Calling all gamers

Houston tech entrepreneurs take online gaming to a new level with GamerWall website

Take the field with your favorite team. Manage your franchise. Build your football dynasty. Madden, the video game, along with NBA 2K, and Rocket League and FIFA soccer games, are all available on GamerWall, an interactive online gaming website. Gratis.

Yeah, you read that right. Sign up online for access to games, free-to-play, and get ready to be transported from your living room to a virtual world where you go head-to-head with competitors from around the globe via a mouse click and keyboard stroke.

Meet the brains behind the new website: John Schaeffer and Mark Flood. The two, who met as freshman at the University of Texas at Austin in 2004 and now operate GamerWall from their Midtown Houston office, are gunning to make their mark in the gaming industry, ever-growing thanks to broadband Internet access.

“John and I have been collaborating since the day we met. We have a lot of similar interests, we’re both sports fans, and we both like to bet on sports,” Flood tells CultureMap.

They're also working to put Houston more on the tech map. “I’m reading that Houston is struggling to keep startups in town, especially if they’re not healthcare or space. We’re pretty excited about growing the city’s technology space and encouraging more companies to come and stay here," Flood says.

Although Schaeffer and Flood are scoring big with digital gaming platform GamerWall, which boasts a gentle learning curve making it easy for users to get a virtual break from reality, the road to success wasn’t an easy one. Their first collaboration in 2010, ThumbTalk, folded within two years. The mobile picture sharing app allowed users to rate photos with a thumbs up or thumbs down before the image disappeared.

Sound familiar, Snap users? Similar app Snapchat hit the market in 2011, and reportedly has more than 160 million daily active users to date.

“We got it (ThumbTalk) launched, but neither of us were technical so we had a really hard time communicating with developer. We were self-funding and when we ran out if money, instead of raising more, we sold it. We learned from our mistakes and applied those lessons,” Flood explains.

Schaeffer and Flood went their separate ways before joining forces again in 2016 to launch GamerWall, which originally began as a platform for sports betting. “We felt like we would be be dealing with legal hassles so we changed our market to e-sports, the official market for video games. GamerWall no longer has anything to do with gambling,” Flood says.

Setting itself apart from the gaming pack, GamerWall is free, saving players from paying for gaming units and accessories as with Xbox and the like. And did we mention you can win prizes?

“You can play the FIFA soccer game on Xbox and you’d rank and level up, but you're not getting real rewards for being good at it. Play our platform and you win real things like apparel," Flood says. “We host all types of events that last from a few hours to a few months. The longer the event, the bigger the prize.”

Future plans for GamerWall include becoming a provider for hosting live sport tournaments, which have the potential to attract at-home audiences larger than those of traditional sporting events. (Gow Media, the parent company of CultureMap and owner of two sports radio stations in Houston, has a equity stake in GamerWall.)

“We’ll use our platform to host your events with people, but from all over the world participating, which is tough to do. It will be like Xbox tournaments, only without everyone present because we’re using our software to manage the process," Flood says. "Our top objective is to become premier e-sports community.”

GamerWall enthusiasts have even more to be excited about with the recent signing of Trevor May, professional e-sports athlete and pitcher for the Minnesota Twins, as brand representative. As well, additional games, from Hearthstone (card game) to MLB The Show, are coming soon, promising increased virtual fun. Because all work and no play would be pretty dull.

Madden, the video game, along with NBA 2K, and Rocket League and FIFA soccer games, are all available on GamerWall, free-to-play.

Houston, GamerWall gaming company, May 2017, Madden

Courtesy photo

Madden, the video game, along with NBA 2K, and Rocket League and FIFA soccer games, are all available on GamerWall, free-to-play.

sports

Jobs report

Texas clocks in as No. 7 best state to find a job, new report says

Photo by The Jopwell Collection on Unsplash

It's easier to find a job in Texas than in nearly any other state.

If you’re hunting for a job in Texas amid a tough employment market, you stand a better chance of landing it here than you might in other states.

A new ranking by personal finance website WalletHub of the best states for jobs puts Texas at No. 7. The Lone Star State lands at No. 2 in the economic environment category and No. 18 in the job market category.

Massachusetts tops the list, and West Virginia appears at the bottom.

To determine the most attractive states for employment, WalletHub compared the 50 states across 34 key indicators of economic health and job market strength. Ranking factors included employment growth, median annual income, and average commute time.

“Living in one of the best states for jobs can provide stable conditions for the long term, helping you ride out the fluctuations that the economy will experience in the future,” WalletHub analyst Chip Lupo says.

In September, Gov. Greg Abbott announced Texas led the U.S. in job creation with the addition of 195,600 jobs over the past 12 months.

While Abbott proclaimed Texas is “America’s jobs leader,” the state’s level of job creation has recently slowed. In June, the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas noted that the state’s year-to-date job growth rate had dipped to 1.8 percent, and that even slower job growth was expected in the second half of this year.

The August unemployment rate in Texas stood at 4.1 percent, according to the Texas Workforce Commission. Throughout 2025, the monthly rate in Texas has been either four percent or 4.1 percent.

By comparison, the U.S. unemployment rate in August was 4.3 percent, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. In 2025, the monthly rate for the U.S. has ranged from 4 percent to 4.3 percent.

Here’s a rundown of the August unemployment rates in Texas’ four biggest metro areas:

Austin — 3.9 percent
Dallas-Fort Worth — 4.4 percent
San Antonio — 4.4 percent
Houston — 5 percent

Unemployment rates have remained steady this year despite layoffs and hiring freezes driven by economic uncertainty. However, the number of U.S. workers who’ve been without a job for at least 27 weeks has risen by 385,000 this year, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported in August. That month, long-term unemployed workers accounted for about one-fourth of all unemployed workers.

An August survey by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York showed a record-low 44.9 percent of Americans were confident about finding a job if they lost their current one.

This story originally was published on our sister site, InnovationMap.

job market texas wallethub jobs