John spent 10 years at multinational corporation IBM, settling in roles either side of the Atlantic in areas such as mainframe computer graphics and the early generations of PCs. He helped ship the first version of the OS2 operating system and managed new product development and marketing activities including brand management for the Transaction Processing range of software. He joined Microsoft and led the team that created Windows Media Player and enabled full screen video playback in Windows for the first time.

His next opportunity arose at Sony, where he coordinated work on professional editing suites, news editing systems and other software. With a wealth of business experience under his belt, John went on to support several early stage startups – raising millions of pounds of venture capital and seed funding. He was Chief Technology Officer, then C.E.O., at Active Navigation Limited during a seven year spell at the University of Southampton spinout.

Within the Centre John leads the ‘Future Technology Exploration’ and ‘SoC Labs’ streams. John’s interests span from the global world wide web, working with Professors Dame Wendy Hall, Sir Nigel Shadbolt and Sir Tim Berners-Lee on developing the open data movement, through to nanoscale device fabrication using the University’s semiconductor wafer fabrication facilities.