Tom Coates
Renowned technologist
On the web
- Blog: Plastic Bag
- Twitter: @tomcoates
Tom Coates is a technologist and writer focused on the shape of the web to come and building products that thrive within it. He's worked for many large technology companies including Time Out, the BBC and Yahoo! where he was Head of Product for the new product incubator Brickhouse. Most recently he created the location sharing service Fire Eagle and defined Yahoo!'s User Location Strategy. He's spoken at many national and international conferences about social software, the web of data, location and future media services. Now independent, he helps new product development as a consultant and start-up advisor. He writes—occasionally—at plasticbag.org.
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Everything the Network Touches
The work we’re collectively doing—opening up gradually all of human information and media, making it recombinable, helping people create and share their work—is a huge unspoken, sexy, world-redefining mission.
It’s a mission that many of us have become blasé about, almost unaware of. It’s a project so large that it’s hard to get a grasp on. And the next few years are going to get even more interesting as the network pervades physical objects and environments, sensing and manifesting information in the real world.
It’s time to recognise the scale of the project we have in front of us, the breadth of the material we have to work with, and the possibilities of design within it. All of human knowledge, creativity—even the planet itself—is our canvas.
Webstock 09
Instrumenting your life
New product ideas are increasingly based around the surfacing, exposing and recombination of data - and people are the biggest source of data there is. The last few years have seen us exploring the possibilities of social data and we're on the brink of the mainstreaming of location - so what's next? What parts of our lives can we track and instrument? What new product possibilities emerge? And what of data portability, ownership, brokerage and privacy?