Career
He has written extensively about social software, the web of data, location services and future media distribution and launched the Fire Eagle location service for Yahoo in 2008. Coates was educated at the Norwich School, the University of Bristol and the London College of Printing. He worked at the British Broadcasting Corporation running an R&Doctorate team for British Broadcasting Corporation Radio, and before that he developed the geo-coded online community UpMyStreet Conversations.
He has also developed online communities for emap and was Production Editor of Time Out"s website.
His professional written work includes film reviews for the British Broadcasting Corporation, contributions to Time Out city guides and comment pieces on technology for The Guardian. From late 2005 until 14 May 2010 Coates worked for Yahoo!, initially for the Technical Development team with Caterina Fake, Jeremy Zawodny and Simon Willison. and later as Head of Product for the Brickhouse product incubator.
He also runs the online subcultural community Barbelith - initially inspired by the work of comic book writer Grant Morrison. He is also on the advisory council of the Open Rights Group.
Coates co-organised the London Hack Day in June 2007 with help from Matthew Cashmore from backstage.bbc.co.uk.
The Evening Standard named Coates as one of the Most Influential 1000 Londoners in October 2007 and again in October 2008. In March 2008, Coates launched the Fire Eagle location brokerage service for Yahoo! at ETech. The service was opened up to the general public on 12 August 2008.
Despite being well regarded as a significant contribution to location sharing and online privacy, the service was generally unsuccessful.
Tom Coates has since left Yahoo. In January 2011 he was listed in Wired United Kingdom"s Smart List 2011.
He is an advisor for several start-ups including Lanyrd, the social conference directory created by Simon Willison and Natalie Downe. Coates has wired his San Francisco house up to Twitter as an Internet of Things-style experiment.
