Alex Butterworth: Founder/Managing and Creative Director
Alex Butterworth is an historian, producer, cross-media author and designer of digital narrative experiences. He has written and produced drama-documentaries for television, written and presented radio documentaries, served as a dramaturge in virtual worlds, and designed story-engines for emergent video games. His most recent book The World That Never Was: A True Story of Dreamers, Schemers, Anarchists and Secret Agents a wry and sympathetic history of nineteenth century revolutionaries (that somehow made it on to Karl Rove’s summer reading list) has been published internationally . His previous co-written work, Pompeii: The Living City, won the Longmans/History Today New Generation Book of the Year. Alex holds degrees from the University of Oxford and the Royal College of Art. He likes to describe himself as a tightly focused dilettante. Amblr is the expression of his wide-ranging interests.
Chris Thorpe: Technologist
Chris is never sure what to say in biographies and tends to introduce himself as someone who makes things, often with code, always powered by tea. Previously he’s worked on projects as diverse as setting up Open Access publishing in the UK and video archives of Nobel Prize winners, putting contemporary art on the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square, building best-selling social worlds for children (Moshi Monsters), and designing the Vogue UK iPad app. He has also created a developer platform for the Guardian and open data projects with/for the UK government. He was one of the co-founders of Artfinder, a service to help people find out about the art they love, and has recently been part of the team setting up the Government Digital Service.
Joe Zuntz: Founder/Lead Front End Developer
Joe has a background in astrophysics, with degrees from the University of Cambridge and a doctorate from Imperial College, London. His continuing work with cosmology takes many forms, from outreach sessions in schools and Big Bang debates at Speaker’s Corner, to the Fellowships he holds at the Oxford Martin School and Wolfson College, Oxford. A founder member of Amblr, he is now applying his expertise in massively parallel programming to the field of geo-location, and using the iOS skills he acquired as a veteran of the Zooniverse Citizen Science team to craft compelling mobile user experiences. As comfortable working with artists to popularise science as he is with C, Python and [cough] Fortran, Joe offers a perfect bridge between the worlds of analogue creativity and code.
Stuart Lynn: Founder/Lead Back End Developer
Stuart has been entertaining the public with complex ideas since he was little more than a bairn. His distinguished career at the University of Edinburgh, which culminated in a Beltan Fellowship for Public Engagement, saw him appointed Science Communicator at the Royal Observatory. While a Fellow of the James Martin School of the Twenty-First Century at the University of Oxford, he press-ganged thousands of crew members to transcribe historical climate-change data from ship’s logs for the “Old Weather” Zooniverse project. More recently he has crowd-sourced the search for new planets (sifting radio signals from outer space), working with the Adler Planetarium in Chicago. He’s quite good with C, C++, objective C, Java, Fortran, Python, Unix shell scripting, SQL, CVS, SVN, Perl, PHP, Javascript, Django for CMS, CSS, XML, XHTML, Ruby on Rails and MongoDB.
Amblr draws on a network of expert content producers, including prize-winning talent from the fields of radio, television, publishing, newspapers, illustration, cartography and graphic design to suit the needs of individual projects.