably well so far. So are you familiar with those, and what is really the unique thing you have over those?

Jochim: Well, I think it’s interface, and the ability to become what you’re doing. A mobile phone, for instance, or a Vita, which I’m very excited about, you are using it, you’re looking through into the looking-glass universe. Looking at cards, exploring an environment. When you’re using a Mac or a PC, the environment is being looked at with you, you are exploring the environment together. The ability that our books or our trading cards allows is, as you’re reading about an astronaut, you can look up at the screen and see yourself as an astronaut. You have a bubble over your head. Or you’re reading about the praying mantis, and you are a praying mantis as you’re reading about it in the book. The ability to change into those costumes, be able to see yourself as a swashbuckling pirate while you’re reading an adventure story, is possible with our book. You’re looking at the universe through those other devices and exploring it, while this device is showing you in that universe. It’s giving a reflection, rather than a binoculars approach to augmented reality. You have an interface such as a book, you can use that book to then control that space shuttle. Or if you’re a girl reading about princesses, your dad’s reading to you about princesses, and you’re like, Daddy, I want to be the pink princess. Daddy can change her into the pink princess as he’s reading through the book. How awesome is that? You’re becoming those characters you’re reading about, you’re exploring them, you’re able to play with those individuals and those attitudes inside the book, becoming a little bit of a drama-based or theater-based experience as well. Which is translating into a lot of different aspects. Mobile aspects, don’t get me wrong, are going to be incorporated into our books, we’re looking at releasing all of our books on the Mac and PC at one time, and we’re going to be working with mobile to create games, as you’ve seen before, inside the books, such as… The construction book will have a real-world brick-breaker. Our Planets 3D book will have a basketball game in it. You’ll be able to use our books and our cards as those interface devices to create those video game as well. We see the video game aspect being a very interactive, hands-on experience in each one of the books, but not the main aspect of it. What we want to do, realistically, is when you open up a book, you want to become that experience you’re reading about. Reading it, seeing it, and becoming it.

GamesBeat: I was actually intrigued by one of the very first things you said, you mentioned smelling, when you’re having these experiences. I was wondering if you could give me some examples of how that applies here?

Interview continues on the next page.

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Bring your toys to life. That was the big idea that drove Activision Blizzard and its game studio Toys for Bob to place a huge bet on a new idea: A massively cross-platform videogame that’s tightly integrated with collectible real-world toys.

That kind of risk-taking is especially unusual in a video game industry that is drowning with clones and sequels. And it represents a huge risk for Activision.

Based in Novato, Calif., Toys For Bob spent 2.5 years toiling on a brand new cross-platform video game that married the world of collectible toys with video games through a unique wireless technology that beams data back and forth between the toy and the game.

The result is Skylanders: Spyro’s Adventure, which will debut on Oct. 16 on the Nintendo Wii, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, PC, 3DS, the web, the iPad and the iPhone. This kind of multiplatform launch with a new technology is almost as big as launching a giant new game franchise or a new console.

Paul Reiche, head of Toys For Bob, said in an interview that team knew what kinds of risks it was taking, but it decided to step up to the challenge anyway. The story of how they did so says a lot about how to innovate in an industry with so much prior art and risk aversion.

Asked if Skylanders was as big a bet as a Call of Duty game, Rieche (pictured) replied, “Fair enough.” He added, “There were many points where we suggested something very radical. There is an unfair perception that (parent company) Activision Blizzard is risk averse. This shows that when there is a good opportunity, they go for it.”

The idea of melding toys and video games isn’t new. Toy companies created titles such as U.B. Funkeys that also came with toys. But doing a good job with a very ambitious game is rare. And tying together the products in the way that Activision Blizzard has done is unprecedented. Toys For Bob was able to move forward only because it knew that it could handle the task of making a high-quality video game.

The project took shape a few years ago as Activision Blizzard was pruning back on its investments. Reiche and Fred Ford started Toys For Bob in 1989 and they built a number of video games. Activision bought the company in 2005 and gave it responsibility for developing the Spyro game franchise.

But then Activision Blizzard killed off a lot of game properties so that it could invest more heavily in the really big ideas. Of the top 20 games, only the top five were really selling well. That meant that there was no point in creating a game that might be ranked No. 20.

“That was the way the whole industry was moving,” Reiche said. “They said they wanted us to reinvent Spyro and the game he appears in. They said they needed something entirely new to generate the return on investment that Activision needed to be competitive.”

So Reiche’s team began toying with toys. They explored how to create toys that could be used directly in games. One of the team’s developers, Robert Leyland, experimented with wireless technology and found something that would work fast. So when you set a toy on an electronic “portal,” the data stored in the toy’s flash memory could be instantly transferred wirelessly into the console and then into the game world.

That way, a toy character could be inserted into the game world simply by placing it onto the surface of a portal. The toy could glow upon contact. RO Design, a technology arm inside Activision, helped with the design of the hardware. They added touches such as the toys having the ability to automatically save their data when they were added to a platform.

“They took it and turned it into something with low power consumption and a mass market design,” Reiche said.

Meanwhile, a senior artist at the company, I-Wei Huang, began the work on the toys. Instead of creating them as 3D animations first, Huang sculpted the characters as physical objects.

Once they had these elements together, they started building the game. They recruited Toy Story film writers Joel Cohen and Alec Sokolow to craft an adventure story for the game. They decided to target the Wii at first.

“We saw no competitors there,” Reiche said. “We thought of how to integrate toys directly into the game play. You play as your toy, and you have an avatar inside the world. You can take your toy to school, and it had a revenue model that worked. It was a blue ocean.”

Reiche said that Toys For Bob could keep it simpler by creating a Wii game for Spyro, without the toys. Dave Stohl, the Activision executive in charge of development, told them to take the bigger bet and go with the toys. As the idea moved up the executive chain, it became bigger and bigger. Toys For Bob built up its team for the Wii game to more than 100 developers. Another 100 developers from other Activision Blizzard studios also helped out. Vicarious Visions made the Nintendo 3DS version and Frima built the web, iPad, and iPhone versions.

About a year ago, the project stood at a critical decision point. Activision Blizzard chief executive Bobby Kotick had to weigh the options for launching the game as it was originally scheduled or pushing it back. He decided to postpone the project by a year, adding a huge amount to the overall budget.

Eric Hirshberg, president of Activision Publishing, a division of the parent company, reviewed every part of the project in fine detail. Reiche had to explain details like why every toy had a certain kind of pose. Hirshberg said the company would bend its marketing plan to support exactly what the creative team wanted to do.

“We had a complete functional game and a set of toys,” Reiche said. “But we all felt we could make this a whole lot cooler. So we went back to polish it. We had to decide that we were going to treat it like other top-tier products like Call of Duty. We chose to put out something awesome.”

Toys ‘R Us got behind the game in a big way, taking the stage with Toys For Bob in a major unveiling at the Toy Fair show in New York in February. The Skylanders toys have been named “top toys for the holidays” a number of times, alongside products from regulars such as Nerf, Hasbro, and Mattel.

“We’ve never shipped a toy before, but we are already in the top tier,” Reiche said.

The extra year gave Activision Blizzard plenty of time to come up with a big marketing plan with a big budget.

The resulting design was for a fighting game where players could stick their toys on a portal, instantly adding them to a game world. They could then play through the adventure, fighting hordes of enemies. Then the players could swap out characters as they wished. When they took the characters home, the toys would retain the memory of what they had done in the game. When you put one of these toys on a portal again, the character will have the same kinds of capabilities that it had recently earned at your friend’s house.

Not only that, but you could level-up a character on the PlayStation 3 and use that same character in a Wii game. You can have a similar experience if you play it on the web or an iPhone or the 3DS.

The game has more than 30 characters. Each one has a “brain” for retaining data and can be used in the adventure story where the goal is to defeat the evil Portal Master, Kaos, and his many minions. The game world is full of monsters, treasures, quests, puzzles, and mythical lands and creatures. You can use the characters in your own game or take them to your friend’s Portal of Power. Players can play cooperatively, or fight each other in a multiplayer arena.

In the meantime, rivals such as Smith & Tinker’s Nanovor hybrid toy-games have crashed and burned. Nukotoys is still aiming to do something similar in the toy-game hybrid market. And Disney Mobile has just launched toys that can be used with a Cars-themed iPad game. The whole idea of hybrid toys is gathering more steam.

The toy stores are lining up racks of the merchandise for Skylanders and they’re promoting them in interactive kiosks. Commercials are starting to run on TV and on YouTube. Activision Blizzard has lined up a considerable inventory of the toys, which will sell for $7.99 a piece.

It’s going to either be a big success or a big crater. But there is no question that the game is innovative and that Activision Blizzard and Toys For Bob are swinging for the fences. That kind of measured gamble is what we all want to see more of in the game industry.

“People should be watching this,” Reiche said. “We are not going at it half-cocked at all.”

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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The entertainment giant will sell Appmates toys based on Cars 2 movie characters, and those toys can be used to control a virtual racing world on an Apple iPad. It is one more example of a gaming app that is a hybrid of the physical and digital worlds.

In creating the product, Disney is getting ready for the day when kids come home from school and play with their tablets and smartphones, rather than turn on the TV, Bart Decrem, head of Disney Mobile, told VentureBeat.

He said that the toy is the first to transform the Apple iPad into a virtual play mat for kids. And the app turns ordinary toys into a part of an immersive game world for kids, full of sounds, narration, and music. That transforms a static and boring toy into an interactive experience.

“We are bringing Disney characters to life,” Decrem said. “Our vision was to take the Disney presence and apply it to the AppStore in a way that creates magical moments.”

The physical part is a toy, like the Mater character pictured at right. You place the toy on top of the iPad and press down. The iPad recognizes that Mater is on top of it and then you can push down to move around on the virtual environment of the iPad app. You can then race other virtual cars and smash into virtual objects by turning the toy in different directions as it sits on top of the touchscreen of an iPad. It creates a kind of 3D illusion.

“The iPad is a new canvas for creativity, and Disney wants to be on that platform,” Decrem said.

The products and apps will come out on Oct. 1. The app is a free iTunes download for the iPad and iPad 2, but Disney will charge $20 for sets of two cars. The toys will be available in Disney Stores and on DisneyStore.com. The whole idea is similar to Activision Blizzard’s Skylanders, which combines toys with console video games as well as mobile devices.

As you can see in the video below, you can race other cars. If you run into them, you can knock the other cars out of the race. There are five different race tracks available in the map of Radiator Springs (the setting in the Cars movies) in the first app. You can play as six different character cars from the film. Kids can explore the world, perform missions, and compete in races. The characters include Lightning McQueen, Tow Mater, Finn McMissile, and Holley Shiftwell. Two additional characters – Francesco Bernoulli and Shu Todoroki – will launch in November.

The bottom of each car has a unique touch footprint that the touchscreen can recognize, so the app can tell which car is sitting on top of it. If the Mater toy is sitting on top, the app will narrate the experience with Mater’s voice. No cable or wireless connection is necessary when you use the toy to make something happen in the game.

Decrem said the concept was around for a year and the company began working on its seriously after Disney bought the mobile gaming firm Tapulous (Decrem’s company) a year ago. Disney Consumer Products, Pixar, Spin Master, and Disney Mobile collaborated on the toy line.

If the toys are successful, then you can expect more toys based on other Disney properties in the future. Decrem said the company is already planning to add more Cars 2 content.

Kids can explore the full virtual game world of Radiator Springs, discovering landscapes and secrets by moving in any direction. They can drive through mud and up ramps, visit friends at Flo’s V8 cafe, and check out the car’s reflection in a mirror. If they crash into a radio tower, it will change the station to another song. And, as in the Cars movie, Mater can sneak up on cow-tractors and blow a horn, making the tractors fall over.

You can perform missions such as towing cars with a tow hook, and then collect hubcaps, the virtual currency of the game. You can use that currency to buy virtual gadgets such as missiles or machine guns. Right now, everything you purchase inside the game is free. You don’t have to shell out extra cash in addition to buying the toys.

You can trick out a car with a unique horn, custom tires or green exhaust. Each toy unlocks different features and content within the app. The play is both structured and unstructured, Decrem said. The game comes with a five-minute tutorial.

“The great thing is when you see a child take the toy and play with it on their own and then use it to play on the iPad,” Decrem said.

Disney has dozens of apps available on the iPad today. It is also launching other merchandise that can be used with iPads, including a Disney Pixar Cars protective case, a Disney Pix Camera, and Disney Spotlight microphone.

Decrem (pictured right) also noted that Disney’s latest app, Where’s My Water, has hit No. 1 on the paid apps charts for the AppStore. In that app, you have to use your finger to dig tunnels through the ground to bring water to Swampy, a cute alligator that wants to take a shower. After three days, the app hit No. 1 and it has a rating of five stars out of five after 2,000 user reviews on the AppStore.

“We’re taking the Disney brand into the AppStore, and if it goes well, we’ll do more of it,” Decrem said.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Quidsi is one of the world’s fastest growing e-commerce companies, thanks to its experience and taking an extremely user-friendly approach to selling products online. Its Diapers.com and Soap.com sites were so good that Amazon bought the company in November for $540 million. Since then, Quidsi has successfully launched Wag.com for pet supplies.

YoYo.com uses similar tactics to those sites in its approach to selling toys. The site looks slick, is easy to navigate and feels tuned to adults specifically trying to find the perfect toy for their child rather than a general marketplace. There’s a search tool called Toy Finder on the homepage that makes it possible to select age, gender, budget and use all results or YoYo’s suggestions.

Other ways YoYo offers to help parents are discovery features like “top 10 toys by age” lists and a search filter for award-winning, eco-friendly, no assembly required and no batteries required products.

It takes another cue from Diapers.com and Wag.com by offering free 1-to-2 day shipping on all orders over $49. Users can also shop across all Quidsi sites using the same shopping cart, and orders using more than one site qualify for free shipping at over $39.

YoYo.com also claims to have the widest selection of toys on the Web, even more than Amazon. The company says YoYo has more than 20,000 items including toys, video games, books and collectibles.

What do you think of Quidsi’s sites? Do you think YoYo.com will be a hit with parents?

“All the heavy lifting has been done — now comes the fun part of figuring out how to use it well,” he said.

Game hardware and software developers should now focus on finding new ways to engage gamers, Weisman said. That can include new ways to control games — such as controlling games with motion and physical actions — or new types of gaming devices, like kids’ toys that also fit into video games. Weisman made the comments at the GamesBeat 2011 conference in San Francisco, Calif., on Tuesday.

Weisman is the second experienced game executive to make dark-sounding pronouncements about the state of the game industry today. Earlier, Electronic Arts founder Trip Hawkins said we are living in a “dark age” of video game development.

One example of a game fitting into Weisman’s scheme is Skylanders, a video game from Activision-Blizzard. That game stores game information on a toy that connects to a Nintendo Wii or an Xbox 360 video game console. When players want to change the character they play as in the video game, they connect a different toy to the game. Then, kids can play with those toys outside of the video game — just like other normal toys.

Weisman has a long history in the game industry. He started making toys and games in 1980, when he founded FASA, which made the Shadowrun and BattleTech toy and game franchises. He founded Virtual World Entertainment, a virtual reality franchise, in 1987 and sold the company to Disney in 1992. He started a video game version of FASA, FASA Interactive, in 1995 and sold it to Microsoft in 1999.

“I’ve spent half my career building games that don’t require technology and the other half designing game platforms that require multiple billions of dollars to develop,” Weisman said. “At the end of the day, the brain doesn’t care about the format.”

Weisman’s last company, Smith & Tinker, was able to raise $29 million in venture capital because its founders — Joe Lawandus and Weisman — are heavyweights in the game and entertainment industries. That company focused on hybrid games that fit in with toys.

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