Geoff Jones

Geoff in a nutshell

View my Linked In profile.

Born and bred in England’s East Midlands at Creswell . Famous for the discovery of Ice age man in The Crags, the pit disaster on my sisters fifth birthday and The Brass Band.

Educated in the ‘B’ stream at a secondary modern, made to leave school by my mother a day before my fifteenth birthday, Even though I got the highest grades in the school leaving certificate. Starting my interest in business by selling sweet chesnuts and conker trees at school.

Started as a junior operative trainee in Renishaw Ironworks (Eventually doing air, water & incoming scrap chemical analysis in the labs under the Chief chemist John Meakin). Renishaw also enabled me to get my Duke of Edinburghs’ Gold award. Then working for the Steetley refractory brick company in their research labs. doing high temperature testing and x-ray crystallography  under Stafford Scholes.

Leaving home at age 19 to be a research assistant at The Cavendish Laboratories in Cambridge (In the Metal Crystals section under  Mick Brown and Archie Howie). Where initially I developed crystal growing furnace controllers and then instrumentation for the worlds first STEM, the HB5.

In my spare time I started up a recycling electronics components business then designing, manufacturing and selling with Jake (Pete) Chapman the first multichannel disco sound operated flashing light system.

Set up a sole trader, soft start business, in 1970 manufacturing instruments such as motor controllers, Digimeters, Scandrives, IMAS, and backscattered electron detectors created out of work at Cavendish (Initially for Terry Brown and Metal Crystals - first customers).

Forming a partnership with Pat Heslop-Harrison and Nick Toop in 1983 to develop a de-icing pump controller (from a contact I made whilst walking Hadrians wall) which then led onto CMM components and finally to the current product range see Cortex Controllers website.

Developed the Cortex range of stepper motor driven rotators to aid optical inspection of jet engines, now used by all major airlines and military air forces globally. Negotiating with Olympus to take worldwide distribution rights.

Sold my share of Cortex Controllers on July 1 2004 to Nick Toop. Now concentrating on the latest Web2 technologies eg RSS feeds, Blogging, tagging etc.

Currently also helping to mentor other start ups in Cambridge UK.

First surfed the net in 1994 at the Cyberia cafe in London and early in 1995 had my first dial up connection with Pipex. In 2002 I started my blog using Dave Winer’s Radio software moving to Blogger in 2003. Organised the first Our Social World conference on September 9th 2005 in Cambridge, UK. Using Wordpress for the first time.

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