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As techie at heart, I had a Ham Radio License when I was 14, and built the entire set-up for my radio and transmitter from spare parts I purchased! I have it on display in my office, but I am scared to start it up and get it going! I continued with my techie thoughts by buying an Apple III in 1981. Its was constructed so badly that to make it work you had to hold it at shoulder height and drop it on concrete to set the chips into the board! I started surfing BBS's in 1981, and then hosting one, which started my fascination with the online world! I even used BBS's for communication forums for the political campaigns I was running in the 80's through 1990.
After starting school again for my MBA, I found the Internet. Several years ago, I became affiliated with ResNova Software who make a killer Internet based BBS based on HTML and HTTP. I became a partner in the company and eventually sold my business Infoport to work there full-time. I got to spend all of my time on the Internet and talking about the Internet,
I spent a year at Neodata, where my team built the largest commerce site on the Internet for 1996 (Over 1.1 million orders in the last seven months of 1996 and 400,000 customer service e-mails processed) Neodata was the largest processor of subscriptions for magazines in the US, managing over 90,000,000 subscriptions at one point. All of those orders came on the Internet, even though EDS which was buying Neodata, thought that the Internet would not be useful for transactions!
In 1997 I switched to
At CollabNet we began by shaking the software world up by Open Sourcing software for major companies like Sun and HP, as well as using code for creating developer communities like Oracle and Motorola. Over the short two years we built a company that could change the methods of creating software.
While at Collabnet, I had also been lending a hand as an advisor to Jabber.com a promising startup in Colorado that has created an XML data stream used in a lot of applications like instant messaging. An opportunity to be the CTO of Jabber, had me head back to Colorado. But after 90 days I realized, being on the advisory board and working with the Jabber team full time, were two different structures. I resigned after 90 days, and decided to get a job with a large company.
My friend Yen-Ping Shan invited me to interview at ADP to work for him and I accepted. I first took over several products and ideas that had been incubated, but not made into enterprise level products. We rapidly launched two of these into large numbers of users, iPay (where you can view your paystatement over the Internet) to over 6.5 million users, and iPQV (viewing mainframe reports as .pdf's over the Internet) to over 49,000 companies. I even launch a W-2 product that allowed over 40 million W-2's to be imported into TurboTax from Quicken. Then my team launched HomePage, the first Web based Portal for ADP. And after 15 months of this whirlwind, I took over several older and more mature ADP products with close to 2 $billion in sales and millions of lines of code. That was what I spent my days doing is analyzing how to maintain and modernize large code bases of products meant to input Payroll and HR so that ADP can process these for your company. In the past five years, PayeXpert has grown to over 70,000 companies and is the largest Software as a Service application on the Internet today with hundreds of millions of dollars annual revenue. Over 100,000 companies and 35,000,000 + employees use products my teams produced. As part of the Software as a Service (SaaS) emphasis I had at ADP, I spearheaded driving our ADP payroll into the SAP ERP systems using a Web Services approach. So large companies can indeed jointly couple their programs and both win as a result.
Recently I decided to get back into the venture world with by becoming the CIO at Partsearch Technologies in New York City. Once I got used to the 2 hour each way commute, I began to have fun in modernizing the infrastructure and applications at Partsearch. Look for the ability to find spare arts embedded as a search application in retail and service sites everywhere. Already used by more than 20 major retailers (like Bestbuy branded site - hosted by Partsearch) and many service companies, Partsearch will be using Web Services on our new SOA platform to extend their business to areas that it never could before. Partsearch is an interesting problem to solve as we have over 10,000,000 SKU’s for sale, about as many as Amazon.com has in their database. We get a variety of data in many messy ways and really need to clean it up and present it to the consumer. Look at our online site Partstore to see how we do it. Many of these are parts that have no SKU#, no UPC and in fact no identifying data. We are in the business of making it look better, finding the right part and handling the shipping , etc. We even take the product you replace with the part and give you a credit when we receive it. Think of all of those “rebuilt” auto parts and that is what we do. Partsearch has great potential as there is no real clean aggregator, except us. So the next few years will tell if we have been successful.
Being a good Colorado Kid, I am into skiing, hiking , photography and of course my online interests. Here is a shot of the view from my old Colorado home office
You might wonder why I ever went into a real office at all! Of course in Half Moon Bay, I tried to run as often as possible on a two mile run along the cliffs above the Pacific Ocean. That run was pretty cool too, and the Ocean was a short few blocks away from my house. I have been blessed to live in such beautiful places.I hold a degree in Economics from the University of Colorado in Boulder and dropped from my MBA program at the University of Colorado in Denver with only a few courses to go so I could work at an Internet startup, ResNova Software.
Websites that I control, although they are mostly dormant today:
◦ Infoport -
My first and largest website, BBS, and ISP site. Finally it was a destination on the Internet to find link to tools to build the Internet. http://www.infoport.com◦ DirectInternet - Never really got off of the ground as a direct marketer of Internet Services - http://www.directinternet.com
◦ JamesBarry - Well you are on my Family homepage - http://www.JamesBarry.com
◦ MelanieBarry - Well that points to here but its cool that we all have our own sites - http://www.melaniebarry.com
◦ KristaBarry - That points here too! - http://www.kristabarry.com
Other ones that don't point anywhere include webserversupport.com, webservertechologies.com, virtualbuysell.com, virtualtradingexchange.com and virtualtradingexchange.net and did own indianpeaks.com but lost it in my move to California when I got backed up with e-mail and regular mail.