nickb_sk nick@cloudmade.com DOPPLR
Nick Black
Founder
Nick co-founded CloudMade in 2007 after spending a year running a London based Ruby on Rails development shop with CloudMade co-founder Steve. Nick has a diverse background, born in the exotic Isle of Man, he moved to London in 2000 to study Archaeology at University College London (UCL). When he graduated in 2003, Nick worked for a research institute in Kenya, where he began to teach himself the principles of land surveying and geographic information systems. After working for various archaeology companies and universities in the UK, Ireland and South Africa, he enrolled in a Masters course in Geographic Information Science back at UCL in 2005. Disappointed by the complexity, clunkiness and cost of the desktop GIS taught to graduate students and shocked by the cost of geodata in the UK, Nick began to investigate the world of open source hacking, Linux and of course OpenStreetMap.
After meeting Steve in a pub near UCL, Nick quickly became involved in all aspects of the OpenStreetMap, participating in the infamous Isle of Wight mapping party and the ensuing Summer of Mapping 2006 during which the mapping party was born. Having graduated from UCL in 2006, Nick took a job with GetMapping, a UK based aerial photography company, where he lead research into open source geographic technologies. Nick left GetMapping in early 2007 and teamed up with Steve to secure angel funding from Copenhagen based tech investor, Nikolaj Nyholm, and founded CloudMade soon after.
Nick still likes free maps and free software. He's responsible for product development and developer outreach at CloudMade, where he tries to think of cool and exciting things to do with maps and then tells you about them.