No, it’s not Jenny’s phone number. Nor is it the social security number of that guy who is always advertising his identity theft protection services on TV and radio. They are actually the numbers of two United States Patents which were issued to me and my friend and co-worker Tom Paasche last month for inventing a “System and method for managing recurring orders in a computer network” … better known to us all as Ditto Delivery.
It all started way back in 1998 when I was working on an application called “Standing Order Program”. At the time, I was a mainframe developer (COBOL, CICS, DB2) but I had been playing around with HTML and ASP and thought it would be cool if I could move SOP to the web. So I wrote a simple web app which would allow Distributors (that’s what they were called back then) to perform inquiries on their SOP profiles. I then launched this new web app on what was our only internet site at the time: the Amway Business Network (ABN). Does anyone remember that website? Anyway, it was a great learning experience and it opened up a whole new world for me as a computer programmer. Since then, I’ve never looked back…
A few month later, I was approached about joining a group (more like an army) of people who were in the process a developing a brand new ecommerce website for the Amway business. It was to use cutting-edge technology and offer IBOs (the newly christened name for Distributors) a fully functional website where they could shop, place and track orders, manage their business, and even check the weather, latest news headlines, and sports scores. Oh, and this is where I come in, it also needed to have an application where people could create and manage recurring orders. So together with Tom Paasche, we began to brainstorm ideas for an even cooler version of the SOP application. But what good is a cool application without an equally cool name? Unable to come up with anything decent, it was actually Tom’s boss at the time Mick Griffin who, off the top of his head, suggested “Ditto! …. Ditto Delivery!”. The rest is history and on 9/1/99 Quixtar.com was born.
It’s been almost 9 years now since Quixtar and Ditto Delivery were launched and since that time both have undergone some major facelifts. Thanks in part to a lot of great suggestions from folks like you – so keep them coming! While I no longer actively work on the Ditto application, having moved on to things like Personalized Health, Time Defiance Skin Assessment, Simply Nutrilite, etc., I do check in on it every now an then. Like they say – you never forget your first.
So there you have it, the real history behind Ditto Delivery. Or as Paul Harvey would say: "And now you know…the rest of the story."
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