Kerpoof

» see kerpoof.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Kerpoof opened with a blank scene and a drawer full of parts. A child picked a background and dragged in a pirate, then scaled it to sit in the foreground or the distance, and the program quietly taught perspective while it did. There was a spelling mode where typing a word correctly made the object appear. There was a movie maker, built to smuggle in the basic shape of programming, which the National Science Foundation paid for with two small-business grants worth $150,000 between them.

Four engineers started it in Boulder, Colorado in March 2006: Krista Marks, Tom Fischaber, Brent Milne and Jonathan Ballagh. They put in $50,000 of their own money and agreed to take no salary for a year. The first public product went up in January 2007, and in September of that year Kerpoof was one of the forty companies invited to the first TechCrunch 40, where it launched the movie tool. By the end of 2008 traffic was growing around 30 percent a month.

Disney Interactive bought the company in February 2009 and the price was never published. Marks became a vice president for user-generated content and the team was renamed Disney Online Kerpoof Studios. Disney kept the Boulder office and the staff in it, then pointed them at Disney.com. In August 2009 they shipped Create, a set of drawing and comic tools wearing Disney characters. Kerpoof itself stayed open alongside it for five more years, with paid memberships at $4.39 a month or $44.79 a year.

It closed on 15 April 2014. The explanation Disney published was a move toward mobile, and the page listed a dozen paid storybook apps as the alternative. Accounts went with the site, and so did the lesson plans and everything a class had ever made in it. Kerpoof was for American schoolchildren aged three and up; I was thirty the year it shut, an engineer in Ankara with no classroom and no six year old, and the only version of this product I have ever seen is the archived one.

~ the case file ~

~ the four of them ~

Krista Marks was the chief executive and stayed inside Disney until 2012. In 2013 she started Woot Math in Boulder, an adaptive math platform for teachers. She ran it for seven years and merged it into Saga Education in 2020. Tom Fischaber turned up at Saga as well, as interim chief technology officer. The people who built Kerpoof went on doing the same job, in the same town, for another decade.

They had been out of Disney for roughly eighteen months by the time the site they built was switched off.

~ what disney wanted ~

Disney was not short of things for children to click on in 2009. What Kerpoof had was a set of creation tools that worked in a browser for a three year old, plus the safety apparatus that makes that legally possible. Every submission was read by a human moderator before it reached the gallery. The site carried no advertising and no outbound links at all. A three strikes policy handled whoever kept trying.

Create, which came out of the acquisition in August 2009, put the same machinery behind Disney characters on Disney.com. That is the reason the original site could be closed without the tools disappearing. Disney kept the engine and dropped the name.

~ the faq is still up ~

When Kerpoof closed, Disney posted a one-page FAQ explaining it. That PDF is still being served today from a Disney content delivery host, last modified in February 2018, and it answers four questions. The first is "WHEN DID KERPOOF CLOSE?" and the answer is April 15th, 2014. kerpoof.com now redirects to games.disney.com. The obituary has outlasted the site by more than a decade, because nobody at Disney ever had a reason to delete one small file.

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