Summary

I innovate practical solutions to real-world problems: one of the UK’s first Internet Service Providers; Europe’s first virtual prepaid card issuer; invented and manufactured a SAP- and ECO- approved smart radiator valve that requires no set-up and saves carbon by automatically turning down the set-point when a room is vacant. Service roles include company directorships for over 30 years, vice-chair of a school governing board and vice-chair of an inventors’ club. Other than starting companies, I have worked in tech journalism, defence, oil, and investment banking, and in every role I invent, persuade, fund, lead and deliver.

OpenTRV/Vestemi/Caredall

2013--now: Founder, project leader and OpenTRV open source project and CTO with the initial goal of cheaply eliminating the ~50% wasted heat (and carbon emissions) of domestic space heating in the UK and across Europe, up to 8% of the region's entire footprint.

OpenTRV is an open source hardware and software project and socially-driven enterprise with Climate-KIC support, with elements of Internet-of-Things cheap sensor and actuator technology, AI and machine learning, to help grow the ecosystem for everyone.

Funding from Climate-KIC, Innovate UK, and an angel investor totalling circa £500k as of the start of 2017. Work with academic partners in universities such as Kingston, Surrey, UCL, Imperial. Products in NEA-financed trial winter 2016/2017 in social housing in London.

To fulfil our vision of painless affordable carbon saving for Jo Everyone, and our mission of having OpenTRV smart valves fitted to 80% of (400 million) European home-heating radiators by 2050, OpenTRV will be a growth business, aiming to at least double sales each year to move the climate-change needle.

Our initial and key carbon-saving product is Radbot, the clever radiator robot that you can fit yourself to halve your heating bill, with payback in one winter.

Previous Projects Summary

1994--2014: investment banking consulting/contracting tech roles for Nomura (twice), Monis, Lehman Brothers (twice, ~10 years), Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), BarCap, Deutsche Bank, Risk Evolution; mainly credit/derivatives, often from concept to production. (Some time spent on Y2K, dot-com and other retail/finance in this interval, see below.)

2002--2006: CTO/founder of Ixaris, leading the design, development and build-out of the J2EE-based EntroPay virtual credit-card system, with a (mainly-Malta-based) R&D staff of 20+ for this UK company. Ixaris had raised well over £3m of venture capital by March 2006.

2000--2001: various dot-COM projects including VP Technology for digitalRUM, a dot-com m-commerce B2B2C startup in London. Design authority and team manager from business requirements though to beta with rapidly expanding team up to about 15 staff.

2011: BP plc greenfield architecture/development on various projects including ship/cargo tracking. 1993: BP Exploration, managing complex and evolving multi-vendor distributed computing resource.

1991--1993: Technical Editor, then Editor, of Parallelogram, an international technical journal covering parallel and high-performance computing, with a world-wide circulation of approximately 6,000 as of 1992.

1990--1993: consultant to BAeSema (previously Dowty-Sema) on high-performance and open-systems technology on the largest-ever Ada projects in the world to then (over £100m) for the SSCS and SMCS frigate and nuclear-submarine weapons command-and-control systems. Handled material classified up to NATO Confidential.

1988--now: MD of ExNet Ltd. Raised £75k in seed capital whilst an undergraduate to do private research in networking and distributed operating systems. Created one of the UK's first Internet Service Providers (ISPs).

1985--1986: Personal Robots Ltd, Systems Engineer. Designed and implemented the real-time, multiprocessor, distributed robotics hardware and operating system in products featured on the BBC's "Tomorrow's World" and "Wogan". Later on contract to PRL while at university.

Education

2023-- : PhD candidate in Environment and Sustainability, University of Surrey.
1991--1994: MSc in Theoretical Computer Science (Parallel Systems), Edinburgh University.
1986--1990: 2:1 BSc (Hons) Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science, Edinburgh University.

Editorial

2007--now Earth Notes "green" site
2007--now various Register articles including How I built a zero energy cost, zero carbon home server and How I used Space Shuttle tech to insulate the living room. (As of 2011-03-28 The Register claimed to be "the UK's biggest technology and science news website [] also pretty big in the US, Canada, Europe and India.")
2007: jWorkers compilation of top-end UK-centric Java contract agencies.
2001: "First Person" article for New Scientist magazine.
1996--now: DHD Multimedia Gallery (code), pro-bono source of free multimedia with millions of visitors per year. Made extensive use of Google's AdWords and AdSense advertising programmes, as well as the networks of TribalFusion, CasaleMedia and AdBrite.
1991--1993: various articles and journalism for Parallelogram HPC/supercomputing magazine, eventually becoming Editor.
1989: "Cloning and characterization of an Escherichia coli gene, pcnB, affecting plasmid copy number": Molecular Microbiology (PubMed ID 2677604, scan).
1984: ETI (Electronics Today International): "Perpetual Pendulum" project.

Energy / Climate Change

2020--now: member of Royal Borough of Kingston "Transition to a Green Economy" taskforce.
2020: patent application GB2006828.4 "Radiator Thermostatic Control" (WO2021224586A1, GB2594749A); granted UK 2594749 2022-08-31.
2013--now: OpenTRV/Radbot open-source software and hardware project to help improve heating efficiency of existing UK housing stock, eg see FOSDEM talk.
2013--2016: founding director of Kingston Community Energy Industrial and Provident Society.
2012--2014: DECC (UK's Department of Energy and Climate Change) pro bono work/advice.
2012: our house became UK SuperHome number 119, for energy/carbon savings of over 60%.
2011--now: Fieldlines renewable energy forum moderator/admin.
2009--2021: Ecotricity (and others) collaboration for the LIVE - Carbon content of the UK Grid page based on own more geeky version, and other renewable-energy visualisation work.
2007--now: earth.org.uk carbon-footprint-reduction site including live GB grid carbon intensity monitor and @EarthOrgUK Twitter feed.

Public Service

2011--2022: school community/parent governor at King Athelstan Primary School (2012--2022 Resources Committee Chair, 2017--2022 Vice-Chair of Governing Body).
2007--2008: accredited UK Election Observer.
1992--now: ExNet was one of the very first UK Internet Service Providers, to open up the market, as a public good, and continues to provide pro bono services.
2000--now: Java "Expert" in Sun's Java Community Process standards body in several areas (JSR-41, JSR-65, JSR-96) and assisted informally with their CLDC/KVM design for J2ME.

Personal

Born York, England, 1967. Technophile, would-be traveller and linguist.

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Contact tel: +44 20 8296 5555; email: d@hd.org; www: http://d.hd.org/.