Position: President
Company: Advance Games
What they do: Produce educational and therapeutic games
Revenue: $500,000 to $700,000 projected
Next Goal: To produce fun and interactive games and apps
Holly Strange didn’t set out to be an entrepreneur.
As a speech pathologist who works with children, she was looking for a way to get young patients to practice outside of her office. While on a home visit, she watched a young boy with Down syndrome play a karaoke video game. The game was judging him on tone and staying with the beat—not pronunciation—but she took notice of how hard he tried to sing.
“I’m standing on my head with this child, with my old-fashioned techniques,” she says, “and this little game is doing exactly what I want to be able to do, which is get him to engage.”
So Strange, who knew nothing about software development, began her research. She quickly learned that creating a quality computer game was beyond her expertise and resources.
“In the speech therapy world, there’s some software out there, but it’s all very simplistic and basic and rarely done with a true gaming company,” she says. “I wanted it to be truly fun for the children, not just more work.”
After meeting with several local companies, she met Dean Majoué, president of Yatec, a local game development firm founded with help from the state’s digital media tax credit. One of his grandchildren has a speech impediment, which, he says, helped him see the need.
Strange says her game, Say-N-Play, can benefit any child in the target 4-to-9 age range, not just those with speech impediments, and the adult mode can be helpful to people with speech problems caused by strokes or injuries. In other words, the potential market is huge.
Majoué says creating the “speech recognition engine” proved complex. Eventually, his team found a system developed by the nonprofit SRI International to build upon. Along the way, Strange learned much more about speech recognition technology. She now throws around software development expressions like “beta testing,” while the Yatec team has learned speech therapy terms like “phonemes.”
The game has been available locally since early 2009, and child development expert Stevanne Auerbach, known as Dr. Toy, gave it a seal of approval earlier this year. A national marketing campaign and an iPhone app will follow, and Strange says the game will appear in several educational catalogues in the fall. Bringing in new investors to Advance Games, the company created by Strange, Yatec and a co-investor, is an option.
“Our goal is to have a family of games that are fun and interactive that are geared toward developing speech, language and reading skills,” she says.
