Just a little Cooqy

Founding and creating Cooqy required a great support team:

Olga is originally from Russia and moved to Atlanta in 1992. She graduated at the top of her Computer Science class from Georgia Tech and is now employed at AutoTrader.com as a Java Software Developer. We met via MatchMaker.com (during the 30-day free trial!) in Oct ‘97 and were married in June 2000.

Kathryn was born Oct 14, 2006, one day after her due date of Friday the 13th! She is wonderful. It is fun to watch her grow…a lot more interesting (and challenging) than our dog and cat.

I continue to be amazed by the accelerating pace of technology and innovation.  I’ve done a lot since my parents gave me my first computer.

I was raised in Southern Indiana, where I attended the University of Evansville majoring in Computer Engineering, along with a dose of music classes. I received my Master of Science in Business Administration from Central Michigan University’s extension program while working in Fort Worth and Atlanta. I was generally a straight-A student, which is challenging in a Liberal Arts school where so many classes were non-technical. I’m all the better for it, IMO.

I started playing the piano when I was five and have been at it ever since. One of these days I’ll figure out how to play the damn thing. Actually, I’m pretty good and am fortunate to have bought a Steinway “M” in 1999 during the dot-com boom. I very much hope to upgrade to a larger Steinway someday.

My complete resume is available here.

My career started off with the rigorous engineering approach of developing software for the F-16 Fighting Falcon. I met a person there who was a former entrepreneur, who instilled in me a great sense of urgency to actually do something with my life. After moving to Atlanta, I started my first company named Synaptec along with a buddy of mine at my day job. I single-handedly built a developer tool for IBM’s System Object Model (SOM) running on OS/2, while my buddy did the business development. We almost reached a deal with a VP at IBM to license the tool, but a lower-level manager at IBM went berserk and nuked the deal at the last minute.

From there I ended up at a startup called ActaMed in 1996. ActaMed was eventually acquired by Jim Clark’s Healtheon, who then merged with WebMD. WebMD’s IPO in 1999 had the benefit that all my ActaMed stock options were 100% vested, making it quite a party.

After ActaMed I spent a couple of years getting into the wireless field, thinking that the wireless Internet was going to be the next big thing. Unfortunately, my ideas were many years ahead of their time and the dot-com crash destroyed any chance of funding. [I have ideas to adapt Cooqy to mobile devices.]

After my passing fancy with everything wireless, I then spent a portion of 2003 wanting to learn C#/.NET. You can’t learn new software tools without actually building something, so I created my first eBay tool called AuctionVision. AuctionVision was a Winform fat client that screen-scraped eBay’s website. At the time, eBay was charging excessive fees for their API (at least for creating affordable consumer tools), making screen scraping a necessary evil. AuctionVision contained many of the same functionality of Cooqy, but also had the ability to mine eBay for historical price data of items that sold. From this data, AuctionVision could calculate a Fair Market Price for items. Then, the tool would allow a user to set a percentage threshold and mine eBay for bargains. Even though I had created a meta-data driven parsing algorithm that could be adapted easily with eBay’s site changes, I was surprised that eBay was proactively trying to block scrapers like AuctionVision. eBay’s rate of changing their website was impressive, as were their technical changes to make screen scraping harder and harder. Today, I doubt it is possible for a screen scraper to be viable against eBay. But hey, now that their API is free, who cares?

Towards the end of 2003 I joined ActaView, who was founded by my buddy from the Synaptec/ActaMed days. At ActaView, I was their VP of Software Development and Operations, which included setting up and operating their datacenter. This experience was sort of the missing link in my technical background that I needed in order to build something like Cooqy.

While working at an exceedingly boring contract-to-perm job after leaving ActaView, I had so much time on my hands that I set out to learn about what was new on the web, technology-wise. I had been so swamped doing multiple tasks at ActaView that I sometimes worked 100 hours a week and didn’t have time to do much else. What I saw on the web amazed me…something called “Web 2.0″. After running across LaszloMail, I knew I was missing a train that was already pulling out of the station. I was breathless to catch up. Around the same time I learned that eBay’s API was recently made free and that they were having a Developer’s Challenge contest. So, in December 2005 (wow, has it been a year already?) I began poking around different Web 2.0 technologies. I quickly determined that AJAX or Ruby were not suitable for creating the type of Rich Internet App that I had in mind. OpenLaszlo seemed the most promising (and it was free), so I picked that as my technology horse. And so Cooqy began…