Background on my work as a product designer, writer and technologist, and the patents, media coverage and references that have accumulated around it.
I'm Tom. I've worked on digital products since the late nineties, at places like the BBC and Yahoo and in small companies I've helped start. Much of that work has been about how people use the internet to find things, share things and talk to one another. Sometimes that has meant building a service; sometimes it has meant making something small to see what happens, like giving my house its own Twitter account.
Over the years I've worked on blogging, location services and connected devices, and more recently the open social web. I've written about those things and given talks about them too. The projects elsewhere on this site explain what I made and who I made it with. This page is more of a collection of the other bits: things people have written about the work, books it's turned up in, and some of the paperwork. Some of it is quite old now, but I like having a place where I can keep it all together. It's also a useful reminder of how much has changed.
A service that receives location updates from multiple sources, estimates a user’s current position and controls how precisely it is shared with each application, allowing products and services to exchange location without maintaining separate systems. Co-invented at Yahoo with Simon P. King, Paul Hammond, Simon Willison, Rahul Nair, Shane Ahern and Mor Naaman.
Methods for organizing distributed media around users’ interests, activity levels and annotations. The system creates pages that surface related material by topicality and quality, helping people discover content held across repositories. Co-invented at Yahoo with Paul Hammond, Simon Willison and Liang-Yu Chi.
Wearable systems that predict the effects of consumables, helping plan sleep around when caffeine falls below a chosen threshold. Co-invented at Jawbone with Aza Raskin and Matt Biddulph.
