Introducing FamZoo, Inc. and Home Office Version 0.5

As of August 29th, 2006, my new venture is now officially incorporated. The name of the business is "FamZoo, Inc." which is a contraction of "family" and "zoo". The name is something I came up with a couple of years back when I was first entertaining the notion of starting a business around some software that I had built for my own family. At the time, I was looking at a Family Circus cartoon. Family Circus is the creation of a wonderful cartoonist named Bill Keane. His cartoons are famous for affectionately capturing the everyday chaos of the typical American family - just like ours. I was thinking that our family was more like a zoo than a circus - perhaps a little more wild than tame. So, out of that train of thought popped "FamZoo".

Unfortunately, the domain name "famzoo.com" was already taken. So, the family put its collective heads together and tried to come up with some suitable alternative names. For posterity, here were some of the serious and not-so-serious contenders:

• famhub, fambase, famcentral - clever suggestions from my wife to denote the product as being a central connector for the family, but, alas, all taken as well;
• faminator - a little Arnold Schwarzenegger flavor - a bit on the aggressive side;
• famzoop - perhaps the sound emitted when the family slips on a banana peel together;
• famboozle - indicative of how people might feel if the product does not deliver on its promises;
• fampoof - what might happen if I don't get this thing off the ground!

Well, none of these had quite the humor, imagery, cadence, and sentimental appeal of FamZoo. Fortunately, I was able to contact the owner of the domain - a nice gentleman who had some similar unrealized ambitions for building family oriented software - and strike a reasonable price for the transfer of the domain.

To commemorate the official founding of the business, I figured it was time to move my office out of the bedroom and into its own dedicated room (apologies to the inlaws who will now have to find other accomodations for visits ;-). I wanted to create a fun environment that fit the name, so I went with a Tiger orange color and some stenciled paw prints. Here are some photos from the late night painting sessions last weekend:

A little fun with the roller before the real coat...

Marking the path of the paw prints with tape before committing to paint...

Replacing the tape with paw print stencils in pencil...

Filling in with paint...

The finished product!

Now it's time to write some software!