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About me

My name is Kim Spence-Jones. For the past eight years or so I have been a Director of OpenHub, based in Cambridge, UK. These days, I am working on on new infrastructure architectures for smart homes and future cities.

Exciting projects with which I’ve recently been involved include a large EU project on supported living (MonAMI), and research and development work with the BRE, on the smart homes and digital communications aspects of their Innovation Park in Watford. I have been involved in a number of projects and studies about how community digital infrastructure can improve people’s lives, including Interspan email connectivity between schools across Europe in 1985, the Cambridge Digital iTV Trial in 1994, and many projects since.

If you want to know more about how I came to be working on new paradigms for residential digital infrastructures, here is a potted history of my career… I am a graduate in Engineering from Cambridge University. I have been working on home control, IPTV and digital convergence since the early 1980’s. I am a serial entrepreneur, and have built up several companies in these fields.

In my early career I designed a significant part of the Acorn BBC Micro, going on to develop the most respected networking equipment for UK schools, as well as early automated control add-ons for Acorn and MS-DOS PCs. In 1985, my company started the world’s first commercial X.400 email service, and in the early 1990s, I was involved in two of the first three interactive video trials in the UK.

I have also been involved in the development of ATM and WiFi networking equipment, and several IP set-top boxes.