Gary Gale - geek with a life

About ...

A self professed "geek with a life", I've had a life-long love affair with maps since discovering the iconic Harry Beck map of the Underground on the back of the London A-Z street atlas at an early age. After "growing up and getting a proper job" I now live in Teddington in South West London with my family and work in London and Berlin as the Director of Ovi Places for Nokia; I'm also the co-founder of WhereCamp EU, the chair of w3gconf and I sit on 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.com and Network Associates.

Fascinated by technology, I first started hacking on a Commodore PET, built my own Sinclair ZX-80, spent too many years behind the console of a VAX, and even more years coding in Assembler, FORTRAN, C and C++.

I speak and present at a wide range of conferences, workshops and events including Where 2.0, State of the Map, AGI GeoCommunity, #geomob, mashup*, the British Computer Society, WhereCamp EU, the Location Business Summit and FOWA.

Writing as regularly as possible on location, place, maps and other facets of geography, I blog at www.vicchi.org and I tweet as @vicchi.

Despite living in London for most of my life I still haven't managed to visit every station on the London Underground network and I now face the additional challenge posed by using the Berlin U-Bahn network every week.

Bio

A quick bio for cutting and pasting

A self professed "geek with a life", Gary's had a life-long love affair with maps since discovering the iconic Harry Beck map of the London Underground on the back of the London A-Z street atlas at an early age. After "growing up and getting a proper job" he now lives in Teddington in South West London with his family and works in London and Berlin as the Director of Ovi Places for Nokia; he's also the co-founder of WhereCamp EU, the chair of w3gconf and sits on the UK Location User Group.

Prior to Nokia, Gary 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; he's 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, he's been at companies including the BBC World Service, Reuters, Factiva.com and Network Associates.

Writing as regularly as possible on location, place, maps and other facets of geography, he blogs at www.vicchi.org and tweets as @vicchi.

Blog

Occasional journal entries on work and other stuff.

• Facebook Places; Haven’t We Been Here Before?

  A week and a half ago Facebook finally launched their Places feature to a predictable media furore over location privacy, regardless of whether it’s justified or not and, to location industry watchers at least, a strong sense of deja vu. Haven’t we been here before? Let’s look at the key issues that seem to be [...]

• History Is Also Written By The Man From The Council With A Tin Of White Paint

  “History is written by the victors“. So goes the saying attributed to Winston Churchill sometime during his reign as British Prime Minister. I’d like to offer up a corollary to that saying, which is “History is also written by the man from the council with a tin of white paint“. I should explain. I live [...]

• Knocking Down (Geo Data’s) Brick Walls

  Earlier this week I was interviewed by Cian O’Sullivan for GoMo News as part of the run-up to the Location Business Summit in San Jose. The interview is now up on the GoMo News site and is reproduced here with permission. Ovi Places: Mobile Navigation needs to knock down its brick walls When Ovi Maps [...]

• Roughly Halfway Between England And France

  As a race and as a society we just love our boundaries and our borders; go here, don’t go here, this is yours, this is ours. We put up border controls, we tax dependent on what side of the street you live on, you need the right visa stamp in your passport to pass onto [...]

• Grepping And Grokking The Etymology Of Grep

  I’ve been thinking a lot about the etymology of place names recently. That’s a slightly verbose way of saying that I’ve been thinking about the origin of place names and where they come from. Take London for example. That’s pretty easy as most sources of information seem to agree that London derives from Londinium, the [...]

Full archive of blog posts is at http://www.vicchi.org