Rick Bettencourt, Principal of Building Block Software (BBS), has had a prominent career as a software developer, architect and technologist. In 1984, Rick graduated third in his class from the University of Lowell, majoring in Computer Science. Since college, Rick has been employed by the Eastman Kodak Co, Apollo Computer Inc., HighSoft Inc., and Building Block Software.
Rick built Building Block Software to provide software architectures and solutions for companies of all types and sizes. Its clients range from large corporations, such as Eastman Kodak Company and Adecco, to smaller local businesses and consulting agencies. In the last few years Taking advantage of the Internet, BBS has also built a remote client base. Some of BBS's recent projects include: a cross platform integration with postal databases and interfaces for AccuZip of Atascadero, CA; a distributed, real-time, radiation monitoring system for MJW Corp. in Buffalo, NY; the re-architecting and optimizing of Eastman Kodak's Picture Maker 8.0 Kiosk product; an Audio/Video automation system with the StereoShop of Henrietta, NY; and a remote Order Entry System, allowing users to edit and print digital images from home, with Softworks of Syracuse, NY; secure JSP based database services for the Protect-Your-Loved_ones.com website. BBS also provides Java performance optimization work for their customers including: architectural patterns for flexible performance tuning, performance optimization, and statistical analysis.
While an employee at Eastman Kodak Co., Rick was the lead architect for the Kodak Color Management System (KCMS), a platform independent, object oriented, architecture. The first application of KCMS was the foundation for ColorSense, a Macintosh and Windows Color Management application tool. Sun Microsystems then purchased KCMS, as the Solaris framework for their extensible, International Color Consortium compatible, color management solution. Rick was instrumental in the Intelligent Color Imaging & Communications (ICIC) infrastructure done at Kodak that integrated imaging into the compound document models of Microsoft's OLE, Taligent's CommonPoint, and Apple's OpenDoc. He was also on the Kodak Image Management "first systems" team, providing a diagnostics subsystem and a low cost alternative display system, for image manipulation and window management. Before leaving Kodak, he was one of the original architects for the Image Manipulation Architecture, a super scalable imaging architecture for parallel, distributed, imaging applications. Sun MicroSystem's, JavaSoft, also exploited the original design patterns of IMA for their latest Java2D and JAI imaging extensions. Working for Kodak, Rick was awarded a patent for "A Camera for Generating and Recording Object Data with the Recorded Image".
At Apollo Computer Inc., Rick lead the development of one, and contributed to five graphics device drivers. He was responsible for the intermediate 2D graphics libraries and their integration with the OS, 3D, Xwindows, and Apollo's proprietary windowing system. He also designed and implemented a virtual colortable manager, which allowed the sharing of logical and physical colortables from many processes across the Apollo product line.
As a Principal Software Architect for HighSoft Inc., Rick had lead the framework technology team supporting three different products in Java and C++. These frameworks integrated proprietary recording/playback technologies, Quicktime 3.0 and QuickTime4Java. They also extended Quicktime to include a grouping mechanism and justifications of its elements.
Rick currently is a member of SOFA, IEEE, ACM and the U-Lowell Alumni Association. He devotes his spare time to his family, his garden and if he has any left, he writes non-violent, interactive, 3D games.
