Testing Our Ideas

While we think the characters and artwork for The Land of PurFUNple are great, we know that it is important to ask our target audience, children ages 5 - 9 and their parents, to see what they think. On Saturday, January 14, Click Bug Studios will be holding a focus group session to get first-hand reactions and suggestions. Parents and their children will all receive a general overview of The Land of PurFUNple. Then we will divide the participants into separate groups, boys, girls and parents, and videotape their responses to the characters, storyline and activities. Based on their feedback, we will determine if anything needs to be "tweaked" as we move forward. If necessary, additional focus groups will be held prior to our launch date of June 1, 2012.  

New Gnat Artwork Completed by Intern

Our internship program with the Art Institute of Indianapolis has proven to be very valuable to Click Bug Studios and the student interns.  One example of the talent level of the AI students is shown below. We challenged an intern to redesign one of the key characters in the Land of PurFUNple named Gnat.  Comments regarding the original Gnat artwork was that the character wasn't "cute" enough.  So, Cindi Blandford, Click Bug founder and Creative Director, worked closely with one of the interns to come up with the new and improved version of Gnat and here it is.  We love him! Hope you do too!

Design Document Being Developed for Phase One Content

As you can imagine, when it comes to creating a 3-D virtual world, the devil is in the details.  Ray has spent much of his Christmas holiday writing the Design Document for the Phase One launch.  The challenge is to write out every detail of each activity, game or function within the site that children will encounter.  No small task, but an essential one. With the phase one document completed, Ray and Eduardo can pull individual projects out and provide the detailed explanation to appropriate knowledge workers.  Consequently, the Design Document becomes our yardstick for the progress we are making, as well as functioning as the quality control standard. 

Leveraging Social Media to Create Buzz

As we consider how best to create a "buzz" about The Land of PurFUNple, we are in the process of setting links to all the popular social networking sites.  So far we have set up a Twitter account at http://twitter.com/#!/purfunple, a Facebook account at http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Land-Of-PurFUNple/190968874278899.  And, of course, this blog site http://clickbugnewsletter.blogspot.com/ for our on-going newsletter. 

Please "like" our Facebook page and forward it to your friends as well.  As we get closer to the June 1 launch, our public relations efforts will accelerate including efforts to secure endorsements  for The Land of PurFUNple from Scholastic magazine, Partner Teachers Associations and Home Schooling Assocations. 

PurFUNple Phase One Launch Targeted for June 1, 2012

With the opportunity to be on the Evanced Solutions Summer Reading Program software, our focus is to get the first phase of The Land of PurFUNple completed by June 1.  The challenge is to create a series of sophisticated activities and games with little or no money to hire the necessary talent.  Being resourceful entrepreneurs, we have created an incentive program that offers Flash programmers, artists, UI designers, and animators to earn a small percentage of our net income before taxes.  This deferred compensation package is being finalized by our lawyers now. We will use our contacts in both Chicago and Indianapolis as well as our LinkedIN account to circulate the projects. 

Distribution Partner Provides up to 750,000 Potential Users!

Over the past six months, Click Bug has been in conversation with an Indianapolis- based company that provides administrative software to more than 2,000  public libraries across the country.  One of their most popular software packages is a Summer Reading Program that libraries use to enroll and track each participant's reading progress over the summer.  We are currently in the progress of finalizing an agreement that will allow a link to The Land of PurFUNple to be added to the Summer Reading Program home page.  This program opens gives Click Bug Studios access to a potential audience of 750,000 to 1,000,000 end-users.  This agreement hold tremendous potential to get The Land of PurFUNple in front of a huge market that can then jump-start our viral marketing efforts. We hope to finalize this contract in the next few weeks and will require Click Bug to have phase one of The Land of PurFUNple completed for the June 1 launch. 

Director of Technology Added to Staff

Exciting news: Eduardo Moreno has agreed to come on board as our Director of Technology.  In lieu of direct payment, Ed has agreed to provide 1,000 hours of development work for 10% stock equity in Click Bug Studios. Ray and Eduardo worked together in Chicago for 4 years and through that working relationship we have been able to negotiate this agreement.  Ed has been working in the field of information technology since 1994 and has been writing computer programs since the late '80's. He received a degree in Computer Science from The University of Illinois in Urbana and a Fine Arts degree in the field of Multimedia Communications from the Illinois Institute of Art in Chicago.  Currently he is a Software Engineer for UBM Studios where is he involved with the development of several large websites, including Innovation Generation, which is an online virtual environment for children interested in pursuing a career in Engineering.