John O'Brien III
<?php $professionalHeadline = array("Engineer", "Doer", "Geek", "Hustler"); ?>
- Location
- Greater Atlanta Area
- Industry
- Internet
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John O'Brien III's Overview
- Current
-
- Founder at [Something new and shiny for 2012]
- Director of Technology Professional Services at Hickory Ground Solutions, LLC
- Doer at ob3solutions (My company when you just want me)
- Past
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- Founder at TwapperKeeper.com (Twitter archiving app acquired by Hootsuite Sept 2011)
- Special Assistant to the Agency Director at US DoD / Business Transformation Agency
- Co-founder at Twangu (Group Buying / Deal Marketplace)
- Program Executive Officer, Enterprise DOD Supply Chain Systems at US DoD / Business Transformation Agency
- Chief Information Officer / Chief Technology Officer at US DoD / Business Transformation Agency
- Senior Delivery Manager at MTS Allstream
- Senior IT Manager at JDSU
- Manager at Bearing Point
- Senior Consultant at PTC
- Design Engineer at E-One
- Education
-
- University of Maryland - Robert H. Smith School of Business
- University of Florida
- Recommendations
-
1 person has recommended John
- Connections
-
500+ connections
- Websites
John O'Brien III's Summary
As an entrepreneur, I focus on web and mobile apps that leverage social platforms.
My 1st startup, Twangu, a group buying Facebook app, is now in the dead pool. Many battle scars that I can talk about at length over a drink - ok maybe 2.
My 2nd startup, TwapperKeeper, a tweet collection app that I originally built and launched during a weekend hack in 2009 to capture tweets for archiving and analysis was acquired by Hootsuite in 2011.
My 3rd startup, (3rd time is a charm right?) will be launched in 2012.
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As a consultant I build and deploy web and mobile apps to enable government and corp business operations.
Projects include custom tech builds, implementation of commercial products, and implementation of open source software / open standards. Hell bent on bringing emerging and open tech into the government and business enterprise apps space.
Focus on rapid prototyping, minimally viable products (MVP), pilot deployments, measurement, & iteration. (Deploy fast, learn fast, improve fast, get it right fast.)
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More details that crawlers like...
13+ years experience architecting, developing, and deploying technology to transform the way Private Sector and Federal Government organizations do business.
4+ years of hacking in the start-up arena. Heavy focus on social platforms. Many lessons learned through both failure and success.
Focused on pushing the limits of technology, aggressively meeting the needs of the business / customers, containing cost, and meeting project schedules. (To put it simply - I get the job done - I work.)
Industry expertise spans high tech, automotive, heavy equipment, discreet manufacturing, life sciences, aerospace & defense, government, and consumer goods.
Functional business expertise in e-business, engineering, manufacturing, procurement, supply chain, and personnel management. (Some areas I like better than others.)
Active Top Secret Clearance (Important to some government agencies.)
Specialties
Agile development; Consumer web and mobile apps; Enterprise commercial apps (ERP, PLM, CAD, BI); APIs (I <3 them); Web 2.0; Facebook Open Graph / Apps; Twitter App; Foursquare apps; Twilio API telephony integrations; Centos; PHP; CodeIgniter; MySQL; JQuery; MongoDB; PostgreSQL; iOS; OAuth; Paypal; Amazon; Google Maps; Rackspace Cloud; AWS; Marketing (acquisition, retention, viral loops)
John O'Brien III's Experience
Director of Technology Professional Services
Hickory Ground Solutions, LLC
Privately Held; 11-50 employees; Management Consulting industry
October 2010 – Present (1 year 4 months)
Dreaming up crazy ideas in the Federal Government / Department of Defense space to show the art of the possible and making stuff that seems impossible.. possible...heavy focus on delivery... usability... agile...
...Yes, I need to update this...
Doer
ob3solutions (My company when you just want me)
January 2010 – Present (2 years 1 month)
Tech consulting focused on building and deploying custom web and mobile applications. Many projects social media, analytics, and lead generation.
Customers range from large brands to start-up companies.
Integration expertise with numerous platforms including Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, and Twilio.
Privately Held; Myself Only; Internet industry
July 2009 – January 2012 (2 years 7 months)
(Acquired by HootSuite Media, Inc September 2011. Acted as a consultant thru integration period.)
A weekend science project to learn the Twitter API that evolved into a grant funded web start-up, TwapperKeeper was a Twitter application that allowed users to archive, organize, and analyze tweets based upon #hashtags, keywords, and @persons.
Used heavily by academic organizations, conference leaders, and marketing departments to track, monitor, and analyze Twitter traffic.
Exposed API for third party applications to leverage archive engine for extraction and analysis (removed at the request of Twitter due to ToS).
Released yourTwapperKeeper (http://your.twapperkeeper.com), an open version of the platform, in August 2010 to allow user to host their own archiving service. Project is maintained at https://github.com/jobrieniii/yourTwapperKeeper.
Personally responsible for all aspects of development, support, and marketing.
Company Info at Crunchbase: http://bit.ly/uLiNkr
Press mentions:
10 Ways to Archive Tweets
http://rww.to/vaYVqc
Mashable's Top 20 for Improving Twitter Experience
http://on.mash.to/snkxEQ
Twitter for Dummies
http://bit.ly/vXUtJk
JISC Grant Funding (2010)
http://bit.ly/tU7aGC
TwapperKeeper ToS Issues (2011)
http://bit.ly/hhf8O3 (WebProNews Video Interview)
http://rww.to/ibCGfH (Read Write Web)
http://bit.ly/gLD0Ug (PC Magazine)
Acquisition by Hootsuite (2011)
http://tcrn.ch/sOp8Dc
http://bit.ly/u1unsu
Special Assistant to the Agency Director
US DoD / Business Transformation Agency
Government Agency; 201-500 employees; Information Technology and Services industry
June 2008 – September 2010 (2 years 4 months)
Recruited into a term appointment within the DoD as one of the first Highly Qualified Expert (HQE) appointees under a Congressional program established to attract experts with state-of-the-art knowledge in fields of emerging importance to the Department.
Hired specifically to lead IT business transformation priorities within DoD with focus on defining and evolving technical architectures of enterprise applications.
Under current role, responsible for leading high profile projects at direction of agency director.
Current focus is on transforming the way DoD does procurement leveraging emerging ERP platforms by:
- “federalizing” Oracle's Advanced Procurement / iSupplier capabilities to support DoD procurement and supplier invoicing
- prototyping a supplier facing portal to provide visibility across n-number of ERPs and single sign from portal to ERPs
Co-founder
Twangu (Group Buying / Deal Marketplace)
July 2008 – December 2009 (1 year 6 months)
A Facebook Verified App and Top 50 Fbfund winner that enabled users to setup group buys for products they wanted to buy and allowed vendors to bid on the team's business (think: aggregate spend + reverse auction).
Responsible for development, deployment, and marketing of application on top of Facebook platform.
Great idea on paper. Got some buzz. But forgot to really engage with the customers and learn early. And Groupon was better. We simply didn't learn and pivot fast enough. Made decision to shut-down at end of December 2009. Painful learning experience.
But you learn so much by failing.
Company information - http://www.crunchbase.com/company/twangu
What was Twangu -
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/23315993/2-TWANGU_Presentation.pdf
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFo1NJyTu08
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EFy9UbTXeYM
Press mentions:
CNN - http://edition.cnn.com/2009/TECH/07/16/online.shopping.china/
WSJ / SmartMoney - http://www.smartmoney.com/spending/deals/strength-in-numbers-scoring-a-group-deal/
Top-50 Finalist in Facebook's Venture fbFund 2009 - http://developers.facebook.com/news.php?blog=1&story=249
http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=84440649573
Program Executive Officer, Enterprise DOD Supply Chain Systems
US DoD / Business Transformation Agency
Government Agency; 201-500 employees; Information Technology and Services industry
March 2007 – June 2008 (1 year 4 months)
Led implementation of custom developed enterprise sourcing and supply chain business systems to support DoD procurement and interface between suppliers / vendors. Managed $70M annual budget and over 200 employees.
- Drove evolution to leverage SOA for emerging business capabilities to standardize integrations, minimize point-to-point interfaces, and lower integration costs.
- Developed and published repeatable methodology for rationalizing capabilities and technologies to be implemented within DoD’s corporate layer, focusing on ensuring proper mix of centralized and decentralized IT capabilities.
- Led strategy and implementation of sourcing business intelligence (BI) capabilities to provide decision support to Department’s procurement executives.
Chief Information Officer / Chief Technology Officer
US DoD / Business Transformation Agency
Government Agency; 201-500 employees; Information Technology and Services industry
November 2005 – March 2007 (1 year 5 months)
Managed investment and technology decisions, including applications, services, and networks. Responsible for all technology decisions for DoD enterprise business systems and ensuring secure operations of BTA owned networks / systems and enterprise DoD systems. Managed $10M annual budget and headcount of 25 people.
- Established and led establishment of agency information security certification & accreditation team ensuring secure operations of DoD enterprise business systems.
- Led Air Force and Navy technology assessment and cost / schedule base-lining for custom Human Resources System program designed to support more than 2.5M users, subsume 50+ legacy systems, and interface with more than 150 external and legacy systems.
- Implemented lean IT operations team by eliminating non-value added processes and reducing overall IT labor cost by 50%, freeing additional resources for other DoD transformation initiatives.
Senior Delivery Manager
MTS Allstream
Public Company; 5001-10,000 employees; MBT (TSX); Telecommunications industry
2004 – 2005 (1 year)
Sold and managed service delivery and product solutions to improve and streamline engineering & supply chain processes and systems.
- Provided global support for JDS Uniphase Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) system, ensuring compliance with SLA, implementing ITIL processes, and ensuring engagement profitability.
Senior IT Manager
JDSU
Public Company; 5001-10,000 employees; JDSU; Telecommunications industry
2002 – 2005 (3 years)
Managed development and deployment of PLM and Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES) processes and systems. Chartered with improving collaboration and effectiveness of global design community and internal / external manufacturing parties.
- Deployed secure B2B portal to communicate with contract manufacturers and suppliers, providing real-time access to engineering data throughout product lifecycle, improving data timeliness from 2-3 days to ~1 hour.
- Implemented system capabilities and controls to ensure auditable corporate compliance with governmental export regulations for technologies of national security interest.
- Developed and deployed PLM web and file replication architecture improving end-user UI performance by 50-90% and increasing speed of engineering file data access by 10-60X.
- Introduced and executed various in-sourcing and out-sourcing hosting and support strategies to ensure efficient operations. Reduced annual operating costs by $1.5M in Year 1 and an additional 25% in Year 3.
Manager
Bearing Point
Partnership; 1001-5000 employees; Management Consulting industry
2000 – 2002 (2 years)
Sold and managed implementation for engineering design and process management solutions across numerous verticals.
Engagements focused on process reengineering, software configuration & customization, and deployment.
- Managed two-year implementation of Matrix One PLM solution for JDS Uniphase within $8M budget. Deployed and architected centrally hosted solution to facilitate engineering and manufacturing collaboration in support of new product introduction, engineering change processes and lifecycle of bill of materials / drawings / specifications. Implemented solution across 15 global sites (2000+ users) and integrated with corporate ERP and design tools.
Senior Consultant
PTC
Public Company; 5001-10,000 employees; PMTC; Computer Software industry
1998 – 2000 (2 years)
Managed implementation and deployment of PTC’s product development and product data management software at customers’ sites. Focused on engineer-to-order / assemble-to-order and data management solutions.
- Engaged over 50+ customers to implement software, ensuring appropriate business process reengineering, rapid ROI, and thorough knowledge transfer to users and administrators. Primary customers included Harris Corporation, General Motors, Silicon Valley Lithography, Paccar (Peterbilt / Kenworth), Timberjack and Airtran Airlines.
Design Engineer
E-One
Privately Held; 501-1000 employees; Automotive industry
1996 – 1998 (2 years)
Designed custom emergency vehicles, including fire trucks and airport rescue vehicles, to support new product offerings and custom requirements.
John O'Brien III's Skills
John O'Brien III's Publications
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Twitter Archiving Using Twapper Keeper: Technical And Policy Challenges
- iPRES 2010, 7th International Conference on Preservation of Digital Objects. Vienna, Austria. 19-24 Sept, 2010
- September 19, 2010
Twitter is widely used in a range of different contexts, ranging from informal social communications and marketing purposes through to supporting various professional activities in teaching and learning and research. The growth in Twitter use has led to a recognition of the need to ensure that Twitter posts ('tweets') can be accessed and reused by a variety of third party applications.
This paper describes development work to the Twapper Keeper Twitter archiving service to support use of Twitter in education and research. The reasons for funding developments to an existing commercial service are described and the approaches for addressing the sustainability of such developments are provided. The paper reviews the challenges this work has addressed including the technical challenges in processing large volumes of traffic and the policy issues related, in particular, to ownership and copyright.
The paper concludes by describing the experiences gained in using the service to archive tweets posted during the WWW 2010 conference and summarising plans for further use of the service.
John O'Brien III's Education
University of Maryland - Robert H. Smith School of Business
Masters, Business Administration
2006 – 2008
University of Florida
BS, Mechanical Engineering
1990 – 1995
John O'Brien III's Additional Information
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