Webucator leaders playing in new sector with Acuity Apps

FAYETTEVILLE  —  The heads of the Central New York–based business-to-business training company Webucator, Inc. are playing games.

Not with Webucator. That company’s continuing to grow, boosting its $4.5 million 2011 revenue by about 10 percent in 2012. Instead, they have a new startup, Acuity Apps, Inc., that just launched a consumer-oriented word game for mobile devices and Facebook.

Webucator’s founder, Nathaniel Dunn, and its COO, David Dunn, co-founded Acuity Apps and are its only employees. They started the business after playing an online game called Words with Friends, which is similar to Scrabble, last spring.

“In Words with Friends, in any Scrabble-like game, the better player wins the majority of the time,” David Dunn says. “But if you get better letters, a less-skilled player can still win. We started talking about this game. What if we both had the same letters?”

The Dunns refined their idea from there. They added a time limit, decided to give players fresh letters every round, and agreed players should be able to compete against thousands of people in a single game. They named their game Word Skill. And they hired a developer, North Carolina–based Electrotank, to help design the game’s apps for Apple’s iOS mobile devices, Android devices, Facebook, and Amazon’s Kindle Fire.

Most of those apps launched the week of Dec. 17, in time for a spike in app purchases that comes with the holidays, according to David Dunn. The Kindle Fire app had yet to launch as of The Central New York Business Journal’s press deadline.

It’s too early to deem the game a success or a failure, Dunn says. He admits he and his brother aren’t sure how high they should ratchet up their hopes.

“We have no idea what to expect,” David Dunn says. “It’s been going up every day. People seem to be inviting other people. The other thing that’s really exciting is the people who are downloading it are playing a lot.”

Of 500 users on Dec. 20, about 100 made more than 10 moves during the day, Dunn adds. He deemed that a high interaction rate.

Word Skill is free to play, but it generates revenue in three ways. The game contains advertising. Users can pay $1.99 to turn off ads. Users can also purchase coins that unlock different advantages, such as the ability to see the highest score that can be played — although not the actual word that would earn that score — before placing their letter tiles.

The Dunn brothers don’t have any revenue projections for Acuity Apps at this point. In the future, the company plans to release an iOS app, Word Learner, that helps players improve their word-game skills. David Dunn wouldn’t rule out releasing other mobile apps after that.

“It’s certainly an incredibly exciting space, and there are a lot of things you can see doing in it,” he says. “There are so many cool things, whether they’re games or tools.”

For the time being, Dunn is focused on promoting Word Skill. Acuity Apps is marketing the game on Facebook. Plus, the company will partner with the Syracuse–based nonprofit ProLiteracy, which will use Word Skill to set up tournaments to raise money in support of literacy efforts.

ProLiteracy hopes to raise as much as $10,000 in a Word Skill tournament starting in January, according to its vice president of programs, Mark Cass. The organization is excited at the prospect of working with Acuity Apps, he adds.

“We had been looking for an opportunity to have our local programs and perhaps our national programs raise money, where we could coordinate something that would be relatively easy for people to get involved with,” he says. “This seems to fit the bill.”

The ProLiteracy partnership is part of a large-scale vision David Dunn has for Word Skill tournaments with entry fees. He wants to continue to apply the game’s large-group capabilities to give nonprofits, political parties, and other groups the option of using it to raise money.

“Imagine Bill Clinton saying that he was going to play, and if you donated $25 to the Democratic Party, you could play against him,” Dunn says. “How many people would play that game?”

Other large-group Word Skill games can be set up based on geography, businesses, or colleges, Dunn adds. For example, Acuity Apps has started a game for people from the Syracuse area that can be accessed by entering the identification code “SYRACUSE” in the app.

The Dunns run Acuity Apps from David Dunn’s home at 173 Brookside Lane in Fayetteville. Webucator, on the other hand, is headquartered at 4933 Jamesville Road in DeWitt. It employs 70 contractors across the country as well as 22 full-time employees, 14 of which are in Central New York, and two part-time workers.

Nathaniel Dunn’s work with Webucator played a role in the founding of Acuity Apps, David Dunn says.

“We were looking at courseware for Webucator for iOS development,” he says. “And Nat, who has written a lot of our courseware, he had to do something with it in order to figure it out. So he was in development mode.”

David Dunn also stresses that Webucator and Acuity Apps are two separate ventures.

“We have a great management team in place at Webucator,” he says. “Things run very smoothly. And that was a big part in the development of this game, getting Webucator to the point where this could be our focus.”