Jerry Greenfield, co-founder of ice cream giant Ben & Jerry’s, gives the opening keynote at the 2019 EntreFEST conference/festival in Cedar Rapids. Photo contributed/Andrew Ravera, NewBoCo The perception of competition is a funny thing. It can bring out the great innovations in companies, the leaps in service or quality or product — or, as Jerry […]

Founder and owner Brad Dwyer is passing the reigns of social gaming studio Hatchlings to E.B. Udegraff as the new CEO, Hatchlings announced Thursday. Updegraff, previously the marketing director at Hatchlings, joined the company in early 2017 and recently coordinated the launch of Hatchlings’ new game Pretty Jigsaw Puzzles in September 2018. Dwyer will stay […]

Studio Ghiblet team members Michael Casner and Lauren Kacere demonstrate the starting screen of ‘Spark,’ a one-player computer puzzle that challenges the user to piece together a dementia patient’s past based on photographs and audio clues. When imagining dementia as a desktop game, Lauren Kacere and her team thought of an art gallery. As the […]

When Brad Dwyer founded Hatchlings Inc. in an Iowa State University dorm room in 2008, he couldn’t have predicted what the social media landscape would become. Dwyer’s mobile games company requires a few basic permissions for users to play using Facebook’s API (application programming interface): Hatchlings needs a user’s name, email address and Facebook social […]

Des Moines game developer Brad Dwyer is keeping an eye on Facebook. Small business owners have been watching since news leaked in March that Cambridge Analytica, a third-party provider, was able to purchase Facebook user data from a rule-abiding personality profile application. The user data was then sold to President Donald Trump’s campaign team in […]