Another newspaper writes about me

This time it is “La Estrella de Nicaragua” one of the leading newspapers in Nicaragua. The article is in spanish and pretty much says just what you all know. Where am from, what ANSCA means, how Walter and I started Ansca and talks about the success of Bubble Ball,(you know, the 14 year old kid) Robert Nays’s successful app written in our Corona SDK.

Here is the link to the newspaper La Estrella de Nicaragua, and a link to the actual article without having to navigate the paper pages, here.

Carlos

Tried to do my best to translate.

“Dweeb Carlos Icaza, Nicaraguan-nerd triumphs in the US in the world of cyber technology.

With the title “The impact of Corona SDK from Ansca Mobile”, el Diario Las Americas wrote about the monumental success of Carlos Icaza Arguello, a Nicaraguan professional in an article written by Nicaraguan reporter Sergio Boffelli.

Carlos Icaza is the co-founder of Ansca Mobile, creators of the Corona SDK. “Corona SDK has allowed 14 year hold Robert Nay from Spanish Fork Utah to create his successful game Bubble Ball a free app for the iTunes app store says Boffelli.

The success of Robert’s game has been featured all over the US, Europe, China and Chile, due in part to Robert’s game displacing Angry Birds from the top stop which was created by a group of 17 programmres.

Carlos Icaza says “Bubble Ball has been downloaded more than 8 million times, which I consider a phenomenon because it put Ansca on the map and now VC firms are coming to us thus proving what we set out to do a long time ago, we made Corona so easy, that even a 14 year old can write apps using our framework”.

In August of 1979, Carlos Icaza, then 13 years old arrived in Miami with his parents Carlos Icaza and Tere Arguello de Icaza and his sister Karla. The entire family, as with thousand of others, exiled from Nicaragua during the civil war due to the unrest brought about by the Sandinista Revolution.  Carlos would have never imagined that his future would impact the world of technology in the US and worldwide.

He left behind friends, his home town of Leon, Nicaragua, and his family’s cotton farm, adding to the exodus of more than 1 million Nicaraguans whose talent and productive capacity displaced the country from the civil unrest and usurped government into the chaos of poverty making Nicaragua the second most poorest country in Central/South America.

At 15 years of age, now in exile, Carlos Icaza started programming classes and graduated from Christopher Columbus High Shool in 1984 in Miami, and as soon as he started college courses in Computer Science he was hired as a professional programmer.

As he grew, Carlos immersed himself in the world of programing and in 1997 joined Adobe as a software engineer and in 2004 Macromedia recruited him as Engineering Manager for their nascent mobile division.

A year later, when Adobe acquired Macromedia, Icaza had released FlashLite, Flash Mobile Authoring and Flash Cast. Flash Lite is now available in over a billion phones worldwide.

With his technological capacity and his desire to be an entrepreneur and work with more freedom he quit Adobe in 2007 and with his co-founder Walter Luh, who met while at Adobe, started Ansca Mobile in Palo Alto.

Where does the name Ansca comes from? It’s a family history, and the cotton farm where he grew up left an indelible experience on a very young Carlos Icaza, and the meaning of Ansca is “Algodoneros Nicaraguenses Sociedad Coooperativa Agricola” [Agricultural Cooperative of Nicaraguan Cotton Growers] and even though Ansca Mobile is a company dedicated to technology, Carlos has fond memories of Ansca that he has carried since his child hood.

Walter, his co-founder was also at Adobe and was lead architect of Flash Lite, has over 10 years of programming experience and aside from Flash Lite worked on Adobe Illustrator and Apple’s Final Cut Pro.”

The rest is the Bubble Ball success and how easy Corona is to use.