I'm Gary; A Geo Technologist, Map Addict And Geographer

A self-professed geek and map addict, I've worked in the mapping and location space for over 25 years through a combination of luck and occasional good judgement. I'm currently CTO with Kamma, a growing #geotech, #proptech and #regtech company based in London's legal district.

When I'm not in an office, I work from anywhere with the magic combination of good coffee, free Wi-Fi and somewhere to charge my MacBook Pro.

Previously I've been CTO of what3words, Head of APIs for the Ordnance Survey, the United Kingdom's national mapping agency, the Geotechnologist-in-residence for Lokku, was Director of Places and Director of Global Community Programs for Nokia Maps and HERE Maps. Before joining Nokia I led Yahoo’s UK Geo Technologies group, launching GeoPlanet, Placemaker, helping Flickr and Fire Eagle do location based services and have even worked at the European Space Agency, a job which really was rocket science.

I'm based in London, where I live with my family in Teddington. A commited Italophile, I'm also a science fiction fan who thinks that removing Deckard's noir voiceover from Blade Runner was utterly the right thing to do. Our house runs on Macs and macOS (because it's basically UNIX with a lovely user interface) and Raspberry Pi's; although an X-Box and Windows laptop have managed to creep in.

I've been tweeting about maps as @vicchi since 2007, writing about maps at www.vicchi.org since 2001 and also make the occasional map at maps.geotastic.org.

A Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, I'm a RedHat Certified Engineer, I've sat on the Executive for the AGI, the United Kingdom’s Association for Geographic Information, I'm a founder of the Location Forum, the co-founder of WhereCamp EU and conference chair of W3G.

Despite prevailing wisdom, it's a firm belief of mine that espresso, rare steak, red wine and chocolate really should be considered food groups.

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