Tim O’Reilly, the technology book publisher who popularised the phrase “Web 2.0”, said that Foursquare and similar geo-location services owed their existence to Ronald Reagan.

He said it was Reagan’s idea to open the government-built GPS network to the private sector, making possible an enormous range of services as a result. O’Reilly said: “The government built this hard infrastructure and opened it up to the market.”

O’Reilly, speaking at the SXSW technology conference in Austin, Texas, said that governments have a role to play in building the infrastructure that could be used for innovation. He cited highways and broadband roll-out as other examples of how the government has played this role.

O’Reilly added: “I didn’t agree with Reagan’s politics but I loved that he had values.” He said that the major technology companies are driven by people with values. Google’s Larry Page and Sergei Brin and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg are “wrestling with problems out of love”, he said.

“I can’t think of a great company that didn’t have a big vision,” O’Reilly said. He said that governments could learn from this: “We need a hell of a lot more engineers driving policy and fewer lawyers.”

Tim O’Reilly has been working with technical writing since the late-1970s and his company, now known as O’Reilly Media, began publishing technical manuals in the early 1980s.

O’Reilly has been quick to spot new trends in technology development and publish books explaining them. When the company first published a book about the world wide web, there were only 200 websites.