Technically, orware networks has been around for a number of years.
The company name originated back in 2003 or so during high school and comes from a fusion of my initials, Omar Ramos, and my favorite computer maker at the time, Alienware (even though I never owned an Alienware PC).
I started out wanting to make computers (buying the necessary hardware and building them from scratch) so the original name of the company was ORWARE Systems.
After a short while (it didn't take me too long to figure out that not that many people wanted custom gaming rigs built for themselves) I moved into the computer consulting field and began doing various side jobs after school fixing computers for various families around my local area.
During my junior year of high school I began running a dial-up Internet service business that my family purchased from a relative named Dial-Up Extreme. That lasted for about two years, until about midway through my first year at UC Berkeley. At the time, I had the dial-up Internet business, a part-time job in the dormitory computing center, my classes and if that weren't enough...there was also a long-distance relationship I was trying to maintain with my girlfriend at the time :-).
After my first year at Berkeley, even though my grades were good enough, I decided the pace I was learning at, and the things I was focusing on, weren't all the things I wanted to do. Perhaps the best thing to come out of it though was my foundational computer science courses: CS3 and CS61A (thank you very much Brian Harvey!). So I came home after my first year and switched to an online university where I was able to make use of my high school AP credits and units from Berkeley to complete my degree in less time.
Shortly after completing my bachelors degree in Information Technology (at the ripe age of 20), I released a new website concept I had put together that still has the potential to raise a lot of money for communities if it were properly understood and used by a region. I dubbed it the "Virtual County Superstore" concept and it received some notice in the local paper: read the Imperial Valley Press article.This may have inadvertently gotten myself noticed by the local community college where I had applied to earlier in the year for a webmaster position because a short while thereafter, they contacted me to come in for an interview and I was eventually hired by the college.
Since I've begun working at the college, I've been able to focus on what's now become my passion: developing cool and useful web applications and focusing on contributing towards the Joomla! project as my skills have grown.
I had put my business on the back burner after starting my job at the college, and even more so during my second year there as I began teaching two web development courses, but I've been wanting to put together an extensions club for a while now and allow others to benefit from the other extensions I've built since that day two years ago when I released my first extension: ArtCats.
I pledge to anyone coming to my site that I will do my best to treat you fairly and with the respect that you deserve and that I will do my best to make my extensions as error free and feature filled as I possibly can.
I hope you enjoy your experience with orware networks and look forward to doing business with you!