About

I’m Gary; A Geo Technologist And A Geographer At Heart

A self professed geek with a life, I’ve had a lifelong love affair with maps since discovering the Harry Beck map of the London Underground on the back of the London A-Z street atlas at an early age. I now live in Teddington in South West London with my family and work in London, Berlin, Boston, Chicago and Sunnyvale as the Director of the Places Registry for Nokia. I’m the co-founder of WhereCamp EU, the chair of AGI W3G and sit on the AGI Council, the W3C POI Working Group and the UK Location User Group.

Prior to Nokia, I was at Yahoo!, leading their Geo Technologies group in the UK, releasing GeoPlanet and Placemaker and providing the geo heavy lifting for Flickr and Fire Eagle; I’ve also been at Digicon, developing geophysical technologies to aid in the search for natural resources and at the European Space Agency Research Institute in Rome, Italy, participating in the development and launch of ERS-1, Europe’s first remote sensing satellite. Outside of the location and geo field, I’ve been at companies including the BBC World Service, Reuters, Factiva and Network Associates.

As well as being the creator of the WP Biographia WordPress plugin and occasional contributor to the Mapstraction mapping API, I speak at a wide range of conferences including Nokia World, Where 2.0, State of the Map, AGI GeoCommunity, Geo Loco and Social Loco, GeoMob, mashup*, the BCS Geospatial SG, WhereCamp EU, the Location Business Summit and FOWA.

I blog as regularly as possible on location, places, maps and other facets of geography here at www.vicchi.org, you can find me on Twitter as @vicchi and there’s a whole lot more on my About Me site.