Welcome to CyberPuppy

My Life as a Comic

noreply@blogger.com (NeillK) — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 04:00:00 +0000

Family Tree

noreply@blogger.com (NeillK) — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 01:12:00 +0000

View more of Neill's tree | Get your own family tree at Geni.com

From cyberpuppy to bunnybot

noreply@blogger.com (NeillK) — Sun, 23 Sep 2007 23:27:00 +0000

Friends,

I have spent many, many months working with a small team of dedicated and talented software developers and designers to create a new kind of online service. It is a place where you can chat and shop with your buddies in real-time. It's hosted by a techno-bunny, known as Bunnybot.

Please remember that the service is brand new and it may not work in all browsers, etc. But that's why we're asking you, our friends and associates to give Bunnybot a test drive. Kick its tires, tell us what works and what doesn't--for you.

There's a one minute demo that I encourage you to watch before you dig in. Once the demo ends (or you can skip it) Bunnybot begins. You can chat with Bunnybot or click around in "browse 'n shop." The service really shines when you register (in "chat 'n shop") and add your IM/chat credentials from AIM, MSN, Yahoo!, or Google Talk. We automatically load up your buddy list so you can begin chatting (and shopping if you like!) immediately (assuming at least one of your buddies is currently online).

Here you go!

We'd love to receive feedback about Bunnybot and read your suggestions about how we can improve the service. Please fill out our feedback form.

Sincerely,
Neill Kramer
Founder, Bunnybot

Hamster Hell

noreply@blogger.com (NeillK) — Thu, 10 Nov 2005 05:58:00 +0000

Little Manny's Missing!

noreply@blogger.com (NeillK) — Tue, 18 Oct 2005 21:11:00 +0000

A fun, stop-motion animation about a family of stuffed manatees. The child manatee (Little Manny) gets kidnapped and the mother and father manatees, along with some stuffed animal friends, help rescue Little Manny and bring him to safety.

A reviewer from triggerstreet.com:

"Honey, why is that alien in our house?

This is one of the most imaginative films I have seen on triggerstreet. I disagree with the reviews which describe the voice acting as weak. I feel that the voice acting in this film is completely adequate and that the voices have been well chosen to suit different characters. Although the story was quite simple, I thought that it was well told using the script and on screen events. I also found the story to be original, entertaining and that there were no major short-comings in the technical construction although I thought that a number of the music cues came in or ended too early or too late. I liked the way in which the characters interacted with each other onscreen in relation their size and shape e.g. the manatees climbing over one another to get up the step at the start or the shoe pushing the smaller manatee into the other shoe" -- May 18, 2004 - 6:49 AM
Review Id: 686305

Vacation Rental in Stinson Beach, California

noreply@blogger.com (NeillK) — Fri, 17 Jun 2005 05:35:00 +0000

Follow the greenhouse blog!

noreply@blogger.com (NeillK) — Thu, 31 Mar 2005 05:02:00 +0000

History of CyberPuppy

noreply@blogger.com (NeillK) — Thu, 23 Sep 2004 18:23:00 +0000

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.