Thursday, September 23, 2004
History of CyberPuppy
I co-founded CyberPuppy Software with two friends that I met while teaching as an adjunct professor at The Rochester Institute of Technology. Our first product, Kid's Studio (later changed to Monstrous Media Kit), became a sweet success. We won a Codie Award from the The Software and Information Industry Association in 1994.
Kid's Studio
We released Kid's Studio under an affiliate agreement with Maxis (now a subsidiary of Electronic Arts). We released the product into the retail channel as a Macintosh-only product on four floppy disks, making a promise to Maxis that we would release the Windows version "soon."
The minimum configuration for Kid's Studio was a Macintosh LC, System 7, a Monitor with 256 colors, and 4 MB of RAM. In addition we requested that the user have 6MB of free hard disk space (Macintosh LCs had between 40-80 MB). The maximum amount of RAM the unit supported was 10MB, while the motherboard came with 2 MB.
Given these limitations we were proud of the fact that we were the first children's software company to support the Kodak Photo CD. Children could take photos with any 35mm camera (this was years before consumer digital cameras were available), bring the film into a retail photofinisher and get a CD that contained digital photographs. The child would then place the CD into a CD-ROM drive, if his/her parents were fortunate enough to own one, and Kid's Studio would create a browser-type display of the images.
In addition to importing the photos in one of three different sizes, kids could apply what we amusingly called "cookie-cutter technology." Essentially you could pick one of twenty cookie-cutters (e.g., in this case I chose a mustache, dragged it across the photo below my nose, and then filled it with red paint.)
Once a child had the photos he/she wanted, added text, recorded sound, painted, added clip-art and slide-show effects, he/she had himself a full-screen multimedia spectacle that could be saved as a QuickTime movie.
CyberPuppy's Office
When we moved into an office in the back of this lovely old estate, we were surprised to learn that it was a station along the underground railroad (see the Warrant Homestead - the third listing).
Of course, being residents of Rochester, NY - we did know something about Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman. But it felt good to know that our little company was housed in a place that helped liberate slaves (technically we were housed in a more recent add-on to the old estate, but who's counting).
Two Lives
CyberPuppy Software had two lives. First as a company that made leading-edge multimedia authoring software for children, then as a bleeding-edge startup that created internet-friendly software for children. To that end we created Pigmail.
Pigmail, as the 1996 press release stated, "places the user in a compelling visual space, based on a geographical metaphor. All of the other PigMailians are immediately visible in the form of little dots on the surface of the continents. From there the user can zoom in to cities and buildings, eventually finding like-minded individuals (and over 2,200 links to geographically-oriented web sites). A handy magnifying lens enables the user to explore deeper levels of the product as well."
Unfortunately, the Silicon Valley venture community was not ready for kid-friendly internet solutions in 1996 (and there are very few, if any, suitable solutions today). While we did get close to a seed round, we never were able to raise the funds to launch our re-positioned company despite the fact that over 2,000 people downloaded the Pigmail beta (Mac only) within the first two weeks of placing it on cyberpuppy.com.
Kid's Studio
We released Kid's Studio under an affiliate agreement with Maxis (now a subsidiary of Electronic Arts). We released the product into the retail channel as a Macintosh-only product on four floppy disks, making a promise to Maxis that we would release the Windows version "soon."
The minimum configuration for Kid's Studio was a Macintosh LC, System 7, a Monitor with 256 colors, and 4 MB of RAM. In addition we requested that the user have 6MB of free hard disk space (Macintosh LCs had between 40-80 MB). The maximum amount of RAM the unit supported was 10MB, while the motherboard came with 2 MB.
Given these limitations we were proud of the fact that we were the first children's software company to support the Kodak Photo CD. Children could take photos with any 35mm camera (this was years before consumer digital cameras were available), bring the film into a retail photofinisher and get a CD that contained digital photographs. The child would then place the CD into a CD-ROM drive, if his/her parents were fortunate enough to own one, and Kid's Studio would create a browser-type display of the images.
In addition to importing the photos in one of three different sizes, kids could apply what we amusingly called "cookie-cutter technology." Essentially you could pick one of twenty cookie-cutters (e.g., in this case I chose a mustache, dragged it across the photo below my nose, and then filled it with red paint.)
Once a child had the photos he/she wanted, added text, recorded sound, painted, added clip-art and slide-show effects, he/she had himself a full-screen multimedia spectacle that could be saved as a QuickTime movie.
CyberPuppy's Office
When we moved into an office in the back of this lovely old estate, we were surprised to learn that it was a station along the underground railroad (see the Warrant Homestead - the third listing).
Of course, being residents of Rochester, NY - we did know something about Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman. But it felt good to know that our little company was housed in a place that helped liberate slaves (technically we were housed in a more recent add-on to the old estate, but who's counting).
Two Lives
CyberPuppy Software had two lives. First as a company that made leading-edge multimedia authoring software for children, then as a bleeding-edge startup that created internet-friendly software for children. To that end we created Pigmail.
Pigmail, as the 1996 press release stated, "places the user in a compelling visual space, based on a geographical metaphor. All of the other PigMailians are immediately visible in the form of little dots on the surface of the continents. From there the user can zoom in to cities and buildings, eventually finding like-minded individuals (and over 2,200 links to geographically-oriented web sites). A handy magnifying lens enables the user to explore deeper levels of the product as well."
Unfortunately, the Silicon Valley venture community was not ready for kid-friendly internet solutions in 1996 (and there are very few, if any, suitable solutions today). While we did get close to a seed round, we never were able to raise the funds to launch our re-positioned company despite the fact that over 2,000 people downloaded the Pigmail beta (Mac only) within the first two weeks of placing it on cyberpuppy.com.
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