Catharon Software Corporation

The Company:
About Us

Catharon Software Corporation¹, headquartered in Sedona, Arizona, was incorporated by Betsy and Michael Feinberg in 1982. The Feinbergs have been in business together, producing films, videotapes, interactive multimedia programs, and software and hardware customized solutions since 1972.

Our staff has an international background, with expertise in consumer and point-of-purchase environments, including e-commerce. We have created the first fully functional programming language for authoring, distributing and reading interactive content over the Internet. Developed from TenCORE, a mature and well-established programming language, VDelta ^TM, delivers rapidly over the Internet, providing a programming paradigm that supports rapid and economical development of content, facilitating new capabilities in Internet software and systems management.

The technology enhances the functionality of Internet-based content and meets the demands of developers looking for a superior solution for the provision of an interactive and stable online experience for their clients and customers. Catharon has copyrighted the VDelta technology and been granted a patent covering 11 major features of the protocol.

¹ Catharon Software Corporation is a Delaware corporation which is Successor in Interest to Catharon Productions, Inc., a New York corporation formed in 1982. Catharon Software Corporation was incorporated in Delaware in March of 2002, and merged with Catharon Productions, Inc. to facilitate the move out of New York.

The Management Team

Betsy Feinberg (Chief Executive Officer) and Michael Feinberg (President) have worked together in marketing, media, and interactive multimedia for over twenty-five years. Previously, Betsy Feinberg was an Assembler language programmer and lead trouble-shooter/debugger in the systems software group at Consolidated Edison in New York, serving as in-house consultant for the nuclear engineering department and providing software systems support for programmers working in all major computer languages. Betsy is a magna cum laude Phi Kappa Phi graduate of the University of Michigan, where she also won the Phi Sigma award (the top award in biology/pre-med.). She holds an M.A. from New York University as well.

Michael Feinberg (President & Interim CFO) After completing systems engineering studies at Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute, Michael was employed by Columbia University to assist in the design of their then state-of-the-art language lab and to implement its installation. He subsequently relocated to the west coast, where he worked as a sound engineer, film editor, and cinematographer at Cinema Lab before returning to the east coast to start his own video production company in 1972. His expertise in business and production systems analysis enabled him to produce highly successful, complex training programs for high tech companies like Electrocom Automation, manufacturer of complex mail sorting equipment for the U.S. postal service. He also attended San Francisco State University.

The Feinbergs have produced ground-breaking interactive multimedia relationship marketing programs. Each possesses significant experience in consumer and point-of-purchase environments, including e-commerce. In a project for Aetna Insurance, for example, the Feinbergs developed and produced a program which increased closing rates from under 50% to over 90%.

The Feinbergs produced a series of interactive computer games on AIDS prevention for the New York State Department of Health which was used by tens of thousands of students. The project included studies to determine how modifications in the program interface affected student behavior, providing valuable insight on the behavior of the under 21 age group. The Feinbergs also have 25 years experience producing training and promotional programs for multinational corporations, including material for Mandarin, Japanese, Korean, French, Spanish, Greek, Italian, and German audiences. These programs also included exploration of cultural differences, such as body language and use of color, critical to international marketing.

Development Contributors

We'd like to thank the following individuals for their major contributions to VDelta during the core development phase of the project:

Ron Klass was co-founder and Vice President of Computer Teaching Corporation, the developers of the original TenCORE system, where he played a key role in system design, development, and integration of new technology. Ron has over 25 years of software development experience with TenCORE and its predecessors, starting as an undergrad with the PLATO research project at the University of Illinois, where he focused on educational applications of advanced display and digital technology. He developed firmware for the first microprocessor-based PLATO terminal, a flight simulator using microprocessor technology, and controlling firmware for numerous specialized applications. Ron worked for Control Data Corporation as a PLATO consultant on location with a number of international clients. He holds a B.S. in Computer Engineering from the University of Illinois.

Colin Sarsfield served as a high-level computer consultant for six years before joining Catharon. His clients included Dunham-Bush, a leading manufacturer of industrial heating and air conditioning equipment. For Dunham-Bush he designed and implemented a field sales tool which included sophisticated floating-point engineering @Calculations, pricing, proprietary database and drawing formats, low-level encryption (to protect proprietary data), custom CAD drawings, and custom Windows controls. Almost all @Calculations involved thermodynamics and complex iterative solutions. Despite its complexity, this sales tool has an installation program that is less than 2 MB in size. The program was deployed to over 200 sites and hundreds of users from whom it received praise for its ease-of-use and flexibility.

Previously, Colin worked as part of a team at a Detroit area computer consultancy to implement a Borland Delphi replacement for an existing mainframe high school student administration system. Tasks included interface design & implementation, training staff developers (Delphi), custom windows control development, and writing queries & stored procedures for Microsoft SQL Server.

Sarsfield has also been a key contributor to the BeSqueak Project, a derivative of Smalltalk-80, a project in which he worked with members of the original Xerox PARC Place team, the original developers of Smalltalk-80. The BeSqueak project ported the Squeak virtual machine to the BeOS (the Be Operating System developed by former Apple management.).

Paul Pantalone, who holds a B.Sc. degree in Electrical Engineering from Ohio State University and an M.Sc. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Michigan, is a Senior Applications Software Engineer with twelve years experience developing systems for image processing, multi-media, remote sensing, audio processing, and scientific measurement, as well as speech recognition and neural networks, multi-media, and MIDI. He was formerly an Electrical/Computer Engineer for the U.S. Air Force Armament Laboratory at Eglin Air Force Base and a Research Engineer with the Environmental Research Institute of Michigan in Ann Arbor, specializing in image/signal processing and advanced computer architectures.

Russell Young, who holds a cum laude B.A. degree in Mathematics from Princeton and a Master of Arts in Mathematics and Computer Science from the University of Minnesota, has 16 years programming experience, with very strong C and OOP skills (mainly Lisp and Java, with some C++) on cross-platform UNIX (HP-UX, AIX, Solaris, ULTRIX). He has debugged and enhanced a C compiler, and written socket-based programs, written a 3D graphics server for a CAD system (using the HOOPS library). Russell has lived in China for many years, where he was formerly employed by IBM for whom he led the team of engineers who provided technical support for the introduction of the RS/6000 in China.