Geraint Davies

Geraint Davies, a video engineer who has lived on Anglesey since 1996, has been chosen as a Finalist for the St David Award for Innovation, Science and Technology for his role in developing an element of the real time video app, Periscope.

Periscope was launched in March 2015 and enables users to view the world in real time, through someone else’s eyes and broadcast live events to their followers instantly through videos. It is this important video element that Geraint built which is central to the app’s function.

Following study at Oxford University, he joined Logica in London as a Unix consultant, porting 2 operating systems to new computer architectures. He is also a co-author of a book on Unix programming.

He then moved to Microsoft as a development lead for more than 8 years, where he was the architect and lead developer of the Quartz multimedia technology, which is the basis for Microsoft’s ActiveMovie and DirectShow, widely used for digital video playback, DVD and digital audio editing solutions.

Geraint then established his own consultancy company before joining Periscope in early 2015, where he was responsible for all the coding and video architecture that makes Periscope a live, real time video broadcaster. The app was acquired by Twitter in January 2015 and won the Apple App Store title of App of the Year for 2015, less than a year after it was launched.