Toys-To-Life And Gaming Industries Turn To Startups For Innovation

The gaming and toy industries have often been dominated by a small group of companies with the assets and marketing reach to secure shelf space in retail stores and online traffic. The continued growth of the Toys-to-Life sector, however, is shifting the scales in favor of small businesses and solopreneurs alike.

Toys-to-Life is a gaming trend that incorporates physical toys into digital games. With the launch of Activision’s Skylanders occurring in 2011, the industry is projected to grow to over $8 billion in revenue by 2013. When other major names like Disney and Lego joined in on the toys-to-life movement, it seemed that this industry would also be dominated by major players. The opposite has been the case, however, as Disney left not only Toys-to-Life but the entire gaming industry earlier this year.

Initially, industry pundits were saying Disney’s exit was the beginning of the end of the movement. However, the emergence of several innovative startups in the space tells a different story. In fact, it would seem that Disney’s size and experience may have been what prevented it from innovating at the pace required by this developing industry.

Entrepreneurs and small businesses, however, are experiencing increased success in both the toy and gaming industries. Jia Shen is the CEO and founder of PowerCore, a company that helps make digitally activated toys and objects for gaming experiences. At a recent DesignerCon in Pasadena California, Shen and his team partnered with fellow exhibitors in a digital version of a scavenger hunt to demonstrate the potential for augmented reality beyond games like Pokemon Go.

Examples of Toys-To-Life Innovation

Reinvigorating Older Franchises

One of the key ways Toys-to-Life is impacting the toy and gaming industries alike is its ability to revive popular franchises that may no longer be in the spotlight. Shen shares, “In a recent project, we partnered with Mattel, Animoca Brands, and Super7 to create a line of character cards that activate powerups in the new He-Man Tappers of Greyskull mobile game. We do this by using NFC (near-field-communication) technology to make the cards scannable from the game.”

Integrations like these create intrigue for existing franchises by generating new and exciting versions of gameplay. Toys-to-life enabled games encourage consumers to collect the various characters or power-ups required for enhanced gameplay, making it easier than ever for brands to bundle toys and games that go together.

The Toy Blank

Another trend in toys that is giving small businesses an edge is the emergence of the Toy Blank. Shen explains, “Toy Blanks, also known as Toy Platforms, are becoming a sound way for brands to license their characters to companies who can produce and distribute them more quickly. Players like Funko and Lego are mainstream examples of how much demand there is for this kind of toy.” As licensed toys designed by smaller toy manufacturers grow in popularity, there will be increased opportunities for designers and manufacturers to collaborate.

3D Printing Enabling Faster Innovation

Finally, larger companies are turning to firms with 3D printing capabilities to more rapidly prototype both standard and digitally activated toys. One reason pushing these larger organizations to leverage startups with 3D printing capabilities is the complexity involved in the modeling process.

Most 3D printers require a significant amount of engineering or computer science expertise, which means to develop their own solutions most companies would have to hire entirely new, highly qualified teams to maintain any 3D printing efforts. The result is an increase in demand for 3D printing startups that can meet the needs of larger organizations.

Enabling Designers

All of these changes are bringing about mutually beneficial updates for designers, game makers, and larger brands. By partnering with larger firms, small businesses in the toy and gaming industries can access assets that would otherwise be unattainable. By the same token, established industry leaders can leverage the innovation and lean speed with which startups operate to create content and collectibles that consumers want.

Conclusion

The relationship between startups and established toy brands is a model for how other industries can innovate. Innovation moves rapidly today, and startups are frequently the ones driving that change. If established companies want to survive successive cycles of disruption, and if young startups want a boost in their early days, partnerships can be mutually beneficial.

Skylanders Balloon Photo via Shutterstock

This article, "Toys-To-Life And Gaming Industries Turn To Startups For Innovation" was first published on Small Business Trends

Social video app Beme shuts down today

 When CNN picked up Casey Neistat’s Beme back in November of last year, it announced that the social video sharing app would go the way of the dodo by the end of January 2017. Now here we sit, mere hours away from the second month of the year, and lo and behold, the app is shutting down today. Those who got in on the action during Beme’s relatively short run as a standalone will… Read More

Silicon Valley is making plans to move foreign-born workers to Canada

 For many U.S. startups and their foreign-born employees, a kind of back-up plan may be starting to sound like a good idea right about now. Yesterday, White House press secretary Sean Spicer confirmed that administration officials have drafted a new executive order aimed at overhauling, among other things, the H-1B work-visa program that U.S.-based tech companies have long relied on to bring… Read More

How to Keep Quality Up In Your Factory

Maintaining the quality of products in the factory is very important in this hyper competitive environment. Here are tips to maintain the quality in the plant.

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What is an Infopreneur?

A couple of decades ago, pursuing self-employment in the information industry was pretty difficult. Starting a publication was cumbersome and costly, blogging wasn’t an option and podcasts hadn’t even been dreamed up. For most aspiring entrepreneurs, making a steady living sharing your professional knowledge with others was an impossible pipe dream.

Thanks to the dawn of the web and a wide range of emerging technologies, that dream is now completely attainable for anyone and everyone — and those who choose that lifestyle are generally referred to as “infopreneurs”.

What is an Infopreneur?

Simply put, an infopreneur is a professional who collects information from multiple sources and personal experiences and uses it to create a unique package for consumers. And although the internet has hugely simplified that process, the term itself actually predates the era of digital celebrities. Harold “Skip” Weitzen coined the term in the 1980s elaborating on his own interpretation of what it means to be an infopreneur in the 1988 book “Infopreneurs: Turning Data Into Dollars”.

In the 20th Century, aspiring infopreneurs produced value-added reports and professional advice through mediums like self-published books, audio cassettes and CD-ROMs. After establishing personal a brand, an infopreneur could then work to establish sustainable self-employment sharing his or her insights on regular conference circuits and earning passive income generated through product sales.

Fast forward to 2017, and the internet, the emergence of social media and breakthroughs in self-publishing technologies have all made it far quicker and cheaper to get a foothold as an infoprenur. Sites like WordPress, YouTube and Facebook mean that anyone and everyone can share information and distribute it in a matter of seconds for free. Meanwhile, advertising services like AdWords and a variety of other methods of monetizing content mean that the right individual can start seeing steady income in record time.

To be clear, the ever-increasing simplicity of web publishing and distribution does not guarantee success — and in order to be a successful infopreneur, you will need to exercise plenty of effort and cunning. The web is absolutely flooded with self-labelled experts and professional bloggers in various fields. In order to stand out from the crowd and generate a following, you’ve got to establish your own unique selling points and some sort of signature style and flair.

Why Be an Infopreneur?

Just like any type of self-employment, pursuing a career as an infopreneur comes with plenty of perks. You get to choose when and where to apply yourself, and chase work that genuinely interests and engages you. At the same time, unlike other kinds of business startups, becoming an infopreneur carries far fewer risks.

First and foremost, it’s not hard to bootstrap a career in selling information. One of the easiest ways to begin establishing yourself as an infopreneur is to launch a blog or YouTube channel. Hosting fees for sites like WordPress are quite affordable and producing a quality eBook costs only time. Distributing self-published books and magazines online via Amazon and other platforms can be fairly cheap, too.

Meanwhile, infopreneurs generally don’t have to worry about ordinary startup overhead like brick-and-mortar costs or eCommerce support. It’s also far easier for infopreneurs to start generating some form of return on investment.

Can You Succeed as an Infopreneur?

If you feel like you’ve got the drive, determination and experience necessary to establish yourself as a credible source of useful information, you may want to consider pursuing self-employment as an infopreneur. So long as you’ve got internet access, you can produce and widely distribute content at virtually no cost. You’ve got little to lose, and plenty to gain.

Yet in order to taste success, you’ll need to come up with something unique. Every month, bloggers churn out about 73.9 million posts on WordPress, and there are literally millions of eBooks doing the rounds on Amazon. If you want to stand out from the crowd, you’ll need to do market research and establish a built-in online following for the content you produce.

The road to success for infopreneurs is never easy — but that doesn’t mean you can’t achieve it.

Working at Laptop Photo via Shutterstock

This article, "What is an Infopreneur?" was first published on Small Business Trends

Snapchat now lets you make QR Snapcodes that open websites

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25 Desktop Photo Editing Tools You May Not Know About

Because of smartphones, owners of these devices have access to high-quality cameras with them at all times. This has made it possible for people to take pictures anywhere and post them right away, for business or personal applications. But the images they take are not always picture-perfect, which is why having a photo editing application you can access right away in your browser has become a valuable tool.

The 25 desktop photo editing tools on this list will let you edit your images with basic and sophisticated tools right from your browser without having to install them on your system.

Desktop Photo Editing Tools

Pixlr

The Pixlr editor comes with a wide range of tools that will allow you to perform many different functions that are similar to Photoshop. And just like Photoshop, it has the Layers functionality to give you greater control of the images you edit. This includes adjustments, distortions, filters, and transformations.

If you don’t want to go into that much detail, you can use Pixlr Express to quickly open your image and use the slider-based interface to make basic adjustments. You can make enhancements by sharpening the image, cropping and adjusting the exposure along with several different filters. 

Fotor

Fotor has an easy to use interface that lets you edit images, create collages and greeting cards with frames, clip art and text. It has five different modules with a collection of filters with standard and specialized photo editing, including one designed to enhance selfies. Some of the filters are, color splash, black and white, lens flare and more.

The collage feature lets you drop photos into 1:1, 3:4 or 4:3 aspect ratios with 80 templates, or you can create your own.

PicMonkey

PicMonkey  has three groups of functions separated into Edit/Touch Up, Design and Collage so you can manipulate your images. In addition to standard editing features such as cropping, effects, touchups and resizing, the design function gives you a blank canvas so you can create invitations, posters, leaflets and more for your business quickly and easily.

The design function has templates for a wide range of projects so you can create graphics for your website, social media page or to print out on paper.

BeFunky

Once you upload your picture on BeFunky, the user interface lets you edit your image in a straightforward manner with multiple options. This app lets you transform your image and make it more engaging with frames, filters, effects and collage templates. The slider for each function lets you control the level of manipulation for each effect.

Ready-made templates for event graphics, small business, blogger resources, social media headers, social media graphics, and greeting cards are available with subcategories to create customized projects with a large number of elements.

Ribbet 

Ribbet has a single click auto-fix function to quickly enhance your image when you don’t have time and you need to post it right away. Crop, rotate, exposure, colors, sharpen, and resize also come as standard editing features along with collage. After you finish editing your image, you can save it to the local hard drive, Picasa and Google+, Flickr and Facebook.

You also get special effects, stickers, text, frames, touchup, pro features, and seasonal filters which can be customized to fit your needs. 

Upperpix

Upperpix comes with several different applications to edit your images online. You can apply filters, add text, draw, merge and add colors to your images. Basic shapes can also be integrated into an image to add custom background to highlight a particular product or service in a website.

A Layers/Objects panel lets you view the different layers and objects you’ve added to your image to better manage the editing process.

FotoFlexer

FotoFlexer has been around long enough to perfect the user interface, and it has done a great job to make the process of editing a photograph as easy as possible. The tabbed interface have basic edits, effects, animations, beautify tools, distort, and layer with great functionalities. It also includes an eyedropper tool so you can match colors of your image perfectly.

FotoFlexer also has an auto fix button, a red eye removal tool, and dozens of effects such as a greyscale, cartoon, sepia, color splash, blur edges, comic, and color rotate effect.

LunaPic

LunaPic has a simple look that is deceptive, because it has a load of features. You get a magic wand selection, gradients, blending, animation effects, texts, drawing and more. The save provides some of them most popular formats, including gif, jpg, png, bmp, pdf, swf (flash), mpg and avi (movie files).

Once you’re finished, you can use the built-in sharing feature with your audience on Facebook, Twitter or Picasa.

Sumo Paint

Sumo Paint has a user interface that looks like Photoshop, and it has tools for performing extreme touchups with a huge number of filter effects that comes included in this app. A fully loaded toolbar has many features Photoshop users will be familiar with, such as selection, painting, shapes, cropping, and transform tools, zoom, eyedropper, and foreground/background colors.

Photoshop Express

You can’t mention photo editing without Photoshop, and Adobe has a stripped down version called Photoshop Express  that brings the technology and experience of the company to this app. You will get editing tools such as white balance, saturation, exposure, crop, rotate and more.

While it does provide some powerful editing tools, it does fall short when it comes to providing creative tools such as collage, decorating, filters and others.

Picozu

With Picozu you can connect with social media sites and cloud services like Dropbox, Google Drive or SkyDrive to get your images and share them. You can edit your image using brushes, filters, and layers, as well as color fill, magic eraser, freehand selection, cropping, selections and more.

Some of the other advanced editing tools are distortion, edge detection, noise, blur and others

Polarr

Polarr has many features, including a great selection of tutorials. Editing features such as cropping, lighting, and color correction tools are readily available, but you also get advanced functions. Histogram editor, curve adjustments, gradient mask and radial mask, sharpening and clarity tools as well as a large number of filters.

You can save in .JPEG or .PNG format with pixel size and image quality percentage and share them on Facebook, or Twitter.

Aviary

As part of the Adobe family of products, Aviary provides professionally designed filters, stickers and frames, frames and overlays, and touch-up tools so you can create and share your images. You can stylize images with more than 100 filters, draw and add text to enhance images with Hi-Def.

The editing features include crop, rotate, and straighten along with being able to modify brightness, contrast, highlights and shadows.

Canva

Canva is a tool that lets you design professional grade graphics, but also edits photos. The platform provides more than 1 million layouts, stock photographs and illustrations with easy to use drag and drop functionality. The preset filters let you easily edit images with brightness, contrast, saturation, tint, blur, and vignette.

This is a very useful application for small businesses that want to design their own posters, flyers, logos, presentations and more. It has a library of more than 1 million premium images or design with hundreds of free elements and fonts to make this possible.

Fotor Online HDR Software

Unlike standard digital cameras, High Dynamic Range (HDR) photography is able to capture a wider range of lights and colors to produce images that are extremely vivid while retaining the details that might be lost. The Fotor HDR Software has advanced HDR technologies to deliver the same effects using alignment, ghost reduction, and Local/Global Tone Mapping.

The result is an HDR effect that will give your images new life.

Fotostars

Fotostars has an array of filters and effects to change and enhance any image quickly and easily. It includes 50 photo effects and photo frames to add unique styles and characters to your images. You can then add text and use the constructor to edit it with color grading, desaturation, image noise, lateral shadow, sepia transformation and more.

These features come with cropping tools as well as blurring and dream effects with a layers menu and customizable camera control. Images can be shared on Twitter, Facebook, Mail, Instagram, iMessage, iPhoto, WhatsApp and other social media and email clients.

piZap

PiZap photo editor has more than 50 million followers, which may be attributed to the multiple of features it provides. With PiZap, you can edit photos and decorate them with more than 200 fonts, outlines and text affects and use over 1,000 stickers to further embellish your images.

The online photo editing tool has the basic features, but it also includes Instagram style filters, light FX, textures, special effects and painting tools. If you are feeling creative, you can use the MEME and Emoji maker to create one of a kind images for your audience.

Photo Lab

Photo Lab gives you more than 600 effects to create almost any imaginable scenario for your picture. You can use creative artistic effects to create collages for multiple images with holiday e-card templates and fun face montages. The photorealistic effects lets you insert your images into books, dollar bills, magazine covers or mobile devices to market your small business.

The photo editor has crop, rotate, color adjustment, lighting, sharpness, and touch-up functions.

PicBuzz

PicBuzz is a great promotional tool you can use for your business to increase brand awareness and attract more customers. Filters and effects address, hotels, restaurants, artists and designers can be used with realistic photo montages.

If you can’t find one that suits your industry, you can create your own photo templates and use it for yourself, or it can be a business opportunity by offering them for sale.

Afterlight

Afterlight is an easy to use editor with 15 adjustment tools, 74 filters, 78 textures and a list of 128 frames to place your images. The cropping and transforming tools have 15 different preset functions to quickly make the most common adjustments. But you can also use the rotating tool, vertical and horizontal flipping tools, and straightening along with the standard editing tools to get the right effect

TinyPNG

Compression is an important feature if you plan using your images online, especially mobile Internet. TinyPNG is able to optimize your PNG and JPEG image with perfect balance in quality and file size by selectively decreasing the number of colors in the image. This means it requires fewer bytes to store and transmit the data, which makes your website faster for end users.

TinyPNG is currently being used by some of the biggest brands in the world, including Samsung, Sony, EA, Walmart, Bank of America and many others. While this is not a photo editing tool, it is just as useful for anyone that has a digital presence.

Phixr

Phixr is a complete imaging solution in which you can manipulate the photo by rotating, flipping, and resizing it based in pixels, percentage or standard sizes. The color effect has more than 70 options, including normalize, auto white balance, color enhance, black and white, sepia and auto contrast.

You can decorate the photos with stock objects, borders and textures as well as adding fun effects by converting images to oil paintings or charcoal drawing.  Image editing tools can sharpen, blur, and soften your photographs while removing red eye and whitening teeth.

Free Online Photo Editor

The Free Online Photo Editor is an application that is very basic, but it delivers in terms of getting the job done quickly and efficiently. It includes basic functionality like cropping, re-sizing, brightness/contrast adjustments, working with text, and a number of effects. If you are looking for a no frills solution, this is it.

iPiccy

This application has been dubbed as the online alternative to GIMP, and with so many features, iPiccy might have earned the title. It has a lot of useful and powerful photo editing tools, including more than 110 photo effects, tools and filters that let you add text and stickers as well as create collages.

The tools are categorized under Basic, Advanced, Adjustments, Color, and Filters and you can use them for one-click fix to the image, resize, crop, rotate, sharpen, or flip the picture, as well as edit the exposure, hue, saturation, and colors. 

Pixelmator

Pixelmator is a full-featured and powerful image editing app for the Mac that lets you create advanced composition using many of the tools it provides. It has pixel accurate editing so you can apply or remove any effect.

You can paint, retouch and draw on new or existing images and add more than 160 effects and see the results in real-time. The color correction tools are professional grade, which lets you adjust exposure, hue, saturation, shadows and highlights, brightness, contrast, and much more.

Conclusion

While Photoshop is the gold standard when it comes to photo editing and manipulation, it has a high learning curve and it is not cheap. These 25 browser-based desktop photo editors let you quickly edit images without having to worry if you have the right application on your computer.

Finding the right solution will depend on your specific needs and how much functionality you will require to make it possible. If you plan on make mobile a big part of  photo editing make sure it has a mobile app. And as always, try the free version first and if it delivers for you, go for the premium version, if it is available.

Photo Studio Photo via Shutterstock

This article, "25 Desktop Photo Editing Tools You May Not Know About" was first published on Small Business Trends