STEVE COAST - A PIONEER IN SEARCH OF NEW WORLDS

If the irascible Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw was around these days
then he'd be giving the equally individualistic Steve Coast more than a run
for his money to be first home with the personal goal of adapting the world
to suit himself. There's a lot more to Steve than the eye suggests, and
after meeting him for the first time most people are even inclined to
believe his version of how he dreamed up OpenStreetMap in the first place.


It's always been in the nature of inventors to continually head-but the
rules that surround them, and it's likely that Steve gave his parents as
much of a headache in this regard as he did the succession of employers that
tried to herd him where he would not go.


Necessity is the mother of invention, and Steve's brainchild OpenStreetMap is
one of the finest examples of where true entrepreneurship can lead.
Seriously frustrated by the internet's inability to supply anything like a
half respectable map for a business opportunity he was playing with, Steve
drove around the neighborhood to capture GPS reference points, and then
wrote the software to create the map for himself. This gave rise to the idea
that others might like to add their own part of the global jigsaw puzzle.
Steve's made this possible, and the rest is history.


While Steve Coast has had the foresight to maintain OpenStreetMap as a free
platform, he's also had the vision to roll out CloudMade which markets a
secure suite of services to permanently leverage previously locked-down sets
of mapped data for private or business use.


Whatever else may have been said about our free-thinking rebel, Steve Coast
has an unerring ability to sense lateral opportunities, and is currently
preoccupied with the idea of laying out data geographically, as opposed to
by keywords with which the likes of Google and Wikipedia seem satisfied.
Although Steve's currently keeping his cards tightly to his chest, few doubt
that when his next leap forward occurs, his competitors will be kicking
themselves as they queue up to follow.


If you're looking for somebody to breathe fire into your next business
planning session or executive team-build then you ought to be seriously
thinking of asking Steve to be your anchorman. Over and above his own
renowned commercial successes, he's also a superb missionary for change and
brings a fresh blast of creative vision to every situation he enters.


On the other hand, if you're hoping to just bump into Steve by accident
somewhere, then you need to brush up on adult skateboarding derivatives like
mountain biking and snow boarding, as the chances of meeting this
individualist at a community sports day are about as unlikely as converting
him back into a nine-to-five employee. Just don't leave it too long - Steve
gets bored quickly and won't be in the same place for long.