The irrepressible Mansour Raad (pictured) opened the eyes of the "Real-World Flex" audience wide on Monday, as he demonstrated the extraordinary power of Adobe's Flex by demo'ing a mouth-watering sequence of 'mapping mashups' drawing on the full power of ESRI's astonishing GIS data combined with the presentation power of Flex.

With over 20 years of experience in the IT field, Raad is Senior Software Architect of ArcWeb Services at ESRI - or Environmental System Research Institute - where he has been using his command of i-Technology to design the next-generation Internet solutions. A user of Flex since its "Royal" days, he said, he has also been a team lead in architecting and implementing ArcIMS, the premier mapping solution on the Internet.

ESRI is the world leader in Geographic Information Systems (GIS), Raad reminded his audience, adding - in case anyone in the Grand Ballroom of New York's historic Roosevelt Hotel didn't know that ESRI is such an established company - that its ESRI User Conference last week, just days before "Real-World Flex" was its 26th!

Currently, Raad is the Flex evangelist within ESRI and is leading the Flex-based ArcWeb Explorer solution, but his background has other interesting highlghts. After graduating from Boston University with a Masters Degree in Aerospace Engineering, for example he combined his IT experience and designed and implemented an airport noise and operation monitoring system (ANOMS) that is currently used in over 30 airports world wide.

His first "mashup," if you will. But certainly not his last!

Jeremy Geelan introduces ESRI's Mansour Raad who showed off the power of Flex
mashing up with real world mapping applications.