John Breslin


John Breslin is an Irish engineer and full professor at the National University of Ireland, Galway. His research publications have focused on the Social Semantic Web, and he co-authored two books on this topic in 2009 and 2015. He has served as secretary of the American Council on Exercise since 2017.
In 2015, Breslin co-founded the Galway City Innovation District to create startup-friendly spaces in downtown Galway. The first space, the PorterShed, is a refurbished former Guinness building that opened to startups in April 2016.
In 2011, Breslin was announced as a co-founder of StreamGlider, a visual real-time dashboard for tracking interests across various types of devices, along with Nova Spivack and Bill McDaniel.
In 2010, Breslin set up the New Tech Post, an online technology publisher. A San Jose office for the New Tech Post was announced by Breslin in March 2011.
In 2007, Breslin met the Collison brothers while Patrick was studying at MIT, and came up with the name for their first company, 'Shuppa', during a brainstorming session over dinner.
In 2006, Breslin co-founded adverts.ie, an online classified ads website and spin-off from boards.ie. The adverts.ie site was acquired in a joint venture by Distilled Media Group and Schibsted Media Group in 2015.
In 2004, while working as a researcher at DERI, Breslin founded the Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities project, a Semantic Web framework for sharing social data and used in web applications such as Yahoo! SearchMonkey, Drupal 7 and the Newsweek website.
In 1998, Breslin set up an Internet forum to discuss video games which evolved into boards.ie, one of Ireland's largest indigenous websites. He was awarded Net Visionary awards by the Irish Internet Association in 2005 and 2006.