About

5 Things About Me

So rather than waffle at you, here are some useless facts about me Nick Hornby style:

I grew up in Wales, UK but now live in Mountain View, California in the heart of Silicon Valley (from one valley to another, you could say).
My accent is starting to sound like a male version of Catherine Zeta Jones (Douglas?). I’ll need to work on that.
I’m a bit of a techie, addicted to buying Apple products, but try to stop myself from becoming a totally anti-social geek…
...which I achieve thanks to my beautiful native Californian wife (...and pet beagle).

I’ve always loved to take photographs. You can see my latest snapshots from my flickr feed on the right, or a gallery of my other work using the link above.
Rails Projects

Look behind the hype and I hope you’ll find as I did, that Ruby on Rails is actually a great development platform. I’ve been plugging away at a couple of different projects to learn the framework over the last year or so which has resulted in the following.

droppedcallr

droppedcallr started out as a conversation between a colleague and I about how great it would be if there was a site where mobile phone users could log where they experience dropped calls.

At the time I was interested in learning the Google Maps API, so thought it would be great if I could build a simple mash-up to allow users to put pins in the places where they experience problems.

This gave me a chance to work on something small and simple so that I could take some rails development through to production. It’s great to take your first app live as there’s much more to it than just deploying your code.

Device Karma

Device Karma started out as my first (ambitious) rails project. Initially designed as a web interface to the WURFL device information repository, it has since grown in scope to be a community site that allows users to contribute, view (both browsing and via SOAP and XML-RPC) and combine information from multiple device information repositories.

With ‘feature creep’ that I’ve been trying to control, I’ve not launched Device Karma yet, but expect to release a version shortly. Stay tuned.

PS: If you have a device information database that you’d like to add to Device Karma, I’d be happy to hear from you.

My Day Job

I joined Argogroup in June 2004 and have held roles in Field Engineering, Solutions Marketing and Business Development, before being promoted to VP Marketing in April 2007.

My experience in the mobile industry started in early 2000, having held a variety of roles with Volantis, BitFlash and Everypath since that time.