Daniel C. M. May


Daniel Chien-Meng May is an Australian tech entrepreneur, author, co-founder of LIFX, and organiser of the inaugural Launch48 Australia events in Sydney and Melbourne.

Biography

May was born in Penang, Malaysia, and immigrated with his family to Australia at age nine. He completed his high schooling at Melbourne High School, before undertaking studies at Monash University. May's first journal article, "Modeling Activities in C++" was published in 1994 when he was twenty-one years old. He later completed a PhD in Software Development on a scholarship at the University of Southern Denmark.
May is best known as the co-founder and CIO of LIFX, the original LED smart lighting bulb. The LIFX Kickstarter campaign is recorded as one of the most successful. Forbes records a total of US$1.3 million raised in three days, while the Huffington Post notes the timeframe as six days.
In 2014, May joined Matthew Zwolenski, Colin Fairweather, and Rod Tucker as expert panelists in big-data, smart cities, advanced broadband networks, and smart devices at
2020: Smart Cities, Zettabyte Data and 200 billion things. May's contribution to the understanding of The Internet of Things, sustaining future smart and sustainable industries, is also present in his published writings that cover diverse topics such as organisational culture and knowledge management to "Designing for the Digitally Pervasive World".
In 2015, May was keynote speaker at Stora Tillväxtdagen after acting as a key advisor to the Skellefteå Municipality, an industrial hub in the regional north of Sweden wanting to kick-start startup and innovation activity. May was also keynote Startups & Innovation speaker at StarsConf in Santiago, Chile, in 2017.

Selected publications