Nicholas Ball

Technology Entrepreneur and Innovator with a hint of Academic.

Nicholas graduated with a Masters of Engineering (MEng) from Imperial College London (2004-2008), a four year intensive course which included a three year undergraduate degree. He achieved a 1st Class Honours degree at one of the highest ranking universities in the world for Computing.

During his undergraduate studies he received numerous awards including the Gloucester Research Prize, an award for Academic Excellence (2007) and the IBM Final Masters Project Prize, awarded for Best Individual MEng Projects (2008).

Months after graduating he published his work, titled 'Distributed Content Delivery using Load-Aware Network Coordinates'. This research has been cited 11 times as of Feb 2012.

In 2009 he was awarded a full academic EPSRC DTA scholarship for a PhD position at Imperial College London (ranked 2nd in Europe and 7th in the world for research in engineering and information technology by THE). During this time, he's been working under the supervision of Dr Peter Pietzuch in the Large-Scale Distributed Systems Group (LSDS). On an individual level, his research has focussed on data discovery and search for the next generation. The expected finishing date for his PhD is October this year, 2012.

Aside from his academic studies, Nicholas assumed a position at Formicary (2007 and 2008), a financial technology house in London. His role quickly progressed giving him creative freedom to build products for top clients including Deutsche Bank, Commerzbank, BNP Paribas, Barclays Capital, UBS Investment Bank and Bank of America. Two of these products have now become core to Formicary's portfolio.

Nicholas founded Silvertipcode in 2006, offering consulting services to various clients and projects over the years. Projects have ranged from a luxury property rental website to a private art collection showpiece application. Aside from consultancy, Silvertipcode has been developing some interesting personal projects which focus on disrupting the online social and gaming sectors. Some of these products in current development include Bableo and Earthleo