Colin Liotta Email & Phone Number

Seattle, Wa, Us

Mathematical art made with lasers.https://etsy.com/shop/LiottaDesign

San Francisco, California, Us

EMME is a digital health company on a mission to put women's health in women's hands.I'm proud to be a part of this team. I help to oversee R&D, product development, manufacturing, customer support, and strategic partnerships. I am extremely excited about the positive impact that our company can have for our customers and the world.

San Francisco, California, Us

Provided a wide range of services including rapid technical development, marketing plans, product roadmap planning, and general company strategy.

Portland, Oregon, Us

Rapid-fire game development.

LifeFolder is here to help people figure out How To Adult -- helping you check all those little checkboxes you need to ensure you're prepared and ready for whatever life throws at you.

Seattle, Washington, Us

3 Minute Games is one of the 5 main studios within Big Fish Games and can be thought of as the Skunkworks division. We explore novel game mechanics, genres, partnerships, and basically try to push the boundaries in order to find the next hot thing. In order to do this we develop and release games very rapidly. We've found that the only way to really understand what will be popular is to make a bunch of educated guess and then throw them out there to see what happens. We've developed word puzzlers, fast twitch games, progression tappers, match 3 variants, social trivia games, interactive fiction, etc.We were excited about the potential for the Apple Watch from the moment that it was announced. We devoted a large effort to creating games that were designed from the ground up to support this new way of playing games. It required re-thinking how we approach games. We wanted the games to be ephemeral yet immersive. Something that you could interact with very briefly but which you were always connected to.Our biggest success to date has been Lifeline. Lifeline is an interactive story that is told in real-time via push notifications. It represents a fresh new twist on the interactive fiction genre since it forces you to interact with the game in real-time. If the character you're interacting with goes to sleep, then you won't hear from them for several hours. This constraint actually deepens the illusion and makes you feel more immersed in the story. People who play the game come to really empathize with the main character and the reviews from our players and the press have been overwhelmingly positive.Lifeline was recognized by both Apple and Google as one of the top games of 2015. It reached the #1 top paid and #1 top free spot in the US and 36 other countries. It has been featured in numerous different ways and it has spawned a whole franchise of new games.

Seattle, Washington, Us

With the runaway success of Card Ace Casino, we knew that we had the option of either growing the company to a whole new level, or partnering with a larger organization which could help us leverage the game to new heights (we described it as throwing fuel on the fire.) We were courted by several companies, but we ultimately made the choice to go with Big Fish Games since there was an excellent cultural fit and Big Fish had proven time and again that they were very adept at pivoting into new areas of the ever changing games landscape. We negotiated a very nice acquisition and Self Aware Games became the Oakland office of Big Fish Games.Within Big Fish I took on the role of Senior Technical Director and was responsible for exploring new technologies and game opportunities, both within the Casino space, and also in partnership with the other internal Big Fish studios.Over the course of 2 years I took on a number of large projects:* Created Big Fish Casino UK, the first ever mobile social casino game that also let you play with real money.* Helped create Big Fish Bingo and built a new internal game engine that let us have full control of the game from our servers and gave us automatic cross-platform support on iOS, Android, and Web.* Ported Fairway Solitaire over to the new game engine and helped revitalize the franchise.* Helped Big Fish Casino incorporate the new game engine so that we could launch dramatically improved slot games.* Created Casino Clicker: Vegas Style, one of the very first games to use the progression tapping mechanic on mobile.After successfully finishing up these projects, I wanted a new challenge, so I started up a new internal studio called 3 Minute Games.

Self Aware Games was started in 2009 by me and a close friend. We felt that there was a huge untapped opportunity to develop games for mobile devices that were geniunely social. We rapidly expanded to a team of 4 and we joined up with Social Concepts, another company which was working on putting social features first (primarily for the Web.)We quickly developed several games that were huge hits with the critics but which failed to generate much revenue. We had an opportunity to partner with Palm for the launch of the Palm Pre and we created Word Ace, one of the very first highly social, mobile, syncronous real-time games. It was a combination of Scrabble and Texas Hold 'Em, and it was a huge hit. We rapidly expanded the suite of games to include Card Ace (a more traditional version of Texas Hold 'Em), and Card Ace: Blackjack. For each of these games, we recognized that people wanted to interact with other people, and that's what made the games so much fun and so sticky. We doubled down on the social features when we launched Card Ace: Casino, a unified version of our other games that featured a large grid of other players that you could flick through in order to decide who you wanted to play with.We expanded the game to include Slots, Roulette, and Video Poker, and the game exploded in popularity. We rose as high as the #2 Top Grossing Game on iOS and were consistently in the top 20.Through all of this I was responsible for leading the Casino team and I was the principal technical architect for the game.

Potenco was one of the companies that was spun out of Squid Labs.When we were spinning out the various companies from Squid Labs we realized that each company would need to have a leader, (we couldn't just spin out the technology, in order to be successful we also had to spin out the drive and the vision.) Each Squid Labs partner took one of the companies, and in my case I was responsible for Potenco.Potenco's mission was to provide power to the billions of people around the world who have no access to reliable electricity. In order to fulfill that mission we developed several novel products that could very efficiently harness the power in the human body while also being very inexpensive. We were an early partner with the One Laptop Per Child program, we received a technology breakthrough award from Popular Mechanics, and we were featured at Wired Magazine's NextFest.We raised $3M in a Series A and built out a team of 10. We developed three core products and built out distribution relationships with several large partners in Africa and south east Asia.Unfortunately, creating a scalable successful company for delivering products to developing countries is hard. We attempted to secure Series B funding from a large number of different sources, but were ultimately unsuccessful. Much of the vision for Potenco was reborn when part of the team created Fenix International.

OptiOpia was one of the companies that was spun out of Squid Labs.OptiOpia's mission is to improve detection, correction and prevention of visual loss due to uncorrected refractive error.

San Francisco, California, Us

Instructables was one of the companies that was spun out of Squid Labs.The World's Biggest Show and Tell. Instructables is a web-based documentation platform where passionate people share what they do and how they do it, and learn from and collaborate with others.Instructables was acquired by Autodesk in 2011.

Alameda, California, Us

Makani Power was one of the companies that was spun out of Squid Labs.Makani Power is seeking to harness high-altitude wind energy to produce energy at an unsubsidized real cost significantly below that of the least expensive coal-fired power plants.Makani was acquired by Google X in 2013.

Us

"We're not a think tank, we're a do tank"Squid Labs was founded in early 2004 by myself and three close friends (all from the MIT Media Lab). The vision of Squid Labs: Bring in consulting & contract work, and use the profits to grow internal projects & technologies. Keep many projects active, keep a small core technical team and outsource the rest, and build a high productivity workspace. Along the way three other partners came on board, and by the middle of 2006 the internal projects had grown to demand full attention. By 2007 no fewer than seven spinout companies were formed to continue growing the most promising Squid Labs projects.The idea of Squid Labs was to be a Venture Technology firm. A traditional Venture Capital firm provides insight and working capital to help create new businesses, and we wanted to do the same thing, but instead of providing money, we provided technology and market insight. Along the way we built out a top-notch rapid prototyping / manufacturing lab and explored hundreds of different technology ideas. We also developed a novel way of allocating equity across all of the people involved in a project, and we let the partners mitigate financial risk by holding equity in all of the companies that spun out of Squid Labs.

San Jose, Ca, Us

Cambridge, Massachusetts, Us

Bs, Meng, Electrical Engineering / Computer Science

Master Of Engineering (M.Eng.), Computer Science / Electrical Engineering