The Story of Cerious

Cerious Software was founded by Phillip Crews in 1992 as a software consulting firm. Phillip continued to work at his full-time job but worked part time doing freelance UNIX, VMS and Windows System programming for companies in the US.

Mandelbrot was written in 1993, Phillip's first significant Windows application.

Mandelbrot produces gorgeous fractal images based on Benoit Mandelbrot's equations. You can select the colors to use, zoom anywhere within the set, generate perspective views, save and load images, export to BMP files and more. We have recently re-released Mandelbrot as Careware to aid the Option Institute and Fellowship in support of their Son-Rise Program(SM). This organization is dedicated to the caring and loving of autistic children. The Son-Rise Program trains parents of autistic children to help their children reclaim their lives. They work miracles for these families.

In 1994, Phillip decided to develop a retail product for Windows called ThumbsUp! He chose to offer ThumbsUp as a shareware product because he liked the idea of "try before you buy" and it was really the only way to cost-effectively market/advertise the product.

A trademark search found no other computer products named ThumbsUp, but a few months later another North Carolinian company called to let Phillip know that they had registered a trademark on the name, which they had actually used for a couple of years. Phillip held an on-line contest to select a new name. This contest generated a lot of publicity for Thumbs. Phillip examined 100's of entries from users on CompuServe, AOL and the Internet. There were some outrageous submissions! The end result of the contest was of course the new name ThumbsPlus, which was submitted by Ralph Mariano!

In July of 1994 Phillip quit his day job to pursue Cerious Software and ThumbsPlus full-time. In late August Phillip and his new assistant (and sister), Laura Shook, moved into a real office. Laura had formerly worked as a pediatric nurse, art teacher, and wrote an occasional free-lance article, but had no real knowledge of computers until that August when she began learning about computers, graphics, ThumbsPlus and customer relations in a Software company. It was during this time that NASA, and other large companies and corporations began to ask for helpful additions to ThumbsPlus. Cerious Software obliged and made some very good friends! ThumbsPlus's popularity continued to grow and in July of 1995, Phillip hired Jeff Hurley a former co-worker, computer hacker and friend, who organized the incorporation of Cerious Software, Inc. Cerious Software then moved to another larger suite in the same office building. We have since moved again and hired three other employees: Pam Perry who is our office manager, Hugh McArtan in tech support and Marcia Vejar who does all of the shipping of ThumbsPlus.

ThumbsPlus will change the way you look at graphics! Whether you're a web professional, graphic artist or casual Internet user, you'll find that ThumbsPlus helps you keep track of your images. Already in use by professionals worldwide, ThumbsPlus is fast becoming the preferred product for organizing, viewing and editing graphic files. Supporting over 60 (and counting) file formats internally, with many more formats that can be configured or accessed via OLE, ThumbsPlus is the product of choice in its class by people who need quick, intuitive access to their graphics. Demanding people, like those at Intel, Microsoft, HP, ATI, the Army, the Air Force and the Navy, sing high praises for ThumbsPlus. You can even find it at NASA, where ThumbsPlus accompanies the astronauts on every Space Shuttle flight!

In the past year, after developing a popular web site, Cerious Software, Inc. has received many shareware awards and favorable reviews. These include reviews from PC Magazine, STReport and Go Inside. MCR Online selected ThumbsPlus as the Graphic Utility of 1996. Awards have been received from Slaughterhouse, CyberMad, CompuServe's Win95, Winuser and WinShare forums, Clicked.com, Galt Technology, Dave Central, Tucows, and Stroud's CWS Apps. ThumbsPlus was the download of the week in CorelNET and the pick of the week from Microsoft and Wugnet. Cerious Software is honored that ThumbsPlus is included in the Naval Criminal Investigative Service's computer crime prevention initiative "Protecting Your Children in Cyberspace".

1. Cerious Software and ThumbsPlus are both sponsors of a local children's athletic association, Starclaire Athletic Association.

2. ThumbsPlus is localized in Japanese and German and there are distributors of the English version in Australia, Belgium, Germany, Japan, New Zealand, The Netherlands and the UK.

3. Our Macintosh version is now in its 11th beta and we hope to be releasing it soon. The 32-bit CD ROM Developer's Kit is also almost finished, much to the delight of many Vendors selling CD ROM's of images who have been waiting patiently for the 32-bit ThumbsCD to be released.

Throughout our growth and development, the ThumbsPlus user, whether shareware user or registered user has remained infinitely important to us. We pore over our suggestion lists and implement any and all suggestions that make sense and allow for continuing growth of ThumbsPlus. We are dedicated to ThumbsPlus, Cerious Software and the continuing development of our software and our company.