Rob Davis Email & Phone Number

We're building a comprehensive travel service with deep use of AI + a modern UI for planning a wonderful trip to wherever you want to go.

Austin, Texas, Us

I was the primary developer of the Roadster calculation engine, a high-performance, penny-accurate system that is used by Roadster's 3,000+ car dealers to power customer-facing UI -- where people shop online for cars -- and to power dealer-facing tools that agents use to finalize purchases. The engine is also used by numerous API partners, notably car manufacturers like Hyundai and Mazda who use it for thousands of real-time calculations on the open web. More than a simple calculator, the engine takes into account local tax quirks, oddball lease rules, and locale-specific fees, and it's deeply integrated with Roadster's deal-management lifecycle. Its use cuts across a large swath of the Roadster/CDK tech stack, and as a result it's involved in about a quarter of all car sales in the US.I also led the team of developers who created the Roadster desking service, a pricing system that dealers use to manage their inventory, and other parts of the back-office suite that we called the "digital sales desk." I worked on low-level bits that were focused on performance and accuracy and high-level bits that were focused on real human interaction, 21st-century UX.After CDK acquired Roadster, I was heavily involved in integrating Roadster's systems with CDK's industry-dominating infrastructure, a major part of CDK's modernization efforts.

New York, Ny, Us

I was initially the lead developer of the Perka Android app, and as the company grew and began merging with Clover Networks (our sister company at First Data), I led development for the customer-focused apps at Clover: the Android and iOS consumer apps, the customer management app that ran on Clover-designed point-of-sale hardware, and the Rewards, Feedback, and Promos apps that small businesses used to stay in touch with their customers.In my last six months at Perka/Clover, I was the "chief product architect" and the acting director of engineering, coordinating the New York based engineering teams that developed the customer-focused web site, the back end infrastructure, apps for phones, and apps for the company's own devices.

El Segundo, Ca, Us

I was the first director of engineering for Fabletics. GM Laura Joukovski was tasked with putting together a skeleton crew to build a completely new brand by leveraging technology and resources from elsewhere in the company. I took the engineering role -- moving over from FabKids -- and we built a working site, a functioning business that shipped real products, in a matter of months. We launched the store to millions of dollars in sales in its first quarter, and the brand has continued to grow from there.

Servdex is a search site for business services. I founded Servdex with Frank Anderson (Blingo co-founder) because our previous ventures all started with a need for basic services —- accounting, voice mail, domain registration, you name it —- but we didn't have a fast, easy, trustworthy way to find the best ones for our business. The landscape is constantly changing, and the offerings are getting better, and more numerous, every day. We needed a way to compare prices, review features, and read comments from people like ourselves, quickly. It didn't exist, so we're building it.

Blingo is a consumer search engine, like Google, but with the chance to win a prize each time you search. Silly, sure, but compelling for the right audience. I co-founded Blingo, developed the site (which became a reference implementation for Google's other partners), hired and managed the technical team, and worked with co-founder Frank Anderson to shepherd the company's acquisition by Publishers Clearing House. There we integrated the site with the PCH brand and saw its user base grow to over 10 million registered users.

New York, Ny, Us

I had several projects, but my favorite was leading the team that revamped the Mail application on AOL.com, creating the first widely deployed DHTML/Ajax webmail application at AOL.

Three friends and I founded iAmaze to develop a suite of web-based applications and a series of server and client frameworks that resembled what is now known, on the client, as Ajax. Or "apps in the cloud." Most of my work, initially, was on the back-end. Since none of the Java database frameworks at the time were very robust -- Java as a server platform was relatively new -- I built an object-relational mapping system on top of JDBC, and we used it as the data layer for all iAmaze applications. This system insulated application developers from the database so they could think and work with objects instead of writing SQL.AOL acquired iAmaze in 2000 and turned us into an internal SWAT team that had major participation in AOL and Netscape products like Webmail, Address Book, Calendar, web-based Instant Messenger (AIM), AOL Radio, and AIM bots. Our team remained a cohesive unit at AOL but also fanned out to work with existing groups. I shifted to the front end and worked primarily on revamping Webmail and Address Book for AOL and Netscape.com.http://www.timewarner.com/newsroom/press-releases/2000/09/America_Online_Acquires_iAmaze_09-05-2000.phphttp://www.eweek.com/c/a/Application-Development/AOL-Bets-Big-on-AJAX/

I was one of the earliest employees at Netmosphere, a VC-funded startup that was founded in February 1996 and acquired by Critical Path in June 2000. We developed desktop and web applications in Java that helped companies track and manage their projects. I led the development of Netmosphere’s flagship product, ActionPlan, in its third major release and two minor releases, and contributed features big and small to the existing codebase, including compatibility with Microsoft Project.

Palo Alto, Ca, Us

I worked on the original Java Swing team, which was a joint project between Sun and Netscape. My contributions included JTree, the tree-based data and UI classes that went along with it, and a host of UI components (like the progress bar), all of which became part of the standard Java platform.

Lighthouse was a small company that developed desktop applications for the NeXTSTEP operating system (the Steve Jobs project that is now the core of Apple’s Mac OS X and iOS). I mostly worked as a contributor to Quantrix, a multi-dimensional spreadsheet written in Objective-C.See what Steve Jobs said about Lighthouse and Quantrix ("the best spreadsheet I've ever used in my life") at WWDC 1997 (skip to 21:45):http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LEXae1j6EYI was also part of the four-person team that created a Java prototype that was based on Lighthouse's PowerPoint-like NeXTSTEP app. The execs showed off our prototype to the company's suitors in discussions that led to Lighthouse's acquisition by Sun Microsystems (by then-CTO Eric Schmidt). After the acquisition I was the co-architect of an internal Java application framework -- predating Swing -- that incuded extensive data structures, window management, graphical hierarchy of components, robust scrolling and mouse tracking, high-level user interface elements that encouraged model-view-controller design, and an undo/redo package.