About Abalakov

Abalakov’s real name is Oliver Kühn. The name “Abal­akov” comes from Oliver’s enthu­si­asm for ice climb­ing. Abal­akov is  a gear­less ice-climbing anchor used dur­ing abseil­ing and named after Vitaly Abal­akov.

Busi­ness Life

Oliver is cofounder of skob­bler, where he deals mainly with com­mer­cial aspects. He learned a lot about dig­i­tal maps when nego­ti­at­ing con­tracts with the com­mer­cial map providers dur­ing his last jobs at SiemensVDO and Nav­igon. Dur­ing this jour­ney, most of the com­mer­cial map providers changed from friends to ene­mies, so his inter­est in help­ing Open­StreetMap to suc­ceed comes straight from the heart.

Oliver was elected as board mem­ber of the Open­StreetMap Foun­da­tion on 10^th August 2010.

Speak­ing

If you’re look­ing for a speaker, Oliver speaks on top­ics such as Open­StreetMap, Dig­i­tal Map­ping and Location-Based Ser­vices. He is flu­ent in Ger­man and English.

Per­sonal

When he has spare time, you will find Oliver in the out­doors – prefer­ably in the Alps. He has a weak­ness for a good Espresso. He under­stands how to work with a com­puter but rarely gets excited about tech­ni­cal bits and bytes stuff unless it improves his “real life”. Nonethe­less, he spends a sig­nif­i­cant amount of time in front of his PC, either because of work or post-processing his dig­i­tal images.

Oliver lives with his wife and their daugh­ter and son close to Bonn, Ger­many. He trav­els reg­u­larly between Bonn and Berlin.