Fresh Software was founded July 29, 1998 by Andrew Niese of central Wisconsin. Then 15, his ambitions were to take his programming talent and creativity and eventually turn them into profit as a respectable business.
Its first products were freeware utilities to combat the trojan horse threat that was just beginning to emerge at that time. Fresh Software received almost overnight worldwide recognition for its AntiGen program in August of that year. AntiGen was the first automatic “BackOrifice” trojan cleaning program ever.
In late March 1999, Fresh Software released its first commercial product, Sentry Professional, which was met with enthusiasm for being a unique product to secure a computer workstation when not in use. Fresh Software’s next product was based on an earlier freeware program called X-NetStat, created before Fresh Software’s conception. Version 3.0 of X-NetStat was rewritten and sold for the price of $5 dollars, where it was received to a broad audience.
When Drew entered UW Eau Claire, Fresh Software became very much part time as he adjusted to a new college life, and no new programs were released for a couple years until X-NetStat Professional 5.0 was released in May 2004. The early success of that new version allowed him to live off of Fresh Software for the summer and gave him time to build up the business into a more stable, agile form.
After graduating UWEC in 2007, Drew took a software engineering position at Parco Windows in Eau Claire and continued to work on Fresh Software.
Northvine, a group texting app, was started as a side-project in November 2013. In August 2014 Andrew Grinder joined the project. Although functioning and mostly completed, active development was project was put on hold in 2016 to focus on Fixity.
Fixity was conceptualized in June 2016, when a prototype native Android app was built. In Fall 2016 development shifted to a web-app focus. Fixity.io was launched in 2017 while development continued on the WiseJ platform.
In April 2018, Fixity entered its beta phase.
In July 2018, Fixity won the regional HATCH competition in Eau Claire for best new idea.
In September 2018, the Fixity corporate page on Freshsoftware.com was launched.
In November 2018, Fixity won the Eau Claire Economic Development Corporation’s “Idea Challenge”, beating out 50 other competitors.
In April 2019, the Fixity Hybrid app based on the Xamarin platform was completed. Over the next months, it was rolled out to the Microsoft Store, Apple Store, and Google Play.
To be continued…
