Gavin Starks

Gavin Starks is the founder and Chairman of AMEE (http://www.amee.com), whose aim is to map, track, and connect all the carbon-data on earth. He is a serial entrepreneur with more than a decade of experience building data businesses, 20 years in internet and software development, and a background in astrophysics. His experience spans business, technology, science, and media. Leading projects with organizations as diverse as the UK Government, Google, BBC, Rolls Royce, LogicaCMG, Shell, and Christian Aid, he has broad and deep knowledge of how data can change the world. He began developing internet-based research tools in 1993, joining Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Net as employee #5 in 1995. He helped design and build many Virgin web properties, including the award-winning Virgin Net and Virgin Radio, and was instrumental in kick-starting the streaming media industry in Europe. In 1999 he created an award-winning media-technology service, Tornado Productions, and sold it to a larger media group in 2003. He then built out world-leading data aggregator, CI: the first company to deliver digital products to iTunes, and delivered Amazon US ~25% of its digital download store. At the UK’s Jodrell Bank Radio Observatory he worked on systems designed to map and interpret the universe. He has created and lectured in engineering and music at Glasgow University. He holds degrees in astronomy and electronic music, is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and serves as a mentor for the A-Frame program at the ICA.