Heynow Software was founded by Jay Koutavas, a long time Macintosh and Unix enthusiast.
Jay got his start in programming in 1974 at the tender young age of 12. By 1978, he was not only the first kid on the block to own an Apple II computer, but also was literally the only person in his midwestern town to own a personal computer. Jay's interests in professionally developing software go all the way back to those pioneering times. He completed his first software development work for hire at age 16.
By age 23, already having produced several business software products, he became the technical lead for the "Apple Classroom of Tomorrow" project in the public school in Blue Earth, Minnesota, which resulted in a number of awards for excellence for the school.
In 1986 he began working for Digital Equipment Corporation's Macintosh software development group. There Jay honed his skills in the science of software engineering and quality assurance. Both of these skill sets proved invaluable, as the user base for products Jay developed and tested were now counted in the tens of thousands of users. It was during his time at Digital that Jay got his first exposure to Unix and to development of network file servers. Jay developed a reputation at Digital as a "guy who gets stuff done" — a reputation that has followed him as he has progressed through his career.
In 1992, Jay got his first glimpse of the Avid Media Composer — a bleeding edge Macintosh application that allowed film and video editors, for the first time ever, to edit by cutting, copying, and pasting their media. Jay saw the potential in this immediately and joined up with Avid. He enthusiastically contributed to the user interface and various internal components of the Media Composer.
Avid grew from less then 200 employees to over 1100 in the first year of Jay's employment there. Within Avid, an interest in developing network-based media sharing was growing and Jay was tapped to be technical lead for two key early developments. He implemented significant parts to the Avid Transfer Tool, a Macintosh-based application for efficiently moving media on peer-to-peer networks. He also lead the development of the Avid Media Server, a first of its kind Unix-based server that could handle real-time editing of up to 12 streams of high resolution media. The Avid Media Server was deployed in a number of 24x7 news rooms in the country. Jay's work on the Media Server also landed him his first patent.
In 1996, with a considerable engineering background established, Jay decided it was time to strike out on his own, and formed his own software development consulting business called "Heynow Software". As of 2008, Jay has contributed to, and helped ship, no less than 24 commercial software applications.
Heynow Software has grown steadily since 1996 and is now a multi-employee company doing Apple engineering consulting, job placement, and developing its own product portfolio for the iPhone. Jay is the CEO and lead engineer for Heynow. Heynow's iPhone app, SkyText, is available in the App Store along with numerous other iPhone apps Heynow has made for customers.
Jay's resume can be found here, and you can contact him at the Heynow contact page.
