Hi-tech world

By Tony Best | Sun, June 19, 2011 - 12:00 AM

When Ferdinand Hinds isn’t in Barbados, New York or Antigua, he is in San Rafael, a community 30 miles outside of San Francisco in California.

That’s where the former student of the Coleridge & Parry School and the Samuel Jackman Prescod Polytechnic develops high-tech systems and runs his business, i2D Inc., a small information management enterprise that works with institutions, private firms and governments in and out of the United States and the Caribbean to develop and manage sophisticated computer applications that meet their communications needs.

“We work and thrive in a collaborative environment to build solutions to meet the everyday challenges of organizations,” said Hinds, whose AbusTechnology Inc., a management information company, operates out of Newton, Christ Church.

“We have established a partnership with the Ministry of Education in Barbados that is enabling parents of children in the nation’s elementary and secondary schools to keep track of their children’s classroom performance with the click of a mouse.”

Called AbusStar, Agile Business Utility System and Student Tracking and Reporting, the system, when up to full speed, said an official of the ministry and Hinds himself, would eliminate the need for parents to wait until a printed end-of-term report card is received from the school to know how Johnny or Mary did.

It would also supplement any face-to-face parent-teacher meeting. That’s not all. It would help teachers keep records of each student in the classroom.

“It provides an easy-to-use method of publishing general information about the students in a secure environment,” Hinds said. “The data is collected and managed as a shared resource to the staff and administrators. When parents register with the school, they can have access to a wide range of information about their children.”

The system was first implemented as a pilot project in 2005 in a few schools and is now in use in 97 schools.

Although such information systems are a fixture in public and private schools across the United States, Barbados became the first English-speaking Caribbean country to introduce it. Since then it has been employed in Antigua and Barbuda in a small number of schools, said Hinds.

The Barbadian behind the system grew up in Six Men’s in St Peter and considers himself “an entrepreneur through and through”, and while he has found a home and a base of operation in California, moving there almost 30 years ago, his “heart” remains in the land of his birth.

“I grew up in a home in which my father Oliver Hinds was not only interested in the development of our country, but was a hands-on person in the sugar industry. He became manager of Portvale sugar factory,” he said. “He was in the industry all of his life and he believed in systems, efficiency and in the use of the technology of his era for the good of the sugar industry and the island.

“Of course, we live and work in a vastly different environment, but I am determined to follow in his footsteps,” asserted Hinds, whose first job in Barbados earned him the paltry sum of five dollars a week at the then Barbados Foundry.

“Our world today is driven by an ever-changing global technological atmosphere, and we in Barbados must use it to propel us even further. We can’t afford to lag behind.”

Hinds, who studied industrial technology at Southern Illinois University, headed the Barbados Industrial Development Corporation’s operations in New York for almost two years before returning to California to pursue what he says comes naturally, and that is coming up with business ideas for small and medium-sized enterprises.

“I started a ‘business incubator without walls’ in the San Francisco area so that small companies could work together and get the job done,” he said.

“With today’s technology, you don’t have to be in the same space to work together. We are always in touch using online systems to achieve our business goals. We chat online and we can make decisions quickly without being in the same room.

“Right now I am working with students at the University of the West Indies in Barbados on new applications and we discuss (online) what we do next despite the fact that we are thousands of miles apart.”