Wikipedia
FatKat animation was an animation studio located in Miramichi, New Brunswick. The company was formed from animators who left Helix Animation in 1999. It was owned and operated by Gene Fowler and his employees. This company was started in Halifax, Nova Scotia and was taken over by Trainingscape which saw the creation of over 40 training films for various companies.
In the winter of 2003, Trainingscape disbanded and that was when Fowler decided to move FatKat to his hometown of Miramichi. FatKat worked on television shows such as Happy Tree Friends, Caillou, Carl Squared, Family Guy, Odd Job Jack, Skunk Fu!, Supernormal, Chaotic, and Three Delivery. As they have had major clients such about I Can't Believe It's Not Butter!, Pepsi, Microsoft and Toyota.
FatKat's was, at one point, considered the largest animation studio in Atlantic Canada and the fastest growing animation studio in Canada. However, after government funding for the studio dried up under the Harper government, the 2007-2010 economic crisis occurred and the fact that the business plan didn't actually set a goal of making money, FatKat eventually dwindled until its closure was announced in May 2009.
At the time of closure, the company was down to employing only 3 people, even though it had received $1 million in government grants since 2005 under the government. Fowler has formed a much smaller successor studio Loogaroo 2, in Miramichi, despite the fact that he had declared insolvency with Fatkat animation.
FatKat, Inc. is a privately held company founded in 1999 by Raymond C. Kurzweil, an author, inventor, and futurist. He’s perhaps best known for creating an optical character recognition system that – in conjunction with a flatbed scanner and text-to-speech synthesizer – reads text aloud to the sight-impaired. FatKat is an acronym derived from “Financial Accelerating Transactions from Kurzweil Adaptive Technologies.” The aforesaid company is one of a total of nine Kurzweil companies.
The purpose of FatKat as listed with the Massachusetts Secretary of the Commonwealth Corporations Division is “investment software.” Kurzweil, who specializes in artificial intelligence coupled with pattern recognition, has created software that uses quantitative methods to pick stocks for investment purposes.
Although selecting stocks based on software-generated recommendations is not new, FatKat’s approach was unique at the time because of its “nonlinear decision making processes more akin to how a brain operates.” In layman's terms, the software can evolve by creating different rules, letting them compete, and using (or combining) the best outcomes. After FatKat’s inception, other investment and/or software companies rushed to develop software based on this and similar Darwinist evolutionary principles, using genetic algorithms.
In 2005, Kurzweil reported that the FatKat software was “doing very well – 50% to 100% returns for the last two years.” But as of December 2008, FatKat does not offer its software for sale.