Raj is a developer advocate for Cloudant, an IBM company. He pioneered Web mapping-as-a-service in the late 1990s with Syncline, a startup he co-founded. After that he finished his PhD at MIT, which explored the potential of web services to power urban information systems. Prior to joining Cloudant in 2014, Raj work on geospatial data interoperability challenges for the Open Geospatial Consortium, an international standards body. He's a frequent speaker on interoperability and geo-location services, and contributed to O'Reilly's 2005 book, "Mapping Hacks".