March 1994 to June 1995
The Delta Group, Beaverton, Oregon, USA
Director of Operations and Engineering
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Key Accomplishments
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- Designed, developed, and delivered an online real-estate marketing system using modem technology, Windows NT 3.51, and $50,000. The system was servicing 6 real-estate listing service areas before I moved on.
- Organized, orchestrated, and delivered a two day conference on business on the Internet for local business leaders and visionaries.
- Performed extensive research into home automation technologies.
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Summary of Skills Used
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PROJECT EXPERIENCE
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TECH EXPERIENCE
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Executive Staff Member
Strategic Contributor
Staff Management
Recruiting
Interviewing
Negotiation
Hiring
Firing
Field Sales
Customer Presentation
Marketing Programs
Print Advertising
Telephone Sales/Cold Calling
Contract Negotiation
Contractor Management
Internal Training
External Training (40+)
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Visual BASIC Programming
Microsoft Windows NT v3.51 Server Administration
Telix SALT (C++) Data Acquisition Programming
Microsoft FoxPro
Microsoft Access
Database Schema Design
UUCP Mail Relay Services
Internet Domain Management
Excalibur Graphical BBS
TCP/IP Services
Quality Assurance
Troubleshooting Technique
Technical Writing
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HIGHLIGHTS
About The Delta Group
The Delta Group was a formation of people who had been laid off and/or left Buffalo Products. Quite a few deals had been brewing with Fortune 500 companies for the Buffalo PowerKit CPU upgrade. The group had taken the deals with them. Melco had shut down all non-Melco products and merged Buffalo Products with another of its American subsidiaries. I was invited to join the group.
During this period I had picked up some work as a consultant on my own. I folded my activities in with Delta Group to help keep that company afloat until a big sale could come through to fund further activities.
None of the big sales ever happened, but we did have enough time to invent some new projects, which are described below.
RealtyNet™
I met with customers, gathered requirements, designed, developed, and deployed an on-line modem-based real estate marketing system known as RealtyNet. It was the launching pad into a larger web-based marketing system. Early key customers included Northwest ERA Realty (Vancouver, WA) and Barbara Sue Seal Realty (Portland, OR).
On signing our first Letter of Intent I personally spent a grueling month-long development time to get the product ready so that Northwest Realty could beat the rest of the local brokers to market. I nearly died from exhaustion and recorded over three 27 hour days of work -- not in a row thank goodness.
During the process I gathered customer feedback, designed a complete data acquisition system, data delivery system, and client software package on a $50k budget. I built and managed two servers running a combination of 16bit and 32bit applications on Windows NT 3.5 Server software...(ahh the days of operating system bravado). I had three workstations running dedicated data retrieval and repurposing functions. Our first client went online in November of 1995.
The data acquisition system was built using Telix communications software with its SALT automation script language -- based on C++. The data was downloaded on a rotational schedule from the Multiple Listing Services and repurposed into a cross-functional database schema that became the backbone of both the modem-based and web-based marketing systems.
My RealtyNet database brought all the properties of homes and land into a data store. My system added the capability of keeping statistics on the records that were being found by home buyers and added up to 8 photos of the property.
 Data repurposing was performed by a custom translation engine I developed using FoxPro for Windows. Each real estate agency and MLS service area had a different schema. I had to design my acquisition system to allow customizable translation keys without requiring code changes. Before I left Delta Group I had brought six MLS zones online and was closing on a seventh.
The client software package was built around a third-party proprietary graphical interface in which I developed a "wrapping" to allow the individual real estate agents to customize and distribute diskettes as if they were business cards. For this customization environment I used Visual BASIC 3.0. I also built agent tools to allow them to create and duplicate their own software diskettes.
The client software allowed a customer to dial into the servers, log on, view a library of resource information about each geographic area, set search parameters against the database and keep an account on our servers allowing them to check back into the system regularly with saved queries. Each client disk afforded the home shopper a free unlimited email account on our system.
The free email account was the "pull" that we provided to the real estate agent and agencies that we signed up for service. I realized early on that email was the online killer application of the future. When I left we had over 2000 home shoppers using the system. The "push" was that we had the largest independent real estate database in the United States and it was updated weekly so that it was always dynamic and fresh. The shoppers were able to store their preferences into the database along with their email account and were able to peruse not only the information about a home, but up to eight color photographs of the home all online.
Because a home shopper could shop in leisure the real estate agent would only be contacted by a qualified buyer (someone who had found something they really were interested in seeing). In real estate slang we solved the "curb appeal" problem and saved home shoppers hours of travel and time.
Our system was reviewed by local news shows and newspapers. Channel 8 (KGW) news followed a customer at an agency through the entire home-buying cycle. The customer used our system to narrow down her choices then purchased one of the homes that she found on our system.
As an additional service to our clients I produced monthly reports which detailed customer activity on the system which agents could use as flags for customer follow-up calls.
The data delivery mechanism was a custom built DLL (Dynamic Linked Library) which integrated the proprietary graphical client/server (Excalibur BBS) system into my FoxPro back-end database. I developed a FoxPro daemon (Yes FoxPro!) application which constantly scanned for query requests transmitnstantly scanned for query requests transmitted by the home shoppers as they browsed our service online. My goal for performance was a two second response rate (from the time they hit the button) and I succeeded in reaching that goal with the tools that I had. The integration DLL was developed for me by a contract programmer which I managed.
At the time of my departure I had three programmers on contract developing more advanced services and features into the system. Just before I left we began arranging for integration of the entire system into a web-based environment. However, I’m told that the RealtyNet system was still operating for over a year after I left and that the existing customers wouldn't let the company shut it down in favor of a web-based version. This went on until Internet access became much more common-place.
During this period I became intensely prolific at programming in FoxPro for Windows, Visual BASIC, C++, installation, configuration, and administration of NT server environments and TCP/IP services, UUTP/SMTP mail systems, digital image processing, and UI design.
The Delta Group Presents The Internet
I set up a training seminar and workgroup sessions, the first Internet seminar in Portland, Oregon and one of the first in the US Northwest. I recruited the speaker, negotiated the engagement, and planned the event via email through CompuServe (then the #1 online service provider). My speaker was Mark Gibbs one of the first authors to write a book regarding the Internet and how it will change business and the world.
The seminar included an all day presentation to about 150 local business and community leaders and ended with two follow-up work sessions which went into more tactical detail. I taught one of the work sessions myself and we hired a local cybrarian for the other.
Moving Forward
Deltagroup later moved to Ohio but continued to keep its core competency in real-estate online marketing tools.
I nearly killed myself with hard work at Deltagroup. We were a small company and each of us had to put in 200%. We lived on a shoestring and kept ourselves high on the fact that this time we owned our own fate.
During this period I got to see very first hand just how far a human being can be pushed and what the hard work can do to a group of friendly partners.
Financially, it was devastating. I was being actively recruited by an old friend from Intel to take his job as Webmaster for an internal marketing group there. The day I couldn't afford to buy my daughter new shoes was the day I decided to take him up on his offer.
 previous experience
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