Thursday, May 2, 2013

13 year old Waterford student to address world’s largest entrepreneur conference



What do LinkedIn, Microsoft, Twitter, Amazon and Waterford’s Casey Games have in common? They will all be speaking at the world’s largest conference for entrepreneurs in the U.S. on May 17th and18th.


Jordan Casey is the 13 year old Waterford student who rose to fame last year as the youngest person in Europe to develop an app for sale on the Apple App Store.


Following a year of worldwide seminars, conferences, innovation awards and four further successful game launches Jordan has been invited to speak at the prestigious 20th Annual TiEcon conference, to be held in Santa Clara, California. Jordan is the youngest entrepreneur ever to speak at the Conference and will address the 4,000 delegates on the topic, “Things I learned the hard way as a young CEO.”

TiE is a global not for profit organisation focused on fostering and enabling entrepreneurship through mentoring, education and networking and is the world’s largest conference for entrepreneurs. The main speakers include Jeff Weiner, CEO of LinkedIn; Sajai Krishnan, GM of Amazon Web Services; Satya Nadella, President of Server & Tools Business at Microsoft, while other speakers are from Net flicks, Pay Pal, IBM, Intel, ESPN, Facebook, Twitter and Ericsson.


Since the age of 9 Jordan has been putting content on the web. In January 2012 he released the app, ‘Alien Ball vs. Humans’, described by Apple executives as a version of the classic ‘Space Invaders’ and was the first step on the ladder for this talented young developer.

In October 2012 he released a game called “Save the Day”; it was the official game for National Children’s day in Brazil. His first ‘complex’ game was called Greenboy Touch and was released in November 2012. It is based on a boy who finds himself lost in a forest. In early January this year he launched a multiplayer game called ‘Food World’ while in March he started working on his next game, ‘My Little World’ an adventure game about a tiny creature named JC who lives in a back garden and wants to see the real world. He is aiming for a June release.


Jordan is constantly in demand as a conference speaker, over the past few months he has spoken in Germany, England, France and India. He is just back from Amsterdam where he was invited to both the Festival of Games and the TNW Europe conference, labelled Europe’s most influential tech event. And while in California he has been invited to visit Adobe headquarters in San Jose.


At first Jordan’s parents, Clyde and Louise did not recognise the talent they had under their roof, “We are very of proud Jordan considering he taught himself how to code and write the programmes. He has worked so hard on this, but also gets lots of support. For instance Waterford City Council, Enterprise Ireland and Waterford City Enterprise Board are all supporting our trip to the States. We really could not have gone without their help,” said Clyde Casey.


So, what’s next for Jordan? As well as more games to be developed and launched, another aspect of the company is to encourage young kids to code. Jordan explained, “I’m just one of many young programmers in Waterford, I believe that if kids think ‘Coding is Cool’ they may develop an interest in increasing their own programming skills. Kids from seven years of age can learn some coding and programming themselves because of the technology available, however, coding and programming are not being taught as a subject in schools. I would like to make kids aware of coding and promote it.”



For more details on Casey Games follow Jordan’s blog on www.caseygameswebsite.blogspot.ie


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