David Wood

Sectors: Longevity Legends, Media and Publicity.

David Wood, D.Sc., a member of the IEET Board of Directors, has spent 25 years envisioning, architecting, designing, implementing, and avidly using smart mobile devices. As one of the pioneers of the smartphone industry, he co-founded Symbian, the creator of the world’s first successful smartphone operating system, and served on the leadership teams of Psion Software and Symbian from 1996-2009. At different times, his executive responsibilities included software development, technical consulting, developer evangelism, partnering and ecosystem management, and research and innovation. The EPOC32 mobile operating system, of which he was the architect and head of integration of upper layers, went on (renamed as “Symbian OS”) to ship in half a billion smartphones between 2001 and 2012.

From 2010 to 2013, David was Technology Planning Lead (CTO) of Accenture Mobility, leading the global team that identified and oversaw staged investments to create assets using emerging or fast-changing mobile technologies. He also co-led Accenture’s “Mobility Health” business initiative, “Mobility innovation for dramatically better healthcare”. He now acts as independent futurist, consultant, and writer, at Delta Wisdom.

As chair of London Futurists, David has organized regular meetings in London since March 2008 on futurist, transhumanist, technoprogressive, and singularitarian topics. Membership of London Futurists now exceeds 3,000. Recently David has been building the new UK Transhumanist Party.

David received a triple first class mathematics degree from Cambridge, UK. Also at Cambridge, he undertook four years of doctoral research in the philosophy of science – covering the philosophy of mind, the characterisation of pseudo-science, creationism vs. Darwinism, and the shocking implications of quantum mechanics.

In November 2005 David received an honorary Doctorate in Science (D.Sc.) from the University of Westminster, in recognition of his services to the smartphone industry. T3 magazine included him in 2009 in their list of the “100 most influential people in technology”. In 2010 he featured in the world’s first Augmented Reality CV.

David became a Board Director of Humanity+ in November 2013. He was lead editor of the volume “Anticipating 2025: A guide to the radical changes that may lie ahead, whether or not we’re ready”, published in June 2014. His own book “Smartphones and beyond: lessons from the remarkable rise and fall of Symbian” was published in September 2014, and has been described as “One of the most candid and revealing books a technology executive has ever written”.