Peter Avritch

Hello Gloss is building a community of beauty and fashion influencers and enthusiasts who help and inspire each other to be uniquely fascinating.

Although our feature set is still mostly private, some of the things we're working on include making deep connections between social media content and products using machine learning and crowd-sourced curation to creatively surface beauty insights and make the content magically come alive.

I'm responsible for all architecture and lead the core development team for a highly-scalable platform hosted in Microsoft Azure on Kubernetes. We use ASP.Net Core and C# for most of the back-end logic, with Python and Tensorflow for the machine learning tasks. Database technologies include Cosmos DB and SQL Server. All front-end work uses React and GraphQL.

Launching soon.

Solutions for making websites sticky. Helping e-commerce companies create captivating and alluring search and discovery experiences.

Our aim is to keep visitors engaged and blissfully going down an enchanting rabbit hole.

Inside Stores operates a handful of ecommerce sites with a focus on luxury home furnishings, upholstery fabric and wallcovering. We list over 500K drop-ship products for sale with nearly all traffic coming from organic search and related SEO/SEM strategies.

As CTO and lead developer, I'm responsible for all team development, web servers, back-end services, SEO, analytics and business insights.

Most of our success is attributed to aggressive SEO with long-tail and cross linking, extreme attention to data collection, data freshness, and to on-site product discovery and classification using machine learning.

On the back end, we pull data daily from 80+ vendors in a myriad of formats, push out feeds to affiliates, automatically crop, resize and classify images, tune our search and autocomplete to boost discovery, send emails with personalized recommendations, and maximize SQL product queries for sub-second page loads.

As CTO and core developer for this boutique venture capital and incubation firm, I was the chief architect and project manager for a fully-automated lead generation system now licensed and marketed as LeadFire. The budget for this project topped $3M.

LeadFire is a one-stop all-inclusive solution for generating real-time sales leads through Internet-centric venues and geo-targeted organic search.

When customers sign up and answer a few profile questions about the services they offer, LeadFire automatically creates a series of custom websites, buys and configures domain names and DNS, sets up proxy phone numbers for tracking and then registers these sites with Google and relevant geo-targeted industry directories.

The cornerstone of this technology is its patented approach for automated content generation using a rich-media database which is designed to scale out to thousands of customers within a given vertical without replication or running afoul of Google.

LeadFire is delivered as a hosted service with lifetime revenue for dental patient acquisition surpassing $20M and growing.

First Information Systems was one of the original companies incubated by venture capital firm Du Molin and Du Molin. The company already had several projects underway when I came aboard as CTO. In additional to guiding the existing development teams to help bring their products to market, I also spearheaded a new project focused on reducing email spam for which I earned my first patent (US 8032751).

I later continued my relationship with the Du Molin group as they initiated other investments.

Founder and developer of the company's line of SafeHouse encryption and personal security software products for Windows.

SafeHouse featured a simple user interface combined with transparent pass-through encryption, making it instantly compatible with all popular Windows applications and a top choice for non-technical users with a need for data privacy.

These products were distributed primarily through the Internet and corporate resellers. Customers ranged from home users to enterprise site licenses for big international banks.

Over 1M downloads. Numerous 5-star ratings and stellar editorial reviews.

As founder and lead developer, I created and marketed a suite of popular desktop utilities and screen savers sold primarily in traditional computer retail stores such as CompUSA, EggHead and Best Buy. Our products won numerous awards and frequently topped the charts in their respective genres.

And yes, I am the creator of the original Energizer Bunny Screensaver which became a monster hit back in the day; subsequently leading to a full line of screensavers, including NASCAR and many other famous-brand names.

Beyond development, my responsibilities included running sales and distribution, marketing, trade events, public relations, various legal and license negotiations, writing user guides and product packaging.

PC Dynamics grew to 15 employees with annual sales topping $5M at its peak.

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I joined Vault Corporation as the company's first VP of Engineering while its initial product was still in the early proof-of-concept stage and worked to productize the founder's ideas.

After demonstrating a diskette fingerprinting and copy protection system named Prolok using a combination of robotics, software and some (subsequently patented) secret sauce, the company received $3M in venture funding and a large production contract from Ashton-Tate, publisher of the acclaimed and massively-pirated dBASE software.

My role principally involved core development and running the engineering team as we grew the company from 5 to 70 employees during my tenure.

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I started Genie Computer using seed money from an angel investor with the goal of producing add-on boards and peripherals for the Apple and IBM personal computers.

I was in charge of all hardware and software engineering while my investor/partner handled operations and marketing.

The company quickly found itself in the national spotlight after we introduced an unprecedented 5MB (not a typo) hard disk storage line-up for the IBM PC with full-page color ads in Byte magazine.

In that era, hard drives had not yet come to personal computers, and my conviction that it could be done persuaded a prominent computer mail-order distributor to fund the project and help me bring it to market. Back then, I was young and didn’t have any business or marketing experience – or money.

I designed the SCSI peripheral interconnect boards for both Apple and IBM, created the external drive enclosures and related internal electronics; and most notably, hacked the Apple DOS and MS DOS diskette-based operating systems and implemented new software kernels in assembly language to make them work with these new mass storage devices.

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I joined ComDesign as a digital hardware engineer just as the company was commencing work on a new RS-232 statistical multiplexer based on the forthcoming Intel 8088 microprocessor.

My role included circuit design of digital expansion boards as well as writing diagnostic firmware in 8086 Assembly language.

Multiplexers played an important role in reducing modem telecommunications costs by combining the data for many keyboard terminals over a single phone line. The stat mux we developed at ComDesign took this to a new level of performance by using microprocessors and ASICs to process and compress the data for maximal saturation of the available modem bandwidth.

Having the luxury of embedded microprocessors also afforded us the opportunity to include sophisticated reporting and phone-home diagnostics. Still further, they provided the functional capability for an intelligent control panel for system status and configuration which included a keypad and multi-row full-character display (something quite new at the time).

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