Distribution deal with in good company is announced for North America

The press release went out last night and now IGC is officially appointed distributor for the 4bambini games in the US and Canadas. They can be found on www.mannersgames.com or www.mannersmatterUSA.com or www.mannersmatterCanada.com. They started their recruitment activities and I hope this will help me jumpstart the scalability of the company.

Nice comments & New distribution partnership for North America

I found a nice comment about our game on the net. It feels good to see that some mothers see value in our games: 

4Bambini. Cute, simple games on manners, safety and diversity for kids 4-8

This is a european-based company that was started by a mom like me! They have three games, which are very cute and look like effective teaching tools for their young audience. Two thumbs up!

(from: http://www.squidoo.com/nicekids)

As well, I will be soon announcing a new distribution partnership for our games in the United States and Canada. This will help us get more visibility in these two markets and be more relevant to people there, a key barrier to growth as a small company. 

Note from my son

He wants to sell his games for $2.00 each. Here is the future director of 4bambini! When I asked him how he would collect the money, he said people would mail it to him. I asked to which address and he said, well, Prague of course. It is true afterall there is only one Arsene in the whole city of Prague. So, anyway, if you want to send him the $2.00, send it to 4bambini, Janackovo nab. 49, Praha 5, Czech Republic

The games of my son Arsene

My son is getting the bug of creating games. Yesterday, I came home and he handed me this game which he created in the afternoon. Take a look at it :-) 

Webmaster tools on google helping me optimize

As part of the work to make our games for children more visible, I have been playing with all the webmaster tools availble. I have spent countless hours correcting all the borken url, missing meta tags and, with the help of our friendly webmaster, I am now showing no error on the site. I am however still very low in the ranking.  A long way to go still. 

Learning to optimize for Google

lots of minors changes in the site which over the last 15 days have helped me get up in the Google ranking. Still a long way to go though... 

Paused my Google Adwords campaign

Too many clicks were generated by what looks like fraud. Looks of clicks with 0 time spent on the site. When I compare this to the traffic I get from MSN's web site, MSN gives me much better quality clicks with higher time spent on the site at a much lower cost. Google Adwords offers more functionnalities for choosing visitors by profile, but in the end, the fraud kills it and I don't have the confidence in their fraud management system (I got a nice email from Google on how they do it, but it is not convincing enough) to think that I get my money worth with Google. 

nb: I stopped advertizing with Yahoo long ago because their ad system looks like from another century vs. Google's or even MSN's. 

The difficulty of being good parents

With my wife, we started the games on www.4bambini.com because we wanted to give children a good start to life. Our age target is the younger kids 3 to 7 so we did not have to reallytalk about phone or internet etiquette in Don't Pick Your Nose, our game about good manners for children. However, it seems from the below article from the NYT (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/12/technology/personaltech/12basics.html?ex=1228881600&en=769b42c4c50c7fff&ei=5087&excamp=GGTEchildrenvideogames&WT.srch=1&WT.mc_ev=click&WT.mc_id=TE-S-E-GG-NA-CT-children_video_games) that it is a really issue for most parents. My view is that we should not deny today's technology for the sake we did not have it in our youth. Instead, we should use it as a tool to teach children the basics of life: they want a phone, ok (as long as you buy a low emission phone and they are above 10 years old - before I am too worried about the health impact on the brain of the phone radiations - See the research on this in the UK, it is scary) but they need to learn to manage it like they manage their time playing or studying. The pressure is of course that of their friends at school which is extremly strong in these formative years, and this is why we, as parents, spend an enormous amount of time teaching our son that it is OK not to be like everyone else and that actually, it can be a strength. Our son does not understand that last part yet but he understood that printing card off the internet was getting him as much pleasure as trading the real thing. Children need these intensity elements which help them build their image of themselves in a group, so we should not focus on removing the prop for it (today the phone, in our time, what wasit? the action Joe?) but instead teaching them how to handle the pressure, get smart about handling it.

Posted this on PR Log yesterday. Some 500 looked at it. 

4bambini Releases 9 New Coloring Pages For Kids About Good Manners, Diversity And Safety

Big changes on the site

Confronted with a high bounce rate (I use Google Analytics for tracking of the site), I decided to redo part of it and address some of the issues which were the most pressing. Definitly an improvment, and I can see that the bounce rate on http://www.4bambini.com/ has been cut by half!

Today, an article was published about the games on idnes. Here is the article. Nice picture of my wife Tania le Moigne!

Coloring pages for Kids added to www.4bambini.com

A picture is worth a 1,000 words, so we saved about 9,000 words by posting 9 coloring pictures today for kids on http://www.4bambini.com/. There are 3 coloring pictures per each game. We know that on the Czech site, this was an area where parents could test the reaction of the kids to the game, so we wanted to provide the same level of experience on the English web site.

New Video posted

Turns out that MSN video is better than YouTube for the standard video quality it offers on video uploads (even if YouTube offers a link to Hi-Res video). So I switched the video to MSN video. So, here is the new and better quality video! 


Games for Children Overview Video

Hasbro copying 4bambini?

About a year ago, I sent a mail to Hasbro France asking for cooperation with 4bambini with our games and Don't Pick Your Nose! I got not reply... A year later, what game is Hasbro releasing ? A game of good manners. How interesting. Well, in the world of games, copyrights are very hard to enforce as long as the company copying is smart enough to change the format be it is sufficiently. And Hasbro is a smart company. Maybe it is pure coincidence, maybe not.

Posted new tutorial

Ok, so I thought I would stay with that old video for longer, but it was simply too ugly. I shot a new one. Not much better, but at least it is not completely out of focus... thank you Olympus.

Order from Russia today! that does not happen every day

TV interest in the US

Got contacted by a couple of TV channels which want to promote the games via their "As seen on TV" channel. Anyone has experience with these ?

Games for kids, www.4bambini.com going international

So, here we are, http://www.4bambini.com/ is launched and we are setting up the first partnerships to increase our distribution network in EMEA and North America.

What started with a Czech games "Nestourej se vnose!" turned into 3 games in English :

1. Don't Pick Your Nose! a board game about Children Good Manners

1. Watch Out! a board game about Children Safety



2. Diversity! a board game about learning the value of differences in people

We've reached so far 21,000 families with our games, or nearly 1 out of every 100 households in the Czech Republic, how many more will we reach by going international with our games?

This blog will narrate this adventure.