About Us
About Us
Welcome to the world of Freakatars, a place designed to inspire your imagination and expand your creativity. Whether you’re three or thirty, creating and collecting Freakatars is freakishly fun!
The Freakatars builder allows you to choose from thousands of original, eclectic body parts to create your own Freakatars. All Freakatars are given a birthday on their date of creation, branded with a name of your choice and registered with your username as its permanent creator.
Every member gets his or her own Freakatars page at www.Freakatars.com/Username where you can show off your Freakatars to your friends and the world. When friends join Freakatars from your Freakatars page, you get bonus Freakies, our currency, which you can use to feed your Freakatars and purchase virtual goods and services. We are currently in beta and creating Freakatars is free. In the future, we plan to offer Freakatars merchandise and other premium services and offerings which will require payment.
Freakatars has been carefully constructed to be a safe place for children. Members under the age of 13 are only asked for their birthday according to COPPA guidelines. Members select a username, password and provide their parents email address so we may let their parents or legal guardian know they have created an account and related account info.
We are glad you are here and hope you will invite your friends to visit your Freakatars pages and share in the fun.
Sincerely,
Adam Jacobs
Founder & CEO
Freaksquad
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- Name
- Adam Jacobs
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- Founder and Chief Executive Officer
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- adam@freakatars.com
- Profile
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Adam has a knack for being in just the right place at the right time – or just a little early. He was born in New York City on New Year’s Eve, a little premature, but at least not in the taxi. Growing up, Adam relied on this great timing and a slightly freaky sense of humor to open doors to new experiences. Prior to having the epiphany which led to Freakatars, Adam utilized his extensive experience in senior-level business development, sponsorship sales and promotions, marketing and product development in new and traditional media markets in his role as Vice President of Business Development at KidZui – The Internet for Kids.
Adam co-founded Akonix Systems with Dmitry Shapiro and during his career, has managed on-air promotions for Time Warner Cable in New York City and headed up Business Development at CollegeClub.com. He founded Mass Hysteria Web Promotions, the Internet’s first online promotions agency, as well as InSync Media where he created original social networks for The Microsoft Network in 1995. Adam also conceived and launched a children’s product line that is in distribution in over 9000 retail locations. He has also acted as a business development and new media consultant to numerous companies including TakeLessons.com, Five Sprockets, Crossflo Systems, Astronaut Sally Ride and Education Systems.
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- Name
- Kyle Tyacke
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- Founder and Chief Technology Officer
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- kyle@freakatars.com
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Assembled in the blustery tundra of Northern Minnesota, Mr. Tyacke is known in some limited circles as the Da Vinci of code. Most recently Kyle served as Senior Flash Developer for Veoh Networks. Prior to Veoh, he spearheaded Interactive Media Development at VMIX Media Inc., a leading SaaS platform for online media management and delivery.
Kyle has extensive experience in recruiting and managing successful development teams, and architecting large scale web-based service offerings.
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- Name
- Matt Spangler
- Title
- Creative Director
- Company
- matt@freakatars.com
- Profile
- Growing up, Matt never really thought of anything else besides doodling. Even when he wasn't thinking about drawing he would find his hand drawing in the margins of his homework. Although this annoyed teachers, his mom took notice and sent him for private art lessons to hone the craft of Illustration and Painting. After high school he attended California State University Fullerton under the Entertainment Arts program for Animation. He learned to animate the traditional (re: paper and pencil) way, and fell in love with the process. It just so happened that when he graduated, the whole animation industry would be turned on its head and converted to 100% 3D CG animation. Not looking to be an unemployed starving artist, he started working at Rent.com as a Production Designer and assisting the Graphic Designer with various web design projects and stayed there for 3 years. He had the fortunate experience of being a part of a company that not only recovered after the .com crash, but thrived and was purchased by Ebay. After the buyout, looking to use his skills as an Illustrator, he took a full time position at Evite as an Illustrator/Graphic Designer. There, he created some of the most popular Evites, managed 13 other Illustrators and animators and helped create a whole new segment to Evite, eCards. After Evite he went onto the world of Freelance Illustration and Web Design, and in the meantime started his own apparel company, got married, and met a guy named Kyle, who liked his skills enough to bring him on board this "Freaky" journey.
ADVISORS
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- Dmitry Shapiro
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- Advisor
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Dmitry founded Veoh Networks in late 2004 and serves as the company's Chief Innovation Officer. Before he imagined Veoh, Dmitry built Akonix Systems, one of the leading P2P network security companies with over 1.5 million deployed enterprise licenses in companies such as Viacom, Disney, Newscorp, and Cingular. Before that, Dmitry led the technology groups at CollegeClub, a 4 million member online college community and Fujitsu Telecommunications.
During his youth in Atlanta, Dmitry learned English by watching lots of television, lost most of his Russian accent and gained a B.S. in electrical engineering degree from Georgia Tech.
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- Al Nilsen
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- Advisor
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- Profile
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Al Nilsen is an award-winning, consumer marketing professional with a reputation for building and revitalizing brands, launching new businesses and products, developing breakthrough products and promotions and introducing America to hedgehogs.
With an emphasis on youth-oriented products, his resume includes stints at Hasbro, Mattel, Viacom and Sega. At Sega he dethroned Nintendo as the best-selling video game company and launched Sonic The Hedgehog that led to his being named as one of the Top 100 Marketers by Advertising Age. For the last fifteen years Al has headed A New Spin, a marketing consultancy that provides innovative solutions to help established companies and start-ups enhance their brand growth and profitability.
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- John Creelman
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- Advisor
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- Profile
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John is currently the CFO at PowerGenix. John has extensive experience financing emerging growth companies having raised over $260 million in combined debt, private placements, venture capital and two public equity (IPO) offerings. John has held CFO roles at the Active Network, VSK Photonics, Copper Mountain Networks and ESI Software. At Copper Mountain (NASDAQ:CMTN) John managed the Company’s annual revenue growth from $211,000 in 1997 to over $280 million in 2000 and led their IPO in May 1999. Earlier in his career Creelman held senior financial management positions with storage providers Western Digital Corporation (NYSE:WDC) and MTI Technology (NASDAQ:MTIC).
John has a B.A. and MBA from University of California at Irvine. In his spare time, he enjoys building Freakatars with his son Jack and daughter Grace.
