Dave Coplin

Since joining Microsoft in 2005, Dave Coplin has worked across a wide range of sectors and customers, providing strategic advice and guidance around the cost effective use of technology in relation to their business needs. As an established thought leader in the UK and having spent a considerable amount of time in the Public Sector providing leadership and guidance around key technology policy issues like Cloud Computing, Open Government, Open Data and the “consumerisation” of IT, Dave is currently working as Director of Search for Microsoft UK’s Consumer and Online business, focusing the spotlight on the power and potential of search and the way it holds the key to society’s effective use of all that technology and the internet has to offer.

As a self-confessed technology “alchemist”, Dave is passionate about turning the base metal of technology into valuable assets that effect the way that we live, learn, work and play and in so doing, move the focus from the technology itself to the actual outcome.

Prior to joining Microsoft, Dave spent 13 years delivering IT strategy and solutions within the Professional Services industry in the UK, Canada and the Netherlands, helping to build the foundations of a global IT infrastructure.

Dave has contributed to a range of media articles, conferences and forums all relating to the goal of making technology less “visible” and more valuable in our daily lives – many of those conversations are available on this site.

Angus Lyon

Gary Burt

Gary helps large organisations understand the potential of technology to improve peoples’ lives. As an outspoken critic of overly-complex technology, he loves nothing more than injecting harsh reality into many unrealistic visions. He can be often seen asking Solution Architects such questions as “How would my Mum benefit from this?” or “Why would a 10 year old use this?”

He brings together knowledge form a number of disciplines including technology, design and management to help organisations challenge themselves to define solutions and visions that make a real difference to lives.

Gary’s spent much of his career working in both the public and private sector in a variety of technology roles including programmer, analyst and strategist. Currently he is working with Microsoft Corp to help design the future of Microsoft Strategy Consulting.

Jonathan Peach

Since July 2008, Jonathan joined the Microsoft Internship programme as an Account Technology Specialist (in human terms a Technology Advisor), helping organisations understand where Microsoft are today with technology, where they will be tomorrow and what that means to their business.

Outside of his day-to-day role, Jonathan has spent a lot of resource trying to figure out how technology will pan out in the future and together with Robin he has been on an epic journey (Tolkien would have been proud) into understanding the most important catalyst in trends, innovation and future envisioning….People, or more specifically ‘Workforce Evolution and Millennial Workers’, and how those two drivers will change everything.

Jonathan is an advocate of futurist research and is keen to engage with companies open to new ideas, but also those that consider technology areas such as ‘Social Computing’ as formidable, to attempt to help them understand that IT is not a threat, it is a beast that can be tamed!

Jonathan is studying Business Information Technology at the University of Portsmouth and will be graduating in 2010.

Robin Cavonius

Coming over from the land of blonde hair blue eyes, Robin left Sweden in 2004 to see what Britain had to offer. Since starting his internship at Microsoft in July last year he has thought a lot about technology and the future. A lot of time and thought has been dedicated to a research project around the Workforce Evolution and Millennial Workers, in an attempt to figure out what the workplace might look like in the next 20 years.

Robin is a social media devotee. He spends a lot of time explaining to organisations how useful it could be for them to make use of it.

Apart from talking too much and drinking way to much coffee, Robin is a realist with a lot of thoughts about the future