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Our Team

Barbara Lewis, Founder and Principal
Nancy Kurz, Director, Marketing
Am Tamim Khan, Manager, Programming

Barbara Lewis
Founder & Principal

Barbara is the Principal of Yowzah Baby! Productions. Before starting Yowzah Baby! Productions, Ms. Lewis worked with Apple Computer in 1996 and was responsible for creating an intranet web site for them. Persuaded by Applied Materials to develop an intranet site for their company, Ms. Lewis joined their IT Department in 1999 to head their Web and Communications department. The complexities of a company the size of Applied (24K employees) kept her challenged for 9 years. Internal communications incorporated fields such as Customer Satisfaction, and major corporate initiative sites like a four year program to convert all ERP applications to SAP which affected most divisions. Some of her clients include UCSC Extension, and the late Luciano Pavarotti.

Previous to the internet explosion, Ms. Lewis did industrial design working 7 years for Qume Corporation and later consulting for corporations like Hewlet Packard and Logitech. She has traveled all over the world implementing her designs, working within time and budget constraints, in countries where the different languages made it even more challenging.

She graduated with honors in Industrial Design from Art Center College of Design. ACCD is consistently ranked No. 1 overall for both its undergraduate and graduate programs in Industrial Design. Ms. Lewis also holds a BA in Fine Arts from University of Oregon. She is an award winning designer and holds a number of patents for industrial design. Learn more about her education.

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Nancy Kurz
Director, Marketing

Nancy is a key member of our staff and is our principal internet marketing guru.  She is responsible for our marketing strategy, analytics tracking, email campaigns, site databases, and electronic commerce.  Before joining YBP, she headed UC Santa Cruz Extensions online Web site for 9 years. Some of her accomplishments were:

  • Designed and created several new department “mini-sites”. These sites substantially increase revenue, for example the AP Institute site increased the enrollment by 800%, adding an additional revenue of $12,000 in 2 months.
  • Created an email form which reduced the bounce rate -- currently at 96%.
  • Scheduling and produced email campaigns: Increasing emails by 87% from 2006 to 2007 with a ROI of $51.41 per dollar spent.
  • Directed the production and scheduling of all online advertising like online banners for other sites.
  • Her Google AdWords campaigns increased traffic to UCSC Extension’s web site by 34%. The Ad words impressions increased 113% and the click-through rate increased 70%. The ROI from July to October was 9000% for all campaigns and the increased income was over $70,000.
  • At UCSC Extension, she tracked, analyzed, and recommended actions to improve the results against the instructors’ goals. Class pages averaged 26,000 visits/month with ˝ of visitors being new to the site. By analyzing who used the site, she tailored the site and Ad words to expand the audience.
  • She also researched and implement Search Engine improvements to increase the audience and traffic to our site.

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Am Tamim Khan
Manager, Programming

Tamim is responsible for overseeing all programming by our consultants. He is experienced in software programming (PSP, ASP, JSP, Java, J2EE, C++, C, Visual Basic, SQL, XML, DOM, SAX, XSLT, HTML, JavaScript, Lips/Scheme, TCP/IP), database design, and knows all the server applications like Apache, Tomcat, Win2000, Win9x, MS-DOS, Unix/Linux.

Tamim is also a Sr. Software Developer at Alameda County Office of Education responsible for in-house development and vendor coordination for ACOE and ACOE school portals. He is developing and maintaining Sakai, a Java-based open source learning and collaboration tool, and is also responsible for web application development and front-end components for acoe.org.

He previously worked with Applied Materials for 5 years and was indispensable for achieving their intranet sites results.

  • He led a workgroup to successfully deploy MS Project Server 2003 and SharePoint Services. MS Project Server has aided Applied Materials in capitalization of five million dollars.
  • He headed a group of software engineers to successfully develop the eProject Directory, a web-based project/portfolio registration tool, which uses LAPI, XML, XSLT, HTML, Struts and JavaScript.
  • Worked with Ms. Lewis to develop, update, and maintain key intranet web sites, including the Applied Telecom directory used by all employees. The redesign of that site increased its page views per month from under 7,000 to an average of 1/2 million.

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