Thomas Nicholls

At balena, our mission is to empower companies to craft exceptional products and services powered by fleets of Edge devices. We're dedicated to continually simplifying the journey of developing, managing, and scaling device fleets.

External lecturer for the Advanced Master in Unmanned Aircraft Systems and Aviation Management. Providing insights into the history, current state and future of the commercial drone industry.

Delair provides PaaS and SaaS solutions that enable large enterprises to capture, aggregate, view and analyze imagery and geospatial data in order to create living digital twins of their assets and gain new insights into how they can improve their business. In the early days of the company Delair only built and sold UAVs (drones), but seeing the customer demand for end-to-end solutions, Delair built an industry leading software platform for data analysis and business intelligence, as well as a service offering allowing the company to be a one-stop shop for anyone wanting to benefit from aerial intelligence. In the end of 2017, Delair launched a strategic partnership with Intel, that would see Intel creating a new platform offering under the brand Intel Insight, based on Delair's delair.ai software platform. Today Delair sells its solutions and services directly to large enterprises and through strategic value add partners.

Advisor on strategy and IoT business development

Sigfox has radically changed the landscape of connectivity solutions by enabling simple sensor-based hardware devices to send and receive small messages, from the physical world and to the Internet, at an extremely low cost and with very low battery consumption. This has lead to the creation of what is today known as the LPWA (Low Power Wide Area) category of connectivity, a category which Sigfox not only established, but also continues to redefine. We are proud to have extended the Internet to the physical world. The solution is provided as a B2B subscription-based connectivity offer and is based on a new globally rolled out physical infrastructure of dedicated IoT radio antennas installed on roof tops. Sigfox’s customers build their own hardware devices, in which they integrate the Sigfox software protocol, and integrate their IT system with Sigfox’s global Internet-connected Cloud through standard-based web services APIs. A broad catalogue of Sigfox compatible devices and software platforms is also available. My role at Sigfox was to establish the brands, including the LPWA category, and scale the brands globally. Starting as a one-person communication army and building it up to a global team of 15 communication experts, I managed press relations, event organization and participation, product- and services launches, digital and social media, ecosystem animation, internal communications and culture, and everything else related to the Sigfox brands. As part of the executive team I participated in the definition and continuous evolution of both the corporate strategy and the operational execution of it, as well as the +€300M fund raising. As a frequent speaker at events, including everything from TedX, to MWC (Mobile World Congress), CES (Consumer Electronics Show), I have built a great network of fellow IoT experts and aficionados.

Launched and managed the Toulouse chapter of CocoaHeads. Brought amazing mobile developers together to create a melting pot of skills, brain power, experience and fun.

Informative and collaborative events for anyone interested in mobile solutions.

Launched and managed a mobile application studio and expert consulting service. Projects ranging from mobile strategy and implementation for startups, to BYOD strategy for Fortune 100 companies.

Started as "Goojet", a cross-platform mobile app that created a much improved mobile Internet experience, before we had iOS and Android. The app would let you discover, share and discuss mobile Internet services and participate in a wide range of group discussions. After the launch of iOS and Android, the company was repositioned as Scoop.it, a mobile and web experience for curating web content.

Involved in a wide range of projects and companies with different types of technical roles, mostly as expert consultant. Sample projects include: Joost / The Venice Project: the founders of Skype had a plan: reinvent the television experience. Let's just call it Netflix before Netflix existed. They raised +$50M in funding, hired experts from all over the world and sadly failed because of lack of media rights and probably also for being just a bit too early in the market. My role was to create the technical architecture for storing user data in an extremely scalable manner so that the architecture was prepared to manage very large scale datasets. Airbus: As one of Europe’s largest enterprises, Airbus had a wealth of different software platforms and each and every project would set up their own operational environment and come up with strategies for scaling. To minimise costs and improve scalability, I helped Airbus set-up a very large scale internal hosting solution, with dynamic horizontal and vertical scalability. 600+ application servers running on virtual machines in multiple data centres. Mostly based on IBM software platforms and Sun Microsystem hardware. On a very different project, but also for Airbus, I implemented a synchronisation system allowing the pilot and co-pilot’s computers to be synchronised during flights. Interested challenge in a highly secured and system-critical environment. E-Commerce: My early days of software development were spent building some of Denmark’s first global e-commerce websites. From system development, to architecture and project management. I spent a great deal of energy on also contributing to the user experience design and development methodologies, using agile methodologies before that was modern.