Tom Coates is a product designer who has worked for UpMyStreet and the BBC and now works for Yahoo. He’s currently working on fire eagle. a location capturing, managing and sharing service.
Fire eagle has two initiatives – giving people tools to use, and giving people the control over the information that those tools develops. The think of fire eagle as a prototype of a kind of service that will become increasingly popular in the future – the capture management and sharing of data about peoples lives is an attractive proposition to humankind – personal infomatics.
We’re seeing a move from webpages with data lying behind them to an increasingly interconnected web of data – an aggregate of connected data and services. Twitter is a good example of a service like this – the underlying data can talk to a multitude of different front end delivery mechanisms. 12 months ago 90% of Twitter’s traffic was API driven (ie coming from/to outside the Twitter website itself). Flickr is another example of an underlying data model which fires out to multiple delivery locations.
Data is driving the creation of new products – not technology.
Categories of data that can be utilised.
- Direct reporting
- Attention data
- Bureaucratic sources
- Personal sensors
- Sensors in your environment
- Possessions that report to the network
The Daiwa intelligent toilet that analyses health information from the littlest room! The Isaac Daniel GPS and satellite phone shoe!
Three opportunities/challenges;
- The data is there to be used
- The possibilities of real-time data
- Privacy as a competitive advantage
