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FAYETTEVILLE - The heads of the Central New York-based business-to-business training company Webucator, Inc are playing games.
Not with Webucator. That company is 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...