Neil’s passion for software started in the 1970’s when he taught himself BASIC and 6502 Assembler. During the 1980’s Neil was involved in various software projects on a variety of platforms including IBM 390, Commodore PET, Apple MAC, IBM PC (DOS) and AS400. The 1990’s brought some big changes to Neil’s career; Neil received a first class honours degree in Computer Science, started the first (of many) software companies and began teaching software development, initially in academia and then commercially. During the early 1990’s Neil worked on a number of different real-time software systems. The work he did on these systems, combined with other research into real-time systems led to a thesis entitled “Software Architectures for Distributed Real-Time Systems”. Neil was awarded a PhD for this thesis from University College London and the brand of Dr. Neil was born.

Since 1995 Dr. Neil has been involved in the formation of many software companies, his roles varying from mentoring through to directorship. Dr. Neil keeps a very active involvement in the software being produced and delivered today, and provides feedback to both large and small companies on how to increase the value of their software business. Dr. Neil is currently awarded as a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional and Microsoft Regional Director.

Dr. Neil’s latest enterprise is a global software business called nsquared, which creates software experiences for digital tables. The nsquared mission is to put digital tables everywhere. The software built by nsquared improves face-to-face meetings by providing opportunities for better connections between people and digital content on the table.

When Dr. Neil is not working on software he likes to get out in the great outdoors and go hiking and climbing in the mountains or swimming at the beach.

Talk to me about: software development, cloud computing, More Personal Computing, cognitive services, bots, conversation as a platform, true social computing, robotics, quantum computing, the economic singularity, and the future.