Paul Golding: Coder, Builder, Transformer.
Architect of many revenue-generating
advanced-tech platforms, products & enterprise tech transformations…
See Portfolio for list of recent or notable projects.
My Background & Skill Set
Originally from the UK, I am an IEE prize winner with over 30 patents in a wide array of advanced technologies including AI, Bias in AI, Signal Processing, Computer Vision, Computational Aesthetics, Blockchain, Digital Marketing and Analytics.
Somewhat uniquely, I can be a highly-technical product leader, or a highly product-aware technical leader in deep-tech programs. I have run many “innovation labs” that are like mini orgs within an org. I am hands-on, still inventing many techniques and products. My consulting approach has enabled me unique freedoms to develop a range of unique pursue perspectives.
In 2011, I moved to Silicon Valley after being awarded a rare self-sponsored “Genius Visa”. I confess that I was motivated to avail my kids of Silicon Valley’s innovation potential whilst fulfilling a childhood dream to work amongst the silicon pioneers I had read about whilst growing up.
I designed my first commercial product (X.21 fibre-optic multiplexor) whilst still an undergrad, aged 19, for which I was awarded the international Von Rheinhold Nostrand prize and the prestigious IEE prize.
At only 22, I won the coveted Motorola global patent of the year for a novel chip co-processor design that enabled radical scaling of cellular networks. My method has been used in trillions of GSM calls.
I went on to become one of the inventors of the mobile app and wrote several leading text books in the field for Wiley Publishing. I also built the world’s first text messaging gateway (for Lucent Technologies) and the world’s first mobile portal for Netscape.
In 2016 I was interviewed by Sergey Brin to run next-generation Google Glass “labs” (my PhD research in the 90s was in augmented reality) but the position didn’t materialize after the demise of Glass and I moved on to work in fintech for a while.
I pioneered the use of various machine learning and AI techniques in the 90s whilst designing one of the first ML chips for digital cellular, which earned me many patents related to co-processor architecture and ML acceleration.
I have helped many of the world’s leading brands with technology transformation, including O2 in the UK where I led the creation of their start-up incubator whilst also building a programmable telecoms platform that included a novel programming language of my own design, called connFu.
I have held Chief Scientist, Chief Architect and CTO “technologist in residence” roles at a number of leading orgs across multiple continents, often working with a high-performing sales culture (note that I am fully trained in SPIN selling).
I have given many keynotes at prestigious corporate and public events, often with a “futurist” slant.
Outside of work, I helped my wife to homeschool three kids by following a “renaissance” style eclectic education program that blended classical education with modern updates, hoping to instill polymathy. I am a proponent of teaching computational-based maths to kids in order to explore foundational ideas versus rote-learning. We were lucky that our kids also gained access to the pioneering EPGY high school at Stanford. Feel free to contact me if you want to know more.
I am a keen student of philosophy of mind, linguistics and aesthetics. I have developed several theories of “cognition” within the realms of building “augmented creativity” tools using AI.
To know more about me and how I can help your enterprise, please contact me.
Key Credentials
IEE Prize
Winner of the IEE prize for outstanding achievement in Electronic Engineering (UK). Not only did I achieve a record high grade, but my final-year project was commercially licensed (an X.21 Fiber-Optic Multiplexor).
>30 patents in advanced technologies (1992-2021)
Including in AI, blockchain, computer vision, signal processing for cellular, computational aesthetics, attention-based bots, digital art, digital marketing, analytics and more.
One of the Earliest Patents in Applied Neural Networks (Comms)
During the so-called “AI winter”, I filed patents for my ’94 invention: “Multi-layer Perceptron Neural Network Adaptive Equaliser” which was one of the earliest NN patents for a commercial use of AI in the field of mobile communications.
Early application of AI/ML to 3D Image Processing
From 1990-1996 I conducted EU-funded collaborative academia-industry research at Motorola R&D whilst studying part-time for a PhD (which I did not complete). The work pioneered the use of AI to solve 3D compression (mesh decimation) for mobile augmented reality applications.
World-beating financial OCR performance (Computer Vision)
For Prosper Inc, a fintech company in SF, I coded software to read financial docs at any angle and with varying amounts of background noise, exceeding the capabilities of the leading finance OCR vendor (Lead Tools). This led to several patent applications.
Motorola Patent of the Year (Youngest ever recipient, Age 24)
For designing a chipset radio that revolutionized the compactness of cellular basestations (for microcells). Multiple patents awarded, resulting in a new family of DSP devices for Motorola semiconductor division.
Architect of a Data Fabric capable of Massively Scalable Simulation of the Enterprise to Manage Complexity
For a UC-Berkeley incubated start-up, I architected and built a serverless backend using the ECS pattern from Massive Multiplayer Online Gaming (MMOG) that allowed composable objects to take on any number of properties. This goals was to power “omniscient” knowledge-management systems like the magical one seen in Minority Report, capable of scaling to every business object in an enterprise.
Von Rheinhold Nostrand (Publisher) Prize
Winner for “outstanding academic achievement” in designing a commercially adopted product (X.21 fiber-optic MUX) as an undergrad, aged 19.
Invited "Futurist" at Many Leading Orgs
I have presented “futurist” or technology insights talks to the likes of McLaren Racing, O2 UK, Naspers, Ericsson, AT&T, Vodafone, GSMA, 3 UK and many more.
Large-scale Stream Processing "Math" Engine
In 2010, for McLaren Racing (of Formula One fame), I architected one of the world’s first real-time stream-processing engines that was intended for large-scale performance engineering IoT solutions as a spin-out (McLaren Applied Technologies), as used by Nike, Specialized and other leading performance brands.
Founder of Europe's First Mobile Apps Co.
I founded Magic E Company in 1996. We created many industry firsts:
- First SMS gateway web API
- First Microsoft Exchange wireless connector with full OTA capabilities, licensed to Glenayre Paging in North America.
- First location-based service (MetroWalker HK and NTT DoCoMo Japan)
Author of First Major Textbook for Mobile Apps
Published by Wiley Academic Press in 2004 – one of the first text books explaining mobile apps and related cellular technologies.
Expert Member of Java Mobile Apps JSR
I was one of the few individual expert members of the Java Community Process team that developed the original mobile apps framework called MIDP.
Inventor of connFu scripting language
connFu was a pioneering platform and programming language (Ruby DSL) for building telephony services atop of any carrier network
Designer of the World's First GSM baseband chipset
I was lead designer for the Enhanced Filter Co-Processor (EFCOP) that enabled the world’s first DSP chip for GSM basestations. This work produced over 10 keystone patents for Motorola in the GSM market.
Featured Podcasts
For a more peek into my career, life and activities, the following recent podcasts might prove useful (I hope).


The Art of Quantifying Aesthetic Judgement:
This was a podcast with the excellent “State of the Art” podcast series and stemmed from my long stint in art-related technologies across a wide range of applications from e-commerce to computer vision (to understand what we see in art). It sheds some light on the science of viewing art, but also diverges into the general themes of technology, AI and creativity.
Blockchain (With Stephen Shapiro)
Stephen Shapiro is considered one of the leading innovation consultants whose client list is longer than this website. We first met when i invited him to run an “Innovation Poker” session at the first ever O2 UK innovation day (a huge offsite bash). We kept in touch and when Stephen heard about the work I was doing in Blockchain he invited me onto his podcast to explain blockchain and its use cases (to a business audience).
Featured Publications
I have written numerous books, essays, guest chapters and papers. Here are just a few notable examples.

From Writing books to Writing Repos: Elasticsearch
I stopped writing technical books after the vastness of self-teaching materials on the web became apparent. I doubt that I have much more to add to the corpus, although I recently re-wrote the Guide to Elasticsearch using Python examples instead of RESTful ones and published it as a Github repo. Please feel free to use, abuse and extend. Pull requests welcome (as I only covered about 60% of the API).

Next Generation Wireless Applications
My earlier books (“Next Generation Wireless Applications” editions 1 and 2) were written to fill a gap at the time, plus I used to teach mobile apps techniques and technologies so often that I needed a kind of “manual” to hand out. It was just about possible to navigate the entire scope of mobile apps within a single 600-page book back then. Note that the used of the term “next generation” was before anyone even knew there was such a concept as wireless applications, but I had already built many apps by then (see “my work”) and had previously done a lot of academic research into mobile comms methods where the term “next generation” was already in vogue (for what we eventually called “wireless data” versus voice).

Thumb Culture
I also wrote the final chapter about the future of mobile in the “Thumb Culture” compendium, in which I predicted the rise of mixed-reality devices (fairly easy to predict) and documented a Google-glass-esque use case. (As a side note, I ended up being interviewed by Sergey Brin to run a next-gen Google Glass research, but they canned the project.)

Connected Services
During an amazing few years trying to reinvent the carrier industry via a well-intentioned investment from O2 UK and Telefonica (see my work) I found myself having to explain the concept of platform business models and modern Web economics, like the API economy. The then-CEO of O2 (now at Verizon) had coined a term Connected Services about the future of carriers, but no one seemed to know what it really meant. Rather cheekily, I wrote a book to describe the application of modern web/platform techniques to carriers and called it “Connected Services” in an attempt to offer a comprehensive and meaningful definition.