Background

- Howdy and welcome to JBKnowledge Headquarters here in downtown Brian, Texas, otherwise known as Aggieland. I'm super excited to have you here with me today so you can geek out on this course about construction technology. Now, you're going to find out that I'm a pretty giant nerd. I love to geek out, and our office reflects that. This is actually 125 year old hardware store that we converted with a whole bunch of technology to our corporate headquarters. Now, behind me you'll actually see a curved wall of wood that we actually fabricated and built right here in this office with our own employees. And it's housing a whole bunch of awards that we've won over the last 15 years. But what matters more to me than those are our people here at JBKnowledge. We've got over 200 incredible teammates who build outstanding technology for the construction and insurance industry that I've had the privilege of working with in the last 16 years. Before we jump into our course and we start geeking out together, I want to give you a little background on me and the company. I was actually born and raised in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. I started writing code when I was about 11. Built my first real application when I was about 15 and jumped into the internet really before it was the internet, back in the days of bulletin board systems, then got into dial up modems and other systems in the mid '90s. Came here to Texas A&M, got an accounting degree and MIS master's, and decided to start JBKnowledge out of my dorm room when I was finishing up in the Corps Cadets at A&M. Since then, JBKnowledge has grown to be an industry and thought leader in the construction and insurance industries. We get to work with lots of really great companies in both industries, but in construction, we work with some of the best of the best, whether they're small, medium, or large sized. We offer a few different services, so I thought I'd just walk you through what our experience and expertise is in. We've got three products in the construction industry: SmartBid, which is the industry leader in invitation to bid, planned distribution, prequal, and sub management, SmartInsight, our prequalification network, and SmartCompliance, our solution for managing certificates of insurance and other compliance related needs. We also have a strategic consulting group that advises contractors, whether they're small, medium, or large, in strategic technology discussions, strategic technology issues and decisions, and we help them make better decisions, select better products, or even build things if they need to. We also have an outsourcing and software group that builds custom software when the market doesn't have a solution that fits our client needs. So we do a whole bunch of things. Also, in a different frame, we have a fantastic R&D group, otherwise known as JBK Labs. Peter Drucker said that if you want to predict the future, you need to create it, and so we decided to write our own future by putting together our own labs R&D group. So JBK Labs works on things like sensors, augmented and virtual reality, drones, a whole bunch of really great technology, including artificial intelligence, data mining, and much, much more. The Labs group is our vision of the future, and hopefully we're going to bring some of that to you through this course. So, sit tight, put your seatbelt on, and get ready to go on a fantastic ride through technology, and I hope you enjoy geeking out with me.