Tuesday, 5/22/2007
4:00 PM - 4:30 PM
Level: Business/Strategic

Garlik, the personal information and identity company, has raised nearly $20m of venture capital investment to launch a large scale, consumer business based on semantic web technologies. Having researched the landscape of emerging technologies, Tom made the strategic decision to "bet the ranch" on semantic web technology for this new venture. This decision was driven by a belief that semantic web technologies could be used to put power and control back into the hands of the consumer and this is what Garlik is setting out to do in the field of personal information and identity management. In this talk, Tom will share his experience of the journey so far, including:

• As ex-CIO of a large online bank running on proven, secure, industrial strength technology, what was the logic behind the decision to adopt as yet unproven Semantic Web technology at the heart of this new venture?
• What arguments encouraged the venture capital community to back a proposition based entirely on Semantic Web technology?
• What have been the real, practical challenges of taking a set of Semantic Web ideas and turning these into a large scale, secure infrastructure based on robust Semantic Web technology?

Tom has over 20 years industry experience of corporate IT environments and venture backed technology start ups. His career spans Goldman Sachs to PriceWaterhouseCoopers and includes founding an agent-based software company, Lost Wax. Tom founded Garlik, the online identity company based on semantic web technology in 2006, after 3 years as Chief Information Officer and part of the founding team of Egg plc, the online bank that grew rapidly to 3m customers and was acquired recently by Citibank for over $1Bn.