Conference Speakers
Brian Oberkirch
Brian Oberkirch consults on marketing, social media and web development projects, helping companies use new tools to have better conversations with those who matter to their business.
In Brian's past lives, he was a marketing consultant and writer for hire, managed national brand accounts at large and small advertising and PR shops, started a social media consultancy called Weblogs Work and helped build a suite of applications for those clients, taught literature and creative writing, wrote newspaper articles, did the morning news at a radio station, and many other things. Phew!
Simon Willison
Simon Willison is a freelance client- and server-side Web developer and the co-creator of the Django Web framework. Simon's interests include OpenID and decentralised systems, unobtrusive JavaScript, rapid application development and RESTful Web Service APIs. Before going frelance Simon worked on Yahoo!'s Technology Development team, and prior to that at the Lawrence Journal-World, an award winning local newspaper in Kansas. Simon maintains a popular Web development weblog at http://simonwillison.net
Conference Speakers
Jon Aizen
Jon, a Cornell CS graduate has been engineering web applications since 1994. He has extensive experience with large-scale, high-profile web projects. His previous experience includes Alexa Internet and the Internet Archive. Jon served as the pioneer and sole web engineer of the Archive's website which is accessed by millions of visitors each month, as well as having, with the help of many others, established the Live Music Archive.
Dion Almaer
Dion is the co-founder of Ajaxian.com, the leading Ajax community, and "Audible Ajax" the popular podcast. He works in the Google Developer Programs group where he spends his time in the land of code.google.com and podcasting via the "Google Developer Podcast". He enjoys writing, having co-authored "Pragmatic Ajax", and speaks at events around the world.
Michael Arrington
Michael Arrington is the founder of the Crunch Network and editor of TechCrunch, the leading blog covering new Internet products and companies. He also co-founded Edgeio, a online classified listing startup. Previously, he worked as a corporate lawyer at O’Melveny & Myers and Wilson Sonsini, worked in sales and business development at RealNames, co-founded Achex, which was sold to First Data Corp., and was COO at Razorgator.
Lane Becker
Founding partner of Adaptive Path (adaptivepath.com), Becker has guided companies, from startup stage to Fortune 100, in designing web sites that integrate user goals and business objectives since 1995.
Most recently Lane has been working on Satisfaction which will act as a start page for customer service online, powered by the people that actually use the stuff: the customers.
Matt Biddulph
Matt Biddulph is the nomadic CTO of Dopplr, the social network for frequent travellers. He started out in 1994 building search engines on CD-ROM, and now specialises in digital media, social software and putting data on the web. In past lives he was a creative technologist for hire, working with companies like Nature, Joost and the BBC to bring cutting-edge technologies into the mainstream.
Daniel Burka
Daniel Burka is the creative director at Digg and is one of the cofounders of Pownce. He is also one of the founders of the Canadian web development company silverorange where he worked on various projects including branding and user interface design for Mozilla. At Digg, Daniel works with Kevin Rose to evolve concepts into a cohesive user experience. Enabling the site's vibrant user community to participate on the site is a constant challenge as the site grows and changes.
Lately, Daniel is especially interested in portable social networks, the viability of the PNG image format, and privacy concerns in online communities.
Heather Champ
Heather is very much enamoured with personal publishing on the web, having launched her first home page in 1994 while working at the School of Architecture, Princeton University. An award winning web designer with more than ten years experience, her clients have included AOL, Art+Commerce, Benetton BLOCKBUSTER, Cartier, jGuru, MBNA, Sweet 'N Low, and Sony. Heather abandoned her career as a pixel pusher in May of 2005 to join the Flickr team at Yahoo! as Community Manager. In addition to her own site, hchamp.com, she maintains the Mirror Project and co-edits the JPG Magazine with her husband, Derek Powazek.
Suw Charman
Suw Charman is a social software consultant and writer who specialises in the use of blogs and wikis behind the firewall. With a background in journalism, publishing and web design, Suw is now one of the UK's best known bloggers.
Suw is also founder and board member of the Open Rights Group, a digital rights advocacy group which aims to raise awareness of digital rights issues, to campaign against bad legislation in Britain and the EU, and to support grass roots activism.
Robin Christopherson
After a degree in Engineering at Cambridge and working as an IT instructor for the Royal National Institute for the Blind (RNIB), Robin helped found AbilityNet in 1998. Robin now manages AbilityNet's Web Consultancy services - heading a team that is globally acclaimed as experts in accessibility auditing, disabled user testing and designing attractive websites that are both accessible and easy to use by all.
Despite being blind, Robin uses a computer very effectively by relying on speech output to access the full range of mainstream software including email and the internet. He has a first-hand appreciation of the importance of good web design practice to accessibility.
Tom Coates
Tom Coates works for Yahoo Brickhouse where he develops new concepts in social software, future media and the web of data. He focuses on the shape of the web to come and how to make things that thrive as part of it. He’s worked for many of the UK’s most prominent web companies including Time Out, UpMyStreet and the BBC where he ran a small near-term R&D team for the BBC exploring media navigation, annotation and distribution. A regular speaker at conferences including ETech, XTech, IASummit and The Future of Web Apps, Tom also writes extensively at plasticbag.org as well as running the experimental online community barbelith.com.
Tony Conrad
Venture capitalist turned entrepreneur Conrad co-founded Sphere (previously Yodel Search). The company was formed with the notion that Conrad and his fellow co-founders could make a blog search engine that worked better than current offerings.
Previously Conrad served as General Partner at Venture Strategy Partners where he led consumer tech and marketing software & services investments. At VSP, he served on the Board of Directors of Oddpost (acquired by Yahoo!), Iconoculture, MusicNow (acquired by Circuit City) and Centive.
Dick Costolo
Dick was cofounder and CEO of FeedBurner and is now Group Product Manager at Google. Previously, he cofounded and was CEO of Spyonit.com. Spyonit was sold to 724 Solutions in September 2000. Google searches may also reveal Dick's theater experience which includes, among others, numerous roles and performances with Chicago's Annoyance Theater, television appearances in the UK, and several years of improv shows at international comedy festivals in Edinburgh, Montreal, and Australia. Dick holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science from the University of Michigan.
Leah Culver
Leah Culver founded Pownce with her friends Kevin Rose and Daniel Burka as a way of sending messages, links, files and events to each other. Leah is the lead developer for the site and spends most of her time working on feature development, fixing bugs, and re-writing her SQL queries. She's a recent computer science graduate from the University of Minnesota and loves the challenge of developing a web application from scratch. Leah also writes a blog about her experiences as a software developer at leahculver.com.
Jyri Engeström
Jyri is founder of Jaiku, a service that brings people closer together by enabling them to share their rich presence. Jaiku members share presence messages on the Web and mobile phone by text messaging and using a mobile application.
Before founding Jaiku, Engeström worked for Nokia and helped to shape the company's Wi-Fi device offering. He also actively engages in conversation about technology and society, and is often recognized for introducing social objects as an alternative way to conceptualize social networks.
Erika Hall
Erika Hall co-founded Mule Design in September 2001, hoping to make web design more humane. She now acts as the Lead Strategist for the company, who have worked with numerous big brands such as Six Apart, Sphere, Yahoo! and Wall Street Journal to bring new dynamics to web design.
Paul Graham
Paul Graham is the author of On Lisp (1993), ANSI Common Lisp (1995), and Hackers & Painters (2004). In 1995, he and Robert Morris started Viaweb, the first ASP, which in 1998 became Yahoo! Store. In 2002 he discovered a simple spam filtering algorithm that inspired the current generation of filters.
He’s currently working on a new programming language called Arc, a new book on startups, and is one of the partners in Y Combinator.
Umair Haque
Umair Haque is Bubblegeneration’s Principal – an innovative Internet Strategy Consultancy. Umair studied neuroscience at McGill, did an MBA and econ/strategy research with Gary Hamel at London Business School in 2003, and began working towards a PhD in strategy and innovation at Oxford in 2004. Umair has spent time working in finance/economics, at a KP startup, and as a strategy consultant. Recently, he put his postgraduate work on hold to pursue Bubblegen full time.
Jon Harris
Jon spent the early part of his career working alongside Macromedia as their creative arm in the UK, or rather arms, legs body and head; he does miss those 24 hour days... NOT! Well he does a little bit... It made sense after designing for Macromedia to work for Macromedia and he joined as Technical Sales Manager for Northern Europe and spent the next 4 years travelling the length and breadth of the UK and Scandinavia. Anybody that stood still long enough would find themselves learning about the wonder of the web, the importance of usability and accessibility for all. After a 12 month dabble with Breeze (that’s the product, not some fascination with part open windows) he moved into the Macromedia mobile team and spent two years making sure Flash was taken seriously by the mobile operators throughout Europe. In more recent times Jon has hung up his travelling boots and has now been resident at Microsoft for the last year and what a year. New technologies to test, new products to use, new boundaries to break, new people to excite, a new rollercoaster to ride... and Jon loves rollercoasters. He also has a cool job title: ‘User Experience Evangelist’.
Michael Jones
Michael Jones, CEO of Userplane and Vice President of AOL, oversees Userplane's business strategy, growth and operations. As a founder of Userplane, and Userplane's CEO, Jones' business leadership brought the business from startup to acquisition by AOL in August 2006. As a Vice President of AOL, he now focuses on the growth of AOL's syndicated application strategy, under the Userplane brand. This includes coordination with a variety of AOL subsidiaries and internal technologies to pioneer distribution to millions of web publishers as well as AOL's strategic positioning as a platform provider to the online community marketplace.
Robert Kalin
Robert Kalin is a carpenter by trade, making his residence in Brooklyn. He founded Etsy in 2005 as an online marketplace for everyone to buy and sell handmade goods, all over the world. Believe it or not, Etsy was born in Rob's living room.
In case you didn't know, Rob's other interests include auto repair, outer space and Bob Dylan - quite a mix!
Michael Kowalski
Michael started his career developing a 4th generation language for Fujitsu, and now specialises in interaction and user experience design. While working at the Guardian, he designed the user interface used to produce the Guardian Unlimited network of sites. In 2000, he left the Guardian to co-found Kitsite.com, a hosted Web application company. Its first customer was Artsworld TV, with subsequent clients including the BBC, the Guardian Media Group, the Community Fund, and Mercury Interactive. Kitsite opened a Dublin office in late 2005 and recently received a great amount of press attention following their work for the 2012 Olympic Games. Kitsite have recently created their own web app, called PostCMS which is a web content management system.
Daniel Lieberman
Daniel is founder and CEO of BitPusher, a web operations and infrastructure company that helps customers reconcile their web 1.0-sized ambitions with web 2.0-sized budgets. He has been running Internet systems since the dial-up days, and specializes in making systems flexible, scalable and easy to manage. He enjoys working with startups and with large companies trying to act like startups.
Tony Lucas
Tony is CEO of XCalibre Communications Ltd., the managed hosting company that he founded in 1997 while still at college. Back in 2004 Tony decided that what the world really needed was a proper utility computing infrastructure, so he created FlexiScale. It does just what its name suggests and he's chosen FOWA to launch it.
Om Malik
Om Malik is the founder of GigaOmniMedia, Inc., an online news and weblog that delivers technology news, analysis, and opinions to a monthly global audience of one million consumers and professionals interested in the world of hi-tech. His daily rants on tech/telecom and broadband can be found at GigaOM
Before launching his own publishing venture, Malik was a senior writer for Business 2.0 magazine covering telecom and broadband stories. He has covered technology and telecom for over a decade for publications like Forbes and Red Herring, and has contributed to The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, and MIT Technology Review.
David Marcus
David is Echovox's CEO. He's responsible for the company's global strategy, direction and management. Prior to founding Echovox, David started GTN telecom, Switzerland first alternative telecom operator in 1996. David is also the founder and Chairman of VOX telecom, a successful wholesale carrier servicing the world's largest incumbent operators such as France Telecom, Verizon, Telecom Italia, Deutsche Telekom, KPN, Belgacom, Cable & Wireless and Optus. He is also the Chairman of echo6, a joint venture with leading French media group M6 created to become one of the top mobile multimedia players in France.
Ross Mayfield
Ross Mayfield is CEO & Co-founder of Socialtext, the first wiki company and leading provider of Enterprise 2.0 solutions. A noted blogger and industry expert, he is a serial and social entrepreneur.
Previously, Mayfield served as VP of Marketing for a Fujitsu spinout and CEO of an enterprise risk management software company. Mayfield co-founded and served as president of RateXchange (AMEX:RTX), the leading B2B commodity exchange for telecom.
Alistair Mitchell
Alastair Mitchell is co-founder & CEO of Huddle.net. Alastair is a veteran of the web-services industry and a passionate advocate of the power of the internet to help people work better together. His career spans ‘web 1.0’, as part of the team that built the first online market place for the global food commodities market, ‘web 1.5’ as global solutions director at Dunnhumby where he led the delivery of online customer behavior analytics and now Collaboration 2.0 at Huddle.net.
Matt Mullenweg
Matt Mullenweg blogs at PhotoMatt.net. He is best known as the founding developer of WordPress, the blogging software he guided from a handful of users to the most widely used open source blog tool. In late 2005, he left CNET to found Automattic, the company behind WordPress and Askimet.com. In his spare time he enjoys taking photographs and playing jazz.
Dave Morin
Dave Morin is the Senior Platform Manager at Facebook where he leads platform strategy and community. Dave joined Facebook from Apple, where most recently he was the Manager of Creation & Collaboration technologies and was initially the Manager of Student Marketing worldwide. Prior to Apple, Dave founded the company Viadi, a technology and marketing company focused on building great brands and experiences using the power of the internet.
Felix Petersen
Felix is co-founder and member of the board of plazes.com, a bottom-up approach to spatial interaction and location oriented service platform, sometimes also dubbed “Mobile Social Software”.
Previously Felix has been busy founding Kinderfield, a radical new collective somewhere between insanity, art and media darling working for clients like Sony and MTV.
Heidi Pollock
Having left Yahoo! Mobile, Heidi's second project was to work as a contractor for Twitter and more recently she started work for Australian start-up, Bluepulse, fulltime. Heidi currently works on their global social mobile networking application and platform currently in java and symbian.
Heidi's stint at Yahoo! included coding the FIFA 2006 mobile site and Vodafone Japan's Yahoo! site, making her one of the most experienced mobile web developers in the field.
Derek Powazek
Named one of the top 40 “Industry Influencers” this year by Folio Magazine, Derek Powazek is the founder of JPG, a magazine that is made by its community. Derek has worked the web since 1995 at pioneering sites like HotWired, Blogger, and Technorati. He’s the author of “Design for Community: The Art of Connecting Real People in Virtual Places” and now works as a social media entrepreneur and consultant.
Mark Quirk
Mark joined Microsoft UK in 1992 as a senior support engineer for Microsoft development tools, having previously being programming in Unix systems. In 1993 he became the first pre-sales consultant to focus on creating solutions in the enterprise with Microsoft development products. He has since lead several teams of engineers and continues to be keenly involved in the application of Microsoft's technology to meet the challenges of the changing software industry. Today he is the product manager responsible for Visual Studio and web development at Microsoft UK.
Scott Rafer
Scott Rafer was CEO of blogger social site MyBloglog.com until its acquisition by Yahoo in January 2007. He is also a co-founder and director at Mashery since 1995.
At Mashery and as chairman of Winksite, Rafer helps deliver services for media publishing and discovery. Both sites offer unique features: Mashery that the basics of great web services are available to all providers, while Winksite helps publishers assemble active mobile communities around their brands and content.
Leisa Reichelt
User Experience Consultant by day and blogger by night, Leisa's work and interests include user research, interaction design, information architecture and usability grounded in User Centered Design methodologies. She has a particular bent towards social presence and collaboration.
Currently available as a hired UX gun, Leisa was previously Principal Consultant with Flow Interactive in London. She has worked with countless clients over the past decade, helping them to design and deliver world class user experiences through the integration of design and usability.
John Resig
John Resig is programmer, working for the Mozilla Corporation, who’s the author of the book ‘Pro Javascript Techniques.’ He’s also the creator and lead developer of the jQuery JavaScript library. He’s currently located in Cambridge, MA.
Ted Rheingold
Ted has been building web apps since 1996 and has spent the last 5 years figuring out how to actually make a business out of doing it. In 2001 he started the web services company OneMatchFire.com and in 2004 started Dogster.com and Catster.com which have become the definitive online communities for pet lovers. What once started as night and weekend projects have turned into a 3 year old, 14 person, profitable mini-network of passion-centric communities.
Eric Rodenbeck
Eric Rodenbeck is Stamen's founder and creative director. He is a 10-year veteran of the interactive design field, and has spent this time working to extend the boundaries of online media and live information visualization.
Eric led the interactive storytelling and data-driven narrative effort at Quokka Sports, illustrated and designed at Wired and Wired Books, and was a co-founder of the design collective Umwow.
Kevin Rose
Kevin Rose is a founder and chief architect at digg. Prior to founding digg, Kevin produced and hosted hundreds of segments on TechTV - a cable television network available in over 45 million homes in the United States and distributing content to more than 70 countries. digg was born on November 1, 2004, and in May 2005 Kevin left G4 to form Revision3 Corporation.
Most recently, Kevin was one of the founders that launched Pownce, the web app that allows you to share files, links and messages with your friends, which is already proving to be a huge success.
Deb Schultz
D. Schultz
An Internet-industry veteran and innovator, Deborah is a passionate customer advocate who believes strongly in the power of technology to connect people, communities and businesses. She currently advises companies ranging in size from start-ups to the Fortune 50 on the new role of marketing and the impact of technology on customer relationships.
Most recently, Deborah was Marketing Director at Six Apart where she was responsible for the typical broad range of marketing needs at a start-up, and specifically for engaging and educating Six Apart customers and partners on blogging and community marketing.
Chris Shiflett
Chris Shiflett is a principal of OmniTI, where he leads the web application security practice. Prior to joining OmniTI, he was the founder of Brain Bulb, a PHP consulting company specializing in web application security services.
Chris is a leader in the PHP community – the founder of the PHP Security Consortium, a contributor to the Zend Framework, and an author of the Zend PHP Certification.
Andrew Shorten
Andrew has been working with webtechnologies for the past 10 years and is passionate about delivering rich, engaging and immersive user experiences. As a consultant for Fujitsu, Andrew advised government and enterprise customers on web, desktop, mobile and kiosk UI technologies. He has since worked for Macromedia, Adobe and Microsoft in a range of technical and business development roles. Andrew is now a Platform Evangelist for Adobe, a role that enables him to engage with designers, developers, partners and customers on the opportunities that Adobe Flex, Adobe Flash and AIR present to enrich web and desktop experiences.
Rashmi Sinha
Rashmi is the Founding Principal of Uzanto - a consulting company that focuses on web product strategy. At Uzanto, Rashmi focuses on Customer Research and Social Technologies such as Recommender Systems & Tagging. She uses a multi-method approach to understand how technology fits into the frabric of people's lives. For the past year, she has been working on MindCanvas, an innovative research platform to gather customer insights for the design of technology products.
Steve Souders
Steve Souders works at Yahoo! as the Chief Performance Yahoo!, where he has developed a set of best practices for making web sites faster. He builds tools for performance analysis and evangelizes these best practices and tools across Yahoo!'s product teams. Prior to that he ran the development team for My Yahoo!. He's been at Yahoo! since 2000 working on many of the platforms and products within the company, including the scalability challenges of Yahoo!'s large number of users and page views.
Thomas Vander Wal
The Principal and Senior Consultant at InfoCloud Solutions, Vander Wal is an information architect best known for coining the term "folksonomy." He's also known for initiating the term "infocloud". His works has been with the Web and with information design and structure.
He has worked for the INDUS Corporation in Bethesda, Maryland, is a member of the Founding Leadership Council for The Information Architecture Institute, and the Steering Committee for the Web Standards Project (WaSP). He is also Alumni Tech Lead for Boxes and Arrows magazine.
Joe Walker
Joe Walker is a developer and consultant working on advanced web development techniques like AJAX.
He recently developed Direct Web Remoting, (DWR) which has become one of the most popular Ajax toolkits for Java by making browser/server interaction intuitive for web developers. See www.drectwebremoting.com
He currently works through his consultancy, Getahead (http://getahead.org/), which is supplying a growing number of customers with AJAX and advanced web solutions.
Simon Wardley
S. Wardley
The companies that Simon has helped range in size from start-up operations to global conglomerates and have been geographically dispersed from Amsterdam and Athens to Barcelona, London and Warsaw. The consistent theme is Simon's ability to provide practical, workable solutions and to bridge the gap between IT and business strategy. He is also a passionate advocate of the commodisation of IT services, Utility Computing, the Open Source movement and Ducks. As he says "they're fowl but not through choice".
Daniel Waterhouse
Daniel is a Sector Partner with 3i with a sector focus on internet/web2.0 and consumer technology investments. He joined 3i at the start of 2006 and is involved in investments and portfolio support on a global basis. Daniel has extensive knowledge of and network within the sector.
Prior to joining 3i, he spent 6 years with Yahoo! in the corporate development, strategy, planning and finance functions. He was involved in the strategic planning of the European business, managed the acquisition process on a number of major deals including the acquisition of Kelkoo (a pan European price comparison site) for $600M.