The Jabloo Birthday Party Pack on Zazzle

The Jabloo Crew are now part of a complete birthday party pack on Zazzle. The collection of products includes individual birthday cards from each character, a group birthday card, as well as invitations, gift tags, customizable guest cards, large signs, thank you cards and more.

Check out the Jabloo Birthday Party Pack on Zazzle!

Jabloo on MySpace

I've set up Jabloo on MySpace - myspace.com/jabloo was taken, so I went with "/jablooproductions" - hey, it works. Even weird words get snatched up pretty quickly, I suppose - and that's why I wanted to set something up now, before the full Jabloo site launches. Like the Cafe Press store (and this blog itself), it won't get much activity at this point, but it'll be up and ready to go when Jabloo is fully operational.

And hey - it's neat to see how many different artists there are on MySpace doing music for kids. That's sure to come in handy down the road.

*edit: I've actually set up a second profile, just for Jabloo's music - just so I could add the theme song to the main Jabloo MySpace. So now, two MySpace Jabloo's... for you.

Online Store - Open For Business

In the spirit of putting the cart before the horse, I've set up The Jabloo Online Store on CafePress. It's nice to see the collected items – especially the individual characters' products. I bought a couple items myself, which felt kind of weird, admittedly. It was very easy to set up the shop, and even easier to add - and keep adding - products.

I set up a Flash header with the animated character heads - users can click each character to see their individual merchandise, and the Jabloo logo goes to the general merchandise featuring all five characters. Fun.

Alpha Site - Up and Running

After more than a year of development, I've finally placed a very simple Alpha version of Jabloo online. It's just the basics - a character overview - but it is phase one. Next will come a functional Beta version of the site, revealing the full concept. Soon... soon.

So, if anyone is reading this blog at this very early stage, check out Jabloo - Phase 1.

Inspiration - Part 1

When I began this project, I made a short list of the people and things that gave me the inspiration to tackle my own creative projects - specifically, this project - Jabloo! Some have been around since my childhood, and others I've only discovered in the past few years. Here's what keeps me shooting for the stars:

Jim Henson and The Muppets
The godfather of all things creative - warmth, imagination and... fun, of course! The older I get, the more I realize what an influence he's been on myself and a score of others.

Nolan Bushnell
Founder of Atari, creator of Chuck E. Cheese, and so much more. I used to write him letters when I was eleven, and he wrote back a few times... or so I thought, until I realized it was his secretary taking pity on me.

Seth Godin
Marketer supreme, and defender of innovation. I love the guy, and got to see him speak in Philadelphia on his speaking tour for his book The Dip. I read his blog daily, and his book Free Prize Inside was the push I needed to take on the project that eventually became Jabloo.

Choose Your Own Adventure books
Analog interactivity from the early eighties.

Captain Zoom
Customized flexi-disc records integrating children's names into a spacey song. "Happy Birthday, Steve" was played very often in my youth - certainly not only on July 12th, my special day. Stewart Sloke was the original voice of the good captain.

Homestar Runner
The untouchable online cartoons series that cannot be stopped, and has integrity and credibility beyond compare.

Arj and Poopy
Amazingly animated cartoon series, featuring comedian Arj Barker and animated by Bernard Derriman. Pushes the boundaries of Flash by recreating, and updating, that classic Warner Brothers animation style.

Bitey Castle/Brackenwood
The animated world created by Adam Phillips. Ditto on the above - this is groundbreaking Flash work.

Smeshariki
I know very little about this Russian cartoon series, but I absolutely love the warm, friendly style. I'd love to see a translated version someday - for now, I watch the short episodes and try to absorb as much of the Russian language as I can.

Happy Tree Friends
The ultra-violent tone of this series couldn't be further from the concept of Jabloo - but I love love love the Flash animation style - it's a great little kick of pure, unrestrained entertainment.

FableVision
A media company from Boston, MA, that uses storytelling as an innovative and compelling way to educate children. FableVision's CEO and Founder Peter Reynolds is a force to be reckoned with.

I plan to go into some of these in more depth in the future, elaborating on the ways they've kept my creative juices flowing as I've worked to develop Jabloo, and pushed me to keep the quality bar as high as possible. I find it's helpful to keep lists like this available, so none of that valuable inspiration mojo has a chance to slip away.

Name Origins

When this project began, I knew it had to have a unique name – and like most modern web companies (I’m trying to avoid the overused “Web 2.0” term – because that’s not really what Jabloo is about) – I needed a name that not only reflected the feeling of the concept, but had no associations with any other company or concept. I didn’t want a compound name, a name that seemed composed of parts of other words, or something generic that required a tagline or positioning statement to give it context – so I let my brain vomit up as many nonsense words as it could generate.

The first name I came up with for this project was “Spume” – which didn’t really fit the above criterion of being completely made-up, but the domain was available, and it felt right – for the first couple weeks, anyway. Then I put together a list of companies and websites with similar qualities: Gund, Galoob, Kandoo (though there’s some meaning mixed into that one), Squidoo (I particularly liked that double-O at the end), Mego – those kinds of names that have little-to-no meaning when you first hear them, then slowly become the brand/product/service over time.

That inspired a list of purely imagined words that could serve as the name of the company. I’m almost embarassed to list these, but entertainment purposes, I’ve transcribed the name possibilities from my original scrawled list. In the order they were generated, we have: Plimp, Jabloo (!), Floon, Noofee, Bloon, Yooney, Takoi, Ipple, Waggle, Garf, Glutes, Gluke, Ort, Loo, Ellum, Blue, Furl, Fleck, Yeeko, Fliff, Hin, Wafty, Yoobee, Voobee, Wimble, Gribbee, Unibo, Durl, Urd, Dingle, Prog, Odge, Moogie, Woogle… and Bibi.

I’m not a parent, but I’m told that no matter how many potential names you go through for your child, once they’re born and you give them their name, you can never imagine any other one having worked. That’s how I feel about Jabloo – it really couldn’t have gone any other way.

Welcome to Jabloo!

...or, at least, welcome to the blog for Jabloo, an online children's entertainment project that has yet to be launched! I'm Steve, creator of Jabloo, and I'll be posting information about the project as it becomes available. For now, those are the five main characters (or at least, their heads) at the top of the screen - Moco, Yubi, Burr, Galoo and Sham. There's really a sixth main character, but I can't give that one up until Jabloo is fully operational.

I plan to make this blog a transcription of Jabloo's progress, which began in secret in September of 2006 and has still only been seen by a few people at this point. All of that will change when the project launches, and the Jabloo crew can hit the streets - or at least, your computer screen. I'm guessing few, if any, people will be reading this until well after the project has launched - but if nothing else, it will serve as an archive of the stages of Jabloo's life.

So, thanks for checking in - there's more to come, I promise!