Industry Software Founder Joel Spolsky CEO Anil Dash (Dec 2016–) | Website fogcreek.com Founded 2000 Type of business Private | |
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Key people Joel Spolsky
Michael Pryor
Anil Dash Products Gomix
FogBugz
Fog Creek Copilot
CityDesk
Kiln
Trello Headquarters New York City, New York, United States Profiles | ||
Fog Creek Software is a software company specializing in project management tools. Its main products are FogBugz, a web-based project management tool; Copilot, a remote assistance tool; CityDesk, a desktop-based content management system; and Kiln, a source control and code review tool built around Mercurial and Git.
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Based in New York City, Fog Creek was founded in 2000 as a consulting company by Joel Spolsky and Michael Pryor. As the consulting market started to dry up due to the collapse of the Dot-com bubble, Fog Creek moved to a product-based business, releasing FogBugz and CityDesk in 2001.
In 2005, the company released Fog Creek Copilot, along with a documentary detailing the development process of the interns who created it.
In December 2016 Anil Dash was appointed CEO.
Offices
One of the company's goals is to make the best programming work space possible. Its first large office, in Midtown Manhattan, was custom designed by architect Roy Leone. It featured angled walls to allow programmers a window next to their computer monitor to reduce eye strain. Fog Creek's new offices, located in the Financial District of Manhattan have been similarly designed, this time with adjustable height standing desks, a library, and fully stocked kitchen.
Stack Overflow
In 2008, Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky created Stack Overflow, a question-and-answer Web site for computer programming questions, which they described as an alternative to the programmer forum Experts-Exchange.
Stack Overflow serves as a platform for users to ask and answer questions, and, through membership and active participation, to vote questions and answers up or down and edit questions and answers in a fashion similar to a wiki or Digg. Users of Stack Overflow can earn reputation points and "badges" when another user votes up a question or answer they provided.
As of April 2014, Stack Overflow has over 2,700,000 registered users and more than 7,100,000 questions. Based on the type of tags assigned to questions, the top eight most discussed topics on the site are: Java, JavaScript, C#, PHP, Android, jQuery, Python and HTML.
Following the success of Stack Overflow they started additional sites in 2009 based on the Stack Overflow model: Server Fault for questions related to system administration and Super User for questions from computer "power users".
Stack Exchange
In September 2009, Fog Creek Software released a beta version of the Stack Exchange 1.0 platform as a way for third parties to create their own communities based on the software behind Stack Overflow, with monthly fees. This white label service was not successful, with few customers and slowly growing communities.
In May 2010, Stack Overflow was spun-off as its own new company, Stack Exchange Inc., and raised $6 million in venture capital from Union Square Ventures and other investors, and it switched its focus to developing new sites for answering questions on specific subjects,
Trello
In 2011, Fog Creek released Trello, a collaborative project management hosted web application that operated under a freemium business model. Trello was cross-subsidized by the company's other products. A basic service is provided free of charge, and a Business Class paid-for service was launched in 2013.
On July 2014, Fog Creek Software spun off Trello as its own company operating under the name of Trello, Inc. Trello Inc. raised $10.3 million in funding from Index Ventures and Spark Capital.
In January 2017, Atlassian announced it was acquiring Trello for $425 million.
Copilot
In August 8, 2005, Fog Creek launched Copilot, a remote assistance service.
Originally known as Project Aardvark, Copilot was developed by a group of summer interns. Fog Creek's founder, Joel Spolsky, wanted to give his interns the experience of taking a project through its entire lifecycle from inception, to mature released product. The interns set up a blog, called Project Aardvark, where they posted updates on the progress of their project to the world even though at that time the details of what they were working on was still a secret.
On July 1, 2005 the Project Aardvark team revealed that they were working on a remote assistance system for consumer use.
Copilot uses a heavily modified version of TightVNC, a variant of Virtual Network Computing (VNC), as its core protocol.
On November 7, 2005 they released a documentary on the interns' summer, titled Aardvark'd: 12 Weeks with Geeks, produced by Lerone D. Wilson of Boondoggle Films.