Cyril Houri

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Cyril Lionel Houri (born April 1969 in Meudon, France) is a New York-based entrepreneur who has founded two successful tech startups – InfoSplit,Inc. a geolocation provider, and Mexens Technology Inc., developer of the Navizon personal location system (one of the first Third-party applications softwares made for Apple IPhone). Houri is a visionary software architect who has designed pioneering IP geolocation, WiFi and cellular positioning technologies, and his expertise in location-based technology made him a significant figure in the landmark LICRA vs. Yahoo! legal case surrounding the online sale of Nazi memorabilia in France.

Houri was educated in the mathematics and preparatory schools of Paris before graduating with an MS degree in both engineering and computer science from the National Polytechnic Institute of Toulouse, France in 1992. He moved to New York in 1996 to take a job designing financial software.

In 1999, Houri founded InfoSplit Inc., a pioneer in IP geolocation, which identifies the geographic location of an Internet user. Houri designed and patented some of the original technology that is now used by companies all over the world to geolocate their website visitors. Geolocation has become a core technology for online fraud prevention, territory rights enforcement and geography-based Internet advertising. (Houri’s patent is now co-owned by Microsoft and Quova.)

Houri’s geolocation expertise was called upon in 2000, after Yahoo! was sued by two French anti-racism groups demanding that Yahoo! France prevent French web users from accessing English-language auction sites offering Nazi memorabilia, which are illegal in France. Yahoo! argued in court that it was technically impossible to block only French web surfers from the site because of the lack of borders on the Internet. Houri was called to testify on behalf of the plaintiff groups, LICRA and UEJF, and demonstrated that the new geolocation technology available at the time could be used to block at least 90% of French-based users from accessing the offending Yahoo! sites. The court ruled for the plaintiffs and ordered Yahoo to block French web users from accessing the unlawful content. This landmark ruling has impacted Internet rights laws, court rulings and policy discussions ever since.

In 2004, Houri sold InfoSplit to Quova, a larger California-based geolocation company. Shortly thereafter, he launched Mexens Technology, Inc. and created Navizon, a wireless positioning system for handheld devices that triangulates signals from cellular tower and/or Wi-Fi access points to pinpoint the user’s geographic location, in much the same way as personal GPS devices use satellite signals. Navizon is based on a collaborative database compiled by users with GPS devices, who collect positional information on Wi-Fi hotspots and cellular signals.