Phasmid LLC

Our History

St. Louis based Phasmid was founded by James Hofer, a software veteran with 25 years experience. Phasmid makes software blend in with your business process. Our philosophy is that technology should blend in with the way you want to work. Although we help companies streamline their business processes, we also believe that minimizing any negative impact is just as important. Unless technology is adding business value to a user, it should be hidden from their daily work.

JIM_Headshot

Experience includes:
Implement Advanced Document Capture solutions.
Identify opportunities to implement Business Process Automation
Manage Enterprise Software Development Teams
Manage Quality Assurance Team
Manage Agile/SCRUM development process
Manage Automated QA testing initiatives
Provide Architectural Guidance to software development teams
Assist with Research and Development

Our Team

jim h_3 rgb

Founder/CEO

Over 20 years of enterprise software experience working for start-ups and large corporations. Considered a Jack-of-all-trades, helping out wherever necessary to insure the success of customers, products, and companies. James has experience at every level of Software Development, including Director of Engineering, Lead Product Manager, Software Architect, Software Developer, Professional Services Manager, Sales Engineer, Product Support, Quality Assurance, Marketing and Documentation. [see more]

Ben v1 – Deep Learning

Specializing in Deep Learning, Serial Entrepreneur Ben works as an Advisor to Phasmid. Ben is the former VP of Engineering at KnowledgeLake, and the Founder and CEO of Positronic.IO. Positronic builds cloud solutions for its clients that leverage modern machine learning, computer vision, and recognition sciences to create technology that radically augments humans and transforms businesses.

Ben v2 – User Experience

Robust User Experience background with proven product management skills to facilitate the discussions and communications needed to design user-centered applications that actually become real-worlds products. Ben listens, digests, summarizes, and visualizes all the disparate information into the latest consensus.

Success Stories

Phasmid’s team has been instrumental in the success of numerous software products and technology initiatives. Here are a few examples of how we help software and technology initiatives.
 

CUSTOM SOFTWARE SUPPORT

Do you need help customizing or updating an existing software application? Do you need help getting software packages to work with each other? Our team can help extend existing software applications or track down tricky bugs in multi-tier systems. We can help get different applications to work seamlessly together. We have even created Minimal Viable Products.

 

CUSTOM SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT

Is your company thinking of developing a new internal application but the idea needs to be vetted first? Do you need a development team to create a prototype or finished product? Our team of designers and developers can work with you to create a Minimal Viable Product (MVP) to test out concepts and identify product requirements, and then deliver a final production version.

 

INTERFACE DESIGN

Our team was responsible for major user interface designs for Quest Software (now Dell Software). We focus on every aspect of the user interface; identifying what features are and functionality are required, when they are needed, and where they should be located for optimal user experience. We interview end users and stakeholders to create visually appealing and functional designs.

 

PRODUCT OWNERSHIP

Every technology initiative and software project should have a Product Owner; someone who is invested in making sure the solution is delivered on time, and with the correct features. Phasmid allows you to outsource the Product Ownership role without allocating dedicated resources on your team.

 

PRODUCT MANAGEMENT

Every commercial solution or software project must have a Product Manager to be successful; someone who tracks marketing trends, competition and market viability. Phasmid allows you to get the best available Product Managers without allocating dedicated resources on your team.

 

ADVANCED CAPTURE

For multiple clients our developers were key additions to the successful implemented solutions to classify complex documents such as mortgages and medical records from various sources. After the system automatically detected the types of documents, it extracted key metadata including name, dates of service, account number, and location of service.

 

TECHNOLOGY ANALYSIS

Our consultants can work with your department or your entire company to identify ways that modern technology can improve process efficiency, data analysis, as well as customer and employee satisfaction.

 

ENTERPRISE CONTENT MANAGEMENT

Our team can help you optimize an existing Enterprise Content Management (ECM) solution using industry best practices or can help you implement a new ECM solution. Store, secure and compartmentalize all of your business content in secure, searchable repositories. Manage content life-cycles with proper records management.

Blog

July 19, 2016

Why Phasmid?

Our blog shows a sampling of projects we have worked on, as well as topics important to the clients we support. If you find the information useful and have a need for design, consulting or custom software development, Hire Phasmid

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April 28, 2017

Color Coded Kids

For the past several months, Phasmid’s founder, James Hofer, has been helping out with Color Coded Kids. KMOV.com

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January 26, 2017

A Big Data Sqoop of Hadoop

This week I’m working with one of our partners on migrating some data from Microsoft SQL Server to Hadoop. Sqoop is the tool of choice because it can migrate the data and maintain data types inside of Hive. Sqoop is

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January 25, 2017

Big Data and Hadoop Jargon

I was starting to write a post on using Sqoop with Hadoop, and realized that to a normal person, it would sound as if I were speaking gibberish, so I decided to define as much of the jargon in one

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December 1, 2016

Great Products Require Great Product Management

I found a good article today on LinkedIn entitled “Who are product managers and why you should never hire a good Product Manager for your company?” It feels a bit like an article I wrote a while back, “Product Owners

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November 18, 2016

Ephesoft Enterprise is now Ephesoft Transact

Ephesoft Advanced Capture Rebranding At the Innovate conference, Ephesoft announced that starting with version 4.1, their Enterprise Advanced Capture product would be rebranded as Ephesoft Transact while Ephesoft Universe would be rebranded as Insight. This makes sense in light of

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October 28, 2016

Ephesoft User Conference Highlights

The Ephesoft User Conference (Ephesoft Innovate) lived up to my high expectations. I arrived Monday morning shortly after the keynote address and caught most of Ike Kavas speaking on the future technical direction of Ephesoft as well as some of

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September 21, 2016

Ephesoft Innovate – The Ephesoft User Conference

I am looking forward to Ephesoft Innovate – the Ephesoft User Conference in Irvine California the week of October 16th. This should be a great opportunity to network with Ephesoft customers and integrators as well as preview their latest version. Enterprise

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August 30, 2016

What is Advanced Capture?

Too frequently in the technology world we assume that everyone already knows all the lingo for whatever topic we happen to be talking about. As much as I try to avoid speaking in jargon, even I am guilty of not

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August 29, 2016

Another Version of SharePoint = Same Basic Problem

I was reading a new article on CMS Wire talking about the history of SharePoint and the new version that Microsoft has just released. Ask not what SharePoint can do for you, discusses both the progress that Microsoft has made

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August 23, 2016

Training Gotchas – Product Ownership 101

One of the first things you should do when you become a Product Owner for a new product is sit through the training class and all of the training videos, even if you are intimately familiar with the product. WHY?

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