Web 2.0 Expo NY 2009 Speakers

Jay Adelson is CEO of Digg, guiding all aspects of the company’s development, growth and management. Under his leadership, Digg has grown to 26 million visitors per month, and is now considered one of the top socially focused Web sites.

Adelson is also chairman of the board of the Internet Television Network Revision3, where he provides strategic direction to the company.

Prior to Digg, Adelson founded Equinix, Inc (Nasdaq: EQIX), a leader in the data center and Internet infrastructure space. Equinix operates Internet data centers where more than 200 network service providers and hundreds of enterprises and content companies, including nine of the top ten Web properties, locate their Internet operations.

Adelson was also a co-founder of Digital Equipment Corporation’s highly regarded Palo... Read More.

Combining a technical background with quantitative business training, Jesper offers expertise in entrepreneurial technology, including data mining, social network analysis, and consumer web services. A 2008 graduate of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, he completed concentrations in entrepreneurship, finance, and econometrics. He currently works with Open Data Group, providing management-consulting data analysis services to Fortune 500 companies; he also provides independent entrepreneurial consulting services for startups. Previously, Jesper served as a summer associate with O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures in 2007. He is also the co-founder of the Chicago Ignite lecture series and has written about business strategy for the O’Reilly Radar blog and industry analysis reports.

Prior to graduate school, Jesper served as the Lead Architect for Visible Path, a Kleiner-Perkins backed... Read More.

As an interaction designer for Adaptive Path and formerly for Lextant, Alexa has immersed herself in the worlds of nuclear pharmacists, smartphone users and diabetics. Her curiosity about people different from herself is reflected in work from the MySpace redesign to the Charmr insulin pump concept.

Having received her Bachelor of Science in Visual Communication at Ohio State University, Alexa cares about the craft of design. She strives to advance design tools and methods through blogging, writing and speaking. Recent appearances include Boxes and Arrows, UX Week 2008 in San Francisco and LIFT 2008 in South Korea.

David is part of the founding team at Dachis Corporation, an Austin based start-up delivering social business design services. He is both an active practitioner and thinker in the worlds of digital marketing, experience design, and the social web. Author of the popular Logic + Emotion blog, he has been invited to speak at events hosted by organizations such as Google, Microsoft, O’Reilly and Ad Age.

Prior to joining Dachis Corp, David worked in the digital agency space for over 10 years with clients such as P&G, HP, WW Grainger, Allstate, Blue Cross Blue Shield, and Fifth Third Bank. His work on Grainger helped the company earn the reputation of best commerce site according to BtoB magazine and his leadership on HP resulted in a... Read More.

Micah is CEO of TakeComics, the seventh startup Micah has been involved in (having recently left Lijit Networks, where he served as VP, Business Development and selling Current Wisdom in the beginning of 2007).

Micah got his start as a university fundraiser, being one of the first to fuze online activities and marketing strategies into alumni fund-raising. In 1996, he sent one of the first email campaigns to help drive alumni fundraising. Over his career, Micah helped universities such as The Catholic University of America and the University of San Diego see their annual giving programs grow by more than 150%.

Focusing on business development, online marketing and advertising, and product strategy, Micah was instrumental in the growth of companies such as MyPersonal... Read More.

Tanuj Bansal is a Sr Program Manager in the SharePoint product group. Tanuj has been in the software industry for 16 years. Before Microsoft, Tanuj served as a general manager for a private software product and consulting company in Michigan, led several product launches at Autodesk and managed an enterprise services team at PTC. Tanuj holds an MS in Engineering from Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland and an MBA from University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Drew Bartkiewicz, Vice President of Technology and New Media Markets, The Hartford

Drew has spent the majority of his career as an executive in the Software and Social Marketing fields with companies such as BroadVision, salesforce.com, The Hartford, and United Technologies.

Drew has written and lectured extensively on Internet and technology business trends over the past decade. He was a participating author in the Brookings Institution book on technology and economics, Unseen Wealth (published in 2001).

During the Web 1.0 and Personalization decade of the Internet, Drew worked extensively with the following organizations’ e-commerce and personalization initiatives: GE Capital, Home Depot, UBS, Barclays, Walmart, Bank of America, Blue Cross, Nike, Maidenform, Time Warner, Fox, MTV, Telecom Italia, Primedia, GE Supply, Citigroup, Bear Stearns,... Read More.

Lane Becker is President & co-founder of Get Satisfaction, a web startup dedicated to fostering new methods of communication and collaboration between companies and their customers. Previously, Lane was co-founder of Adaptive Path, a user experience strategy, research, and design consultancy. While with Adaptive Path, Lane ran the consulting business and, as the creator of the New Ventures program, developed strategic partnerships with early-stage startup companies to provide them with long-term support for their product development, design, and launch strategies.

Tom Bedecarré is CEO of AKQA, a global digital marketing firm that uses innovative ideas and technology to deliver results for the world’s leading brands—including Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, Nike, Unilever, Visa and Xbox. AKQA has more than 750 employees in San Francisco, Palo Alto, New York, Washington DC, London, Shanghai and Amsterdam. Recognized numerous times as “Digital Agency of the Year,” AKQA was recently named one of the “World’s 50 Most Innovative Companies” by Fast Company magazine. More information about AKQA is available at www.akqa.com.

An enthusiastic entrepreneur, Tom was also a founder and CEO of Citron Haligman Bedecarré, San Francisco’s largest independent advertising agency and a leader in launching Internet brands.

Rob Beeler joined AdMonsters in October 2008 after nearly 10 years at Advance Internet, a leading creator of local news and information web sites across the United States. At Advance Internet, Rob started as the only Ad Operations person and developed a department of 15 people in 8 locations across the country responsible for operations, project management, business development, web analytics and financial reporting, becoming Executive Director of Ad Operations and Analytics in early 2007. Prior to Advance Internet, Rob held a number of positions related to advertising and publishing ranging from electronic prepress to an ad agency multimedia specialist. Rob graduated from Syracuse University in 1990 with a dual major in Producing for Electronic Media/English

An internationally recognized ethnographer, Genevieve Bell has developed product shaping insights into consumers world-wide and is bringing a research driven, end-user focus to Intel. Her influence has been recognized with the award of Intel’s highest honor: an individual Intel Achievement Award. She is a Senior Principal Engineer and the Director of User Experience within Intel’s Digital Home Group and manages an inter-disciplinary team of social scientists, designers and human factors engineers. She and her team strive to stay ahead of Intel’s technology roadmap, using insights gained for in-depth ethnographic and design research to help drive innovations in and around Intel platforms, creating technology that responds to human needs, desires and aspirations. Bell is particularly interested in issues of cultural difference as they are expressed around... Read More.

Scott Berkun is the best selling author of Making Things Happen (Formerly titled ‘the art of project management’, (O’Reilly, 2005) and The Myths of Innovation (O’Reilly, 2007). He worked as a manager at Microsoft from 1994 to 2003, including working on the first five versions of Internet Explorer. Since 2003 he has been on his own as independent writer and public speaker. His work has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Wired Magazine, and on National Public Radio. He taught a course in creative thinking at the University of Washington, teaches seminars on innovation to the Fortune 500, and is currently a regular contributor to Harvard Business Digital. He has appeared frequently as a management and creative thinking expert on MSNBC... Read More.

Matt Biddulph works at Nokia Social Location in Berlin. He is a co-founder of Dopplr, the social network for smarter travel. 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 Joost and the BBC to bring cutting-edge technologies into the mainstream.

Ben is co-founder and CEO of Earth Aid Enterprises, a Washington DC-based social venture specializing in developing and deploying sensible energy efficiency and renewable energy solutions. Earth Aid recently launched the first-ever consumer rewards program for saving energy and water, and is the winner of both the Sustainable Brands ‘09 New Venture Award and the Social Matchbox ‘09 Community Choice Award.

Prior to launching Earth Aid Enterprises, Ben served as Senior Officer for Domestic Political Affairs at the Embassy of Israel. He has held leadership positions with a variety of academic, social justice, and internationally oriented organizations in both North and South America. His experience has included service on the Executive Committee of Georgetown University’s Center for Jewish Civilization, at the U.S. Agency for... Read More.

Richard Blakeley has been the head of the Gawker Media video department since 2006 and is perhaps best known for co-creating the over-the-top food blog This Is Why You’re Fat. It’s success as an overnight viral sensation led to the publication of the book available in stores now. In the tech world, Richard is best known for stealthily turning off televisions at The 2008 Consumer Electronic Show, earning him a lifetime ban from the largest trade show in the world.

Richard graduated from Pratt Institute with a BFA in film in 2006. While still in school he was awarded the Consumers for Cable Choice Award in New Media for his online choose your own video adventure game Don’t Make Her Cry. The following year... Read More.

I work in the technology, communications and media space — as an entrepreneur, a builder and an investor. My interests are in building great companies — and in the process understanding about how media evolves as it collides with real time conversations.

The companies I am working with are listed on the betaworks site. Prior to launching betaworks I was CEO of Fotolog, and prior to that I was Snr. VP of Technology and Alliances at Time Warner. I arrived at Time Warner — AOL — in early 1997 when they Read More.

danah boyd is a researcher at Microsoft Research New England and a Fellow at the Harvard University Berkman Center for Internet and Society. She recently completed her PhD in the School of Information at the University of California-Berkeley.

Dr. boyd’s dissertation “Taken Out of Context: American Teen Sociality in Networked Publics” focused on how American youth use networked publics for sociable purposes. She examined the role that social network sites like MySpace and Facebook play in everyday teen interactions and social relations. She was interested in how mediated environments alter the structural conditions in which teens operate, forcing them to manage complex dynamics like interacting before invisible audiences, managing context collisions, and negotiating the convergence of public and private life. This work was funded by... Read More.

Chris Brogan is a ten year veteran of using social media and technology to build digital relationships for businesses, organizations, and individuals. Chris speaks, blogs, writes articles, and makes media of all kinds at chrisbrogan.com a blog in the top 20 of the Advertising Age Power150, and in the top 100 on Technorati.

Chris is also the cofounder of the PodCamp new media conference series, exploring the use of new media community tools to extend and build value. He recently became president of New Marketing Labs, a social media agency.

Andy Budd is an interaction designer and web standards developer from Brighton, England. As the user experience lead at Clearleft (clearleft.com), Andy spends his time helping clients improve their customers online experience.

Andy is a regular speaker at international design events such as SXSW, An Event Apart and Web Design World. He also runs the popular dConstruct conference, which takes place in Brighton every year (dconstruct.org). Andy has helped judge several international design awards and currently sits on the advisory board for .Net magazine. Andy wrote the best selling book, CSS Mastery (cssmastery.com) and blogs at andybudd.com.

Never happier than when he’s diving some remote tropical atoll, Andy is a qualified PADI dive instructor and retired shark wrangler.

Carlos Bueno is CEO of Archivd, Inc. Previously he helped build Terespondo.com, a search startup which handled 65% of all search engine advertising in Latin America before it was acquired by Yahoo in 2005. Since then he has done security and performance work for other very high traffic sites including Spock.com and the US Department of Treasury.

Leah Buley is an experience designer for Adaptive Path. She enjoys designing products that are useful, intuitive, and delightful—and has a related interest in the tools and methodologies that make that possible.

Before Adaptive Path, Leah was a user interface designer for Barclays Global Investors. She designed transactional financial systems, client-facing web sites, end-investor tools, and internal applications. She also championed firm-wide awareness of user experience design practices. Before Barclays Global Investors, Leah worked for New York interactive agencies Flat and Plural, and LA-based BMC, an information services company. Leah started her career in design as an opinionated web developer.

With a background in marketing, design, and technology, Dave Burke focuses on bridging disciplinary gaps to create web products that delight both users and business owners.

At Washington Post Media, Dave leads a cross-disciplinary team — designers, information architects, and developers — in the creation, support, and measurement of Washington Post web applications. These products include e-commerce, customer acquisition and self-service, B2B content, publishing, and internal collaboration/productivity.

He has spoken on user research and usability, agile development, and enterprise social networking at The Washington Post, the USDA Graduate School, and George Washington University.

Dave and his MacBook Pro commute by train to DC from his home in Baltimore, where his wife, Kim, recently completed her doctorate at the Johns Hopkins University.

Gerry Campbell is the CEO of Collecta, a real time search and personalized newsfeeds provider. Gerry was previously head of search at AOL and Reuters, was with Altavista when they spun out of Compaq, and is an angel investor in and advisor to several companies in the real time space, including formerly Summize, which now powers Twitter search, and which is how Gerry came to be a shareholder in Twitter. Gerry blogs at http://www.luckyrobot.com.

Nicole Carrier is the Program Director for IBM Mashup Center. Her expertise lies in defining, launching, and managing new products, which have included IBM Mashup Center, the WebSphere Portal Accelerators, WebSphere Dashboard Framework, and WebSphere Portlet Factory. Nicole has over 15 years of product management and IT consulting experience. She joined IBM in January 2006 with the acquisition of Bowstreet, where she was Director of Product Marketing.

Sumit Chawla is a Technical Program Manager / Architect in the Interoperability Technical Strategy team at Microsoft. His team is chartered with solving the toughest interoperability challenges in bridging Microsoft and non-Microsoft technologies. Prior to working on interoperability technical strategy, Sumit spent several years in the consulting world working on large scale systems integration projects and helping customers build complex enterprise solutions using Microsoft and other technologies.

Lisa Conquergood has over 13 years of experience in the e-commerce world, including Eddie Bauer and Expedia, Inc. With an MBA from Seattle University, retail-veteran Lisa has built her career around online merchandising, social networking and e-commerce. As the Chief Marketing Officer at Picnik, Lisa’s focus is on fostering a conversation between Picnik users and developers to take online photo-editing enthusiasm to a new level. Picnik currently has over 38 million monthly site visits.

Prior to Picnik, Lisa wore many hats as the vice president, marketing & operations of Bevy, Inc., a Seattle-based social media start-up targeting fashionable women. Among other things, Lisa’s responsibilities were to drive pre-launch strategic and product definition, branding, initial partner relationships, and creation of the seed community. She also... Read More.

Blaine is a Canadian transplant to Northern Ireland via San Francisco, where he made Twitter do things no website had done before. In addition to being a primary author on the OAuth specification and active in the Jabber community, he is a frequent contributor to various open source projects. He now works at Osmosoft, focused on making the web a little more responsive and a little more human.

Robert Cook co-founded Metaweb Technologies in July 2005. At parent company Applied Minds, Robert led the San Francisco office as Director of Knowledge Product Development. Since the start of his career, Robert has played the role of author, designer and programmer for myriad software applications. Robert’s first computer was an Elf II, which used the same microprocessor as the Voyager, Viking and Galileo spacecraft. At the young age of 15, Robert created database software for a small publishing company. He followed this first piece of work by publishing a number of computer games through Broderbund. This early work included the classic game Gumball as well as the Atari 400/800 and Commodore 64 versions of Karateka. Robert later designed the game D/Generation and acted as the... Read More.

Lauren Cooney has ten years of experience with product management, product marketing, and building technical communities, strategies, and GTM plans for enterprise software companies across several different products, technologies, and languages.

Cooney joined Microsoft in May 2008 to lead the Web Platform team, focused specifically on driving change in Microsoft’s web strategy, working on Open Source Web initiatives, and providing developers with the right products and tools to be successful when building web solutions. Her team drives developer-focused product management and marketing for The Microsoft Web Platform including ASP.NET, PHP, IIS, Visual Web Developer, The Web Platform Installer, The Windows Web Application Gallery, and several other products. Her team is also responsible for www.microsoft.com/web, Microsoft’s main go-to-market website for developers &... Read More.

Alistair is a principal at analyst firm Bitcurrent, and a frequent contributor to the GigaOm family of sites. Prior to Bitcurrent, Alistair co-founded Coradiant, a leader in online user monitoring, as well as research firm Networkshop. He has held product management positions with 3Com Corporation, Primary Access, and Eicon Technology.

Alistair has coordinated and spoken at a wide range of industry events, including Interop, Structure, Web2Expo and Unconference. He is the author of numerous articles on Internet performance and security, and co-author of Managing Bandwidth: Deploying QOS in Enterprise Applications from Prentice-Hall as well as the forthcoming Complete Web Monitoring from O’Reilly.

Dennis Crowley is the founder of Foursquare and formerly the Director of Product Development at area/code. He was the founder of dodgeball.com, a New York-based service which aims to coordinate social interactions between mobile users. His work focuses on finding the intersection between location-based services, social software and user-generated content on mobile devices.

He has developed and managed mobile applications for Vindigo, MTV Networks and ABC and was previously a member of Jupiter Research’s technology and operations research group.

His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Wired, Time Magazine, Newsweek, MTV, Slashdot and NBC and he has presented examples of his work at Microsoft and at O’Reilly’s Emerging Technology conference.

Dennis holds a Master’s degree... Read More.

As founder and CEO of Dachis Group, Jeff’s leadership and vision helped establish the digital services industry more than a decade ago when he co-founded Razorfish, Inc. out of a one-bedroom New York City apartment.

As co-founder, CEO, President and Chairman of Razorfish, Dachis profitably grew the company revenues to over $250 Million, expanded its talent base from 2 to 2,200 employees with offices in nine countries, completed over 25 M&A transactions, lead its IPO which raised $55 Million, and catapulted Razorfish’s public valuation to over $5 Billion.

Over the last decade, as the recognized leader in the digital services industry, Razorfish has won numerous performance, design, and professional service awards.. Razorfish ultimately was bundled as part of Microsoft’s $6 billion purchase... Read More.

Anil Dash is a pioneering blogger who helped found Six Apart, the world’s biggest blogging company. Dash is a recognized expert on web technology, web culture and the software industry, having founded one of the earliest and most popular blogs on the Internet, at Dashes.com, which was named one of MSNBC’s “Best of Blogs”. A frequent keynote speaker, Dash has given presentations around the world about the future of social communication online and the relationship between social and traditional media.

Christopher David is the Head of Developer and Partner Engagement and responsible for driving and communicating Sony Ericsson’s developer strategy in terms of their multi platform approach, as well as articulating the relevance of content development to developer and partner, and ‘prosumer’ communities.

Christopher’s deep knowledge and understanding of the telecoms industry stem from 19 years’ experience in various engineering, sales and technologist roles. Christopher spent many years in the software development business at Ericsson, Logica, Sun Microsystems and Sony Ericsson. He also has over 10 years’ experience in standards related work with Parlay, OMA, JCP and OSGi Alliance, where he held positions on the board, as spec lead and chair.

Anthony is a columnist for Mediaite.com

He was formerly the editor in chief of GiantsFootballBlog.com, part of the SportsNet New York blog network from November 2007 to June 2009. SportsNet New York (SNY) is a New York City-based regional sports cable network which airs in the New York metro area and all of New York state, and nationwide via satellite. It is owned jointly by the New York Mets, Time Warner Cable, and Comcast.

Anthony owns and manages a team of writers at HotFootBlog.com since 2006 which covers the New York Mets. Prior to Hot Foot, Anthony was a contributing writer for MetsBlog.com, one of the most highly trafficked sports sites on the web, drawing over 3 million visitors a month.

Anthony keeps a personal... Read More.

As Chief Marketing Officer, Sanjay is responsible for driving Lithium’s vision, go-to-market strategy, and customer acquisition programs.

He joins Lithium from SumTotal Systems, where he was instrumental in advancing the company’s market leadership in the learning and talent management industries. During his tenure, the company grew over 10-fold and became the clear leader in its market, with a relentless focus on customer solutions and success. He served most recently as Senior Vice President and General Manager, of SumTotal’s Learning and Talent Management Business Unit, driving the company’s vision, strategy, and go-to-market activities across all channels, while maintaining responsibilities in M&A, corporate strategy, and emerging business lines at the company, which he held in his previous position as Senior VP of Marketing & Alliances.

Before joining... Read More.

Aaaron Dignan joined the founding team of Undercurrent from a background in brand strategy and brand experience at Brandplay, a boutique agency he co-founded, and whose clients included Coors and Pepsi. Aaron manages Undercurrent’s New York office, where the team explores the future frontier of social interactive – where consumers rule, and brands aspire to contribute and enable the most connected generation in history. His blog (Surveyvivalist) uses targeted research to explore these same topics and issues. A charismatic speaker (alongside Undercurrent’s Josh Spear) for brands like McDonald’s, PepsiCo, Virgin, Leo Burnett, Columbia College, and the University of Colorado, Aaron’s thinking on the “born digital” consumer is highly sought after.

Nancy Duarte is the CEO of Duarte Design, the largest firm focused solely on presentations in the world—whether they are delivered in person, online or via devices. For more than 20 years she has shaped the perception of the world’s leading brands and thought leaders. Clients include Adobe, Apple, Cisco, Disney, Google, Food Network, Nestle, and thought leaders such as – Al Gore, Michael Pollan, William McDonough, Steven Chu and partnerships with innovative forums like TED, Churchill Club and PopTech.

In 2008 she authored slide:ology—The Art and Science of Creating Great Presentations where her experience was distilled into best practices for visual business communicators. She serves as a TED Fellows committee member, is a 2009 Woman of Influence, 2009 Woman Business of... Read More.

Rob Ellis is a software developer at Nitobi Inc. As one of the PhoneGap creators, Rob is focused on trying to make mobile device app development easy and open. At Nitobi, Rob is part of a team that makes web applications easier to use by building software that allows both developers and end-users be more effective.

Christopher Fahey is a founding partner and user experience director at Behavior, an award-winning New York web design consultancy focused on building compelling and elegant user experiences for business and culture.

At Behavior, Chris has led the IA and UXD strategies for clients and projects in many industries, including BusinessWeek, The National Geographic Channel, UNICEF, HBO, The Smithsonian Institution, McGraw-Hill, JPMorgan Chase, XM Satellite Radio, AARP, the AIGA, and The Onion. In his 14+ years as a professional interaction designer and manager, Chris’s projects have covered everything from business- critical web applications to sci-fi adventure games and artificial intelligence chatbots.

Chris is an active speaker on user experience design, with recent events including SXSW, An Event Apart, the ASIS&T IA... Read More.

Caterina Fake is a businesswoman and entrepreneur. She co-founded Flickr along with Stewart Butterfield in 2004. Flickr emerged from the development of a massively-multiplayer game, Game Neverending. After being acquired by Yahoo!, she ran the Technology Development Group at Yahoo, founded Yahoo’s Brickhouse, and ran the Hack Yahoo program.

Caterina currently serves as Chief Product Officer at Hunch. She is a boardmember at Etsy.com.

Veronica Fielding has long held a reputation as an innovator and as someone always right on the forefront of the next big thing. As a leader in the search marketing world, Veronica has been a frequent resource for The Wall Street Journal and she and her team regularly contribute to industry publications on the topic of search marketing. Veronica is often invited to speak at conferences and with marketing executives about the nuances of successful search marketing programs.

Veronica founded Digital Brand Expressions in late 2001. DBE is an interactive marketing consulting and services firm focused on providing search and social marketing services to Fortune 1000 and middle market companies for which search engine solutions are mission-critical component in the marketing mix. The company... Read More.

Brady Forrest is Chair for O’Reilly’s Where 2.0. Additionally, he co-Chairs Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco and NYC. Brady writes for O’Reilly Radar tracking changes in technology. He previously worked at Microsoft on Live Search (he came to Microsoft when it acquired MongoMusic). Brady lives in Seattle, where he builds cars for Burning Man and runs Ignite. You can track his web travels at Truffle Honey.

Vanessa Fox, called a “cyberspace visionary” by Seattle Business Monthly, is an expert in understanding customer acquisition from organic search. She shares her perspective on how this impacts marketing and user experience at ninebyblue.com and provides authoritative search-friendly design patterns for developers at janeandrobot.com. She’s also an entrepreneur-in-residence with Ignition Partners and Features Editor at Search Engine Land. She is co-chair for O’Reilly Found, a conference for web developers about SEO. Vanessa speakes regularly at conferences and corporate events and has written for a number of publications. She previously created Google’s Webmaster Central, which provides both tools and community to help website owners improve their sites to gain more customers from search. She was recently named one of Seattle’s 2008 top... Read More.

Limor Fried is a recent graduate of the MIT Media Lab where she earned a Masters of Engineering in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering. For her thesis, Limor developed and built subversive electronic devices, including a pair of glasses that darken whenever television is in view and a jamming device that disables people’s annoying cell phone conversations at the press of a button. She releases much of her work in the form of DIY kits or instruction sets, including persistence of vision displays for bikes, a home brew synthesizer, and a minty iPod charger.

Alina Fu is the Product Manager for Social Computing on the SharePoint product team. Alina’s primary responsibility is to develop the strategy and execution plan around social computing for the different SharePoint product cycles. Her efforts are currently focused primarily on the Information Workers (i.e. end users) and TDM/BDM audiences. She also develops the core content for social computing, works extensively with customers, and manages the SharePoint presence at all the major social computing industry events.

Heather Gold is an innovative comedian with deep roots in The Valley. She tours North America performing, speaking and hosting conversations at venues from the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts to Kenyon College to Gotham Comedy Club. For 10 years, she’s been mixing up the Net and in live performances exploring the emotional mechanics of how people connect — for example, how to be “private” in public, how to scale conversation, and how to bring really different people together.

Heather’s best known for quickly cutting through the chaff and “open sourcing” aspects of her shows to highlight insight and humor from the people formerly known as the audience. Heather uses her performance as a lab, bringing insight to technology, business and communities on... Read More.

Karl Good, director of consumer applications, can share with the Symbian community about why and how Truphone develops their application. Truphone has had more success than most distributing through mobile web advertising, and can demonstrate how to handle user perceptions of “quality” and free versus “premium” applications. Truphone would also like to unveil its new initiative to offer open Truphone platform capabilities that allow developers to build voice-supported applications. This presentation will be interactive, inviting discussion and audience participation. Founded in 2006, Truphone is a global mobile communications provider in the business of innovating how people converse in our globally connected world. As the industry’s first mobile Internet operator, the company makes it easy and affordable for users all over the world to keep in... Read More.

Eric is President of Development Seed, an online strategy shop in Washington, DC that specializes in building tools with open source software for international development agencies. Eric has developed communications strategies and tools for organizations around the world, ranging from international development organizations to major media outlets. Recently he has been mapping food security projects in Africa, developing the intranet at the World Bank for their international communications team, and building decentralized data collection tools to survey public health organizations’ capacity to respond to bird flu outbreak on the ground in Southeast Asia.

Eric’s interest in effective communications and background in international development has led him to develop news tracking and aggregation tools, SMS and mobile applications, and most recently mapping solutions and data... Read More.

Shwen is part of the Corporate Communications group at Vertex Pharmaceuticals, where he leads New Media Communications and focuses on New/Social Media, Web 2.0, and Health 2.0. He develops and implements digital strategies in support of Marketing and Communications initiatives and establishes/maintains key relationships with new media publishers and “new influencers”.

Shwen speaks regularly at industry events on New/Social Media and advises various industry-related organizations on their social media strategies. For 2009, he will chair the annual Digital Pharma conference and sits on the advisory board for IAmBiotech.org.

Shwen also hosts the Med 2.0 Blog & Podcast (med20.com) and is the founder of the Social Pharmer Network and Unconference (SocialPharmer.com)—a network for new and social media in pharma and healthcare.

For more info, please see:... Read More.

Marty Hall has presented seminars and training courses on Ajax, GWT, Web, and Java technology topics in Australia, Canada, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Japan, the Philippines, and in dozens of US venues. He has done consulting and software development for a number of clients in the Baltimore/Washington area, and is the author of six popular books from Prentice Hall on Web and Java programming topics. Mary is also is an adjunct faculty member in the Johns Hopkins University part-time graduate program in Computer Science, where he directs the Web and Java related concentration areas.

Steve Hall is the Publisher of Adrants. Steve has done time in media, account management and new business at, among others, Leo Burnett, Starcom/Mediavest, BlackSheep Marketing, and Bozell, where he managed big ass marketing budgets for both consumer and business-to-business clients including Reebok, Sperry Topsider, Monster.com, Tyco, Marriott Hotels and Marshmallow Fluff.

Steve has written about and spoken for industry associations on topics such as the advertising’s role in consumer-controlled media, the integration of public relations and advertising, the future convergence of media, and the decline of traditional media. He is co-founder of MarketingVOX, an online marketing publication, co-founder and publisher of the ad:tech industry trade show weblog and creator of the advertising social network AdGabber.

Kristina is the founder and president of Brain Traffic, an internationally-renowned agency specializing in content strategy and writing for the web.

Widely recognized as one of the world’s leading content strategists, Kristina speaks regularly to international audiences about how to deliver useful, usable content online, where and when your customers need it most. She’s a highly sought-after speaker and has appeared at Web 2.0 Expo, IA Summit, Future of Web Apps, An Event Apart, Voices That Matter, Online Marketing Summit, SXSW Interactive, and j. boye.

In 2009, Kristina curated the first Content Strategy Consortium to facilitate a national dialogue about this emerging discipline. She is also the author of Content Strategy for the Web (New Riders, August 2009). The book is the first to... Read More.

Rabble is an independent hacker. He has extensive experience doing ruby on rails development and generally causing a ruckus. He was the architect for Odeo.com and Yahoo! Fire Eagle location broker platform. He’s currently causing trouble with the entp.com kids.

Christine Herron has spent her career finding new and innovative information technologies. She is currently a Principal with First Round Capital, an early-stage venture capital firm. Previously, Christine was a director at Omidyar Network, where she developed the Media practice strategy and drove $15 million in early-stage placements.

Prior to joining Omidyar Network in 2005, Christine was the VP of Marketing for Mission Research, which develops small business CRM solutions. While there, she led marketing from initial business plan authoring through paying customer and distribution partner acquisition. Earlier, Christine was the founder and CEO of Mercury2, a software-as-a-service developer of international trade logistics systems. She has also managed developer tools at NetObjects, and played for the Internet Server Team at Microsoft.

Christine started... Read More.

Allan Holmes is Executive Editor at Government Executive, joining Executive Editors Tom Shoop and Anne Laurent in the senior management of the enterprise. Holmes has been CIO’s Washington Bureau Chief since 2004. He was editor in chief of Federal Computer Week magazine and FCW.com from January 2001 to August 2003, and FCW editor and managing editor prior to that. He developed, launched and managed the award-winning daily news site, FCW.com. During his nearly nine years at FCW, the magazine and web site won more than three dozen awards, including Folio Magazine’s Best Government Publication and first-place awards from the American Society of Business Press Editors for Best Government Coverage and Best Overall Web Publication. Holmes also served as editorial director... Read More.

Josh Holmes is an Architect Evangelist with Microsoft focused on building and educating the architect community. Prior to joining Microsoft in October 2006, Josh was a consultant with SRT Solutions working with a variety of clients ranging from large Fortune 500 firms to smaller sized companies. In most situations, Josh was called in as the technical leader on a project to lead the clients team to success. Josh is a frequent speaker and lead panelist at national and international software development conferences, including VSLive, Software Development Expo (East and West), Basta, eRubyCon and the Rich Web Experience, focusing on emerging technologies, software design and development with an emphasis on mobility and RIA (Rich Internet Applications). Josh has written and delivered many training classes... Read More.

Damon Horowitz is a leading thinker at the intersection of technology and the humanities. Horowitz is co-founder and CTO of Aardvark, the popular social search engine, where he oversees product development and research strategy. Prior to Aardvark, Horowitz built several companies around applications of intelligent language processing. He co-founded Perspecta (acquired by Excite), was lead architect for Novation Biosciences (acquired by Agilent), and co-founded NewsDB (now Daylife).

Horowitz teaches courses in computer science, cognitive science, and philosophy at many institutions, including Stanford, NYU, University of Pennsylvania, and San Quentin. He has spoken at conferences ranging from TED to AAAI, and his work has been featured in media ranging from the New York Times to Discovery Channel to TechCrunch.

Horowitz earned a... Read More.

Tom Hughes-Croucher is an Evangelist and Senior Developer in Yahoo’s Open Strategy Group, focusing on Yahoo’s Web Services and Cloud Platform. Tom has contributed to a number of Web standards for the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the British Standards Institute (BSI). Previously he helped build the online music stores for some of the UK’s largest brands including Tesco, Three Telecom and Channel 4.

Ben is the CEO of the company that runs I Can Has Cheezburger?, FAIL Blog, EngrishFunny.com and a network of other user-created humor sites.

The company has grown from nothing to serving 160 million page-views a month in less time than Sarah Palin has been governor of Alaska.

Tara ‘miss rogue’ Hunt has spent most of her adult life online, either participating in or building communities. From the first wave of online marketing when she was in Canada, showing companies how to brave this new medium, all the way to being part of one of the companies in Silicon Valley that led the wave into Web 2.0: the participatory web.

Tara understands how the the participatory web is changing all of our relationships: B2C, B2B and C2C. She doesn’t believe in pushing messages or creating strong brands, only in the power of building relationships.

Tara wrote The Whuffie Factor, a book on community marketing, that came out spring 2009. She speaks all over the world on the same topic. She is... Read More.

I’ve started four companies since I left graduate school, ranging from publishing to mobile application development, the last being Angelsoft.net, where I used my hard-won skills in operations, sales, marketing, and product development to help meritocratize early-stage equity financing.

In April I took a position as the Entrepreneur in Residence at Rose Tech Ventures and I’ve started a new company called SetJam. With SetJam, I’ve got two goals:

1. To build a “rational economic sanctuary”–a place where smart people can do what they are best at in the service of something they care about without having to worry about the day-to-day vicissitudes of the economic forces that surround us all.

2. To make online TV easy enough for my Mom to use.

JEFF JARVIS is the author of What Would Google Do? (Collins, January). He blogs about media and news at Buzzmachine.com and as a columnist for the Guardian. He is associate professor and director of the interactive journalism program at the City University of New York’s new Graduate School of Journalism. He is consulting editor of Daylife, a news startup. Jarvis was creator and founding editor of Entertainment Weekly; Sunday editor and associate publisher of the New York Daily News; TV critic for TV Guide and People; a columnist on the San Francisco Examiner; assistant city editor and reporter for the Chicago Tribune; reporter for Chicago Today.

r. Jebara is Director of the Columbia University Machine Learning Laboratory, whose research focuses upon machine learning, computer vision and related application areas such as human-computer interaction. Jebara is also a Principal Investigator at Columbia’s Vision and Graphics Center.

He has published over 50 peer-reviewed papers in conferences and journals including NIPS, ICML, UAI, COLT, JMLR, CVPR, ICCV, AISTAT, and PAMI. He is the author of the book Machine Learning: Discriminative and Generative (Kluwer).

Jebara is recipient of the Career Award from the National Science Foundation and has also received honors for his papers from the International Conference on Machine Learning and from the Pattern Recognition Society. He has served as chair, program committee member, and reviewer for various conferences... Read More.

Yousef Khalidi is a Distinguished Engineer in the Windows Azure team. Windows Azure is a platform for developing, deploying, managing, and hosting cloud-based services. Khalidi has led several areas of Windows Azure, and is currently responsible for the platform’s enterprise strategy. Before Windows Azure, Khalidi led an advanced development team in Windows that tackled a number of related operating system areas, including application model, resource management, and isolation. He also served as a member of the Windows Core Architecture group.

Before joining Microsoft, Khalidi was a Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems. Khalidi was Chief Technology Officer and Chief Architect of Solaris, Chief Architect and Director of the Sun Cluster product line, Chief Architect of Sun’s N1 utility computing initiative, as well as a principal architect... Read More.

Peter Kim is Managing Director, North America at Dachis Group, a Social Business Design firm. He is a leading thinker and analyst on social business, which he discusses in his blog at www.beingpeterkim.com. He has been quoted in the press by media outlets including CNN, CNBC, NPR, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal.

Peter was previously an analyst at Forrester Research, focusing on the intersection of social technology and marketing strategy. Earlier, he managed international marketing operations, e-commerce, and digital marketing at PUMA AG. Peter is a graduate of the University of Virginia Darden School and the University of Pennsylvania.

With 12 years of experience designing software systems and web applications, Sarah is a leading authority on user-experience enhancement. Prior to founding UEVision, Sarah served as user experience consultant, usability evangelist, and team leader for a number of enterprise and business-to-business software companies, including Saba, E-Stamp, and Inxight Software.

Sarah specializes in designing the enterprise user experience by adapting user-focused design practices to the specific requirements of enterprise software systems and the needs of their users. She has led a variety of successful initiatives to integrate usability best practices with the product development process to produce enterprise products that are practical, efficient, visually appealing, and highly usable.

As the CEO of UEVision, Sarah drives the vision and strategy for the company, and works with... Read More.

Josh has been a social entrepreneur for the past 20 years, creating and leading successful organizations in both the non-profit and for-profit sectors. His ability to spot emerging trends in technology and how they can be used for the betterment of society and the environment have caused him to be considered a leading expert in the field. He’s been featured in Time, Fortune, Newsweek and Wired magazines, and was even named a New Media Hero by the Utne Reader.

Prior to Rhiza Labs, Josh lead MAYA Design’s Information Commons project. Before that, he founded and served as Executive Director of the EnviroLink Network, a nonprofit foundation dedicated to helping organizations adopt emerging technologies. Josh also founded and served as CEO of Green Marketplace,... Read More.

Peter Koht is the economic development coordinator at the City of Santa Cruz. Prior to this, he headed the Arts Commission at the City of Santa Cruz, was an account manager at Good Times Santa Cruz and taught at San Francisco State University and University of California, Santa Cruz. Peter currently serves on the board of Santa Cruz Next and Central Coast Public Radio.

Randy currently manages the social media strategy for MOTODEV which is Motorola’s developer program primarily focused on mobile devices and Motorola’s latest Android handsets. He is constantly listening and engaging with the MOTODEV community via blogs, discussion boards, and numerous social networks like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. Previous to Motorola, Randy worked on viral marketing programs for Yahoo! and online marketing roles at Roxio, Handspring, and Sony Electronics. In his spare time, he volunteers for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society’s Team in Training program running marathons, cycling century rides and raising funds to find a cure for blood-related cancers. Tweet @djksar to contact Randy.

Kichiro Kurozumi is a creative producer, managing Creative UX team at Sony Ericsson and responsible for Sony Ericsson’s new UX concept creation.

Kichiro has been putting his creative energy and focusing on creation of strong consumer propositions and compelling user experience. Kichiro spent 9 years in Sony Corporation as a strategist for new business development and telecom strategy before he joined Sony Ericsson in 2003.

Peter Laudati is a Microsoft Developer Evangelist from New Jersey. In his current role, Peter works with the developer community in New York and New Jersey to support area user groups, code camps, and other events. Previously, he worked as a consultant in Microsoft’s services division. As a consultant, he worked on enterprise application development projects and provided architectural guidance for large companies throughout the NY & NJ metro area. He lives with his family in central New Jersey and loves kayaking and biking at the Jersey Shore. His blog can be read at http://www.peterlaudati.com.

As Chief Strategy Officer, Adam Lavelle delivers leadership, strategy and innovative ideas to iCrossing teams, while driving the development and delivery of iCrossing’s service and technology offerings to create comprehensive digital marketing programs for the company’s Fortune 500 client-base. Lavelle has more than twelve years of interactive expertise helping clients succeed online, with senior positions at Agency.com, iXL/Scient, Digitas, and The Internet Group, where he led the first launch of Mapquest.com. Lavelle has a B.A. in Classical Studies and Creative Writing from the University of Pittsburgh. He speaks at numerous industry events, including ad:tech NYC, Pluck 2008 Socialize Conference, StarVest Partners, SES Chicago, and keynote speaker at Infopresse Search Summit, among others.

Michael is a serial entrepreneur who has co-founded four successful internet-based media companies. He has a passion for creating, managing and growing companies from the ground up.

Michael’s first foray into entrepreneurship came with the founding of University Wire, an Associated Press-like network of more than 700 student-run newspapers that is now owned by CBS Corp. Building on his growing experience in the online space, Michael next founded GOLF.com, which was purchased by Time Warner’s Time Inc. division in January 2006. Michael led GOLF.com from a start-up to a multi-million dollar profitable golf media company.

Michael is currently the chairman and CEO of Buddy Media, Inc., a New York-based company that is a leading developer of applications for social media sites,... Read More.

Alisa Leonard-Hansen is a Social Media Evangelist and subject matter expert within the Digital Strategy group at iCrossing, a leading global digital agency. She drives thought leadership around social media and develops social strategies for clients across diverse industry verticals. Alisa is also the Communications Chair of the DataPortability Project and writes about the future of the social web, data portability and the pragmatic web on her blog, TheWebisSocial.com. She also contributes to Great Finds and Mashable, and has been featured in AdRants, The Daily Beast, Sillicon Alley Insider and AdAge. Alisa was named one of DM New’s “30 Under 30 Industry Whiz Kids” in 2008 and has been featured on AdWeek’s “Top 50 Twitterers to Follow.” Follower her on Twitter @alisamleo.

Pete LePage is a Senior Product Manager working on Internet Explorer at Microsoft. Pete started using and developing on the web in the mid-90’s creating his first website on GeoCities. Since then, Pete has moved on to bigger and better things. For the last two years, he’s been working with the IE. Before his role in Product Management, Pete was a tester on Visual Studio’s web design components.

With over six years at Microsoft, LePage has been designing websites since his early days in high school, evolving from the <font> tags and GeoCities to properly styled CSS, managed hosting websites. Prior to joining the product management team, LePage was a tester on Microsoft’s Visual Web Developer where he steered much of the web design... Read More.

Rasmus Lerdorf is known for having gotten the PHP project off the ground in 1995 and has contributed to a number of other open source projects over the years. He is currently an infrastructure architect at Yahoo! He was born in Greenland, grew up in Denmark and Canada and has a Systems Design engineering degree from the University of Waterloo.

Mike is an entrepreneur and marketing executive with a 14-year track record of success as a senior manager at early-stage technology companies.

Mike was most recently the CEO and Co-Founder of Stimulate Solutions, a SaaS software provider focused on leveraging social media to target leads and increase demand. He was responsible for general management and company operations, business development, marketing and sales.

Prior to forming Stimulate, Mike led marketing activities at several early stage technology firms, helping them mature into highly successful organizations. As Vice President of Marketing at PlatformQ, Mike increased demand by 120% and increase strategic partners by 200%. As Vice President of Marketing at Salesnet, he drove all marketing activities, leading up to the company’s acquisition by RightNow Technologies (NASDAQ: Read More.

Håkon Wium Lie joined Opera in 1999 as the Chief Technology Officer. Prior to his position at Opera, Wium Lie worked for W3C, where he proposed the concept of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS).

After receiving his Master’s degree from MIT Media Lab, Wium Lie worked as a research scientist at Norwegian Telecom Research and later at CERN, the birthplace of the Web. From 1995 to 1999, Wium Lie worked for W3C, after which he joined Opera. He has also received a PhD degree from the University of Oslo in 2006.

In 1999, Technology Review included him on the TR100 list, “a group of one hundred young innovators in technology from around the world”. Wium Lie was also honored by the... Read More.

John Limbocker is Founder and CEO, of Limbo Vision, Inc. Limbo Vision is responsible for over 100 Million in increased online sales for its commercial clients through natural SEO techniques. In an effort to break away from the norm and share his internet marketer lifestyle, John has developed an online training program to teach webmasters and website owners all of his tricks in his new SEO Dominator’s Club.

John lives and works inside of a beautiful tropical estuary he has created and calls home in sunny Huntington Beach, California. He doesn’t know the actual date he started his web career, but recalls it being in the mid 90’s – prior to Yahoo! in the days when having a top listing on Alta... Read More.

Dr. Ching-Yung Lin is a Research Scientist and Project Lead at IBM T. J. Watson Research Center. He joined IBM in 2000, after getting his Ph.D. from Columbia University. Dr. Lin is also an affiliate associate professor in the University of Washington and an adjunct associate professor in Columbia Univ. Dr. Lin is the Lead of the IBM SmallBlue project – an Integrated Socio-Informatics Network Analysis and Application Platform since 2006. This is an IBM Corporation effort including worldwide Research, Software, and Service divisions. Inside IBM, this platform has been capturing and analyzing both people networks, document networks, and the cross-layer links between people and documents. An external product version of this platform (IBM Atlas) is available to other organizations.... Read More.

Mike has over 20 years experience bringing products to market in companies ranging in size from startups to $1 billion in sales. Mike has held senior positions in Product Strategy, Product Management, Marketing, Sales and Operations. He has been a co-founder of a successful software business, Coral Systems, and a successful consulting business, Consensio.

MARISSA LOUIE is the founder and CEO of AD-Village, which gives website publishers instant access to ads from top ad networks. AD-Village has helped website publishers of all sizes earn an average of 5-15% more revenue by recommending ads which match their online identities and audience the best. AD-Village’s publishers include some of the most highly visited websites in the world.

Marissa is a frequent conference speaker and has also appeared on BusinessWeek.com, Forbes.com, BlogTalkRadio, GQ Korea, and more. She writes the column “Young Female Entrepreneur” for BusinessWeek.com and publishes thought leadership in online advertising at marissalouie.com.

Prior to founding AD-Village, she held leadership positions in Management Consulting, Product Management, Sales, and Viral Marketing for companies including Deloitte Consulting, Number Networks, and SlideShare.... Read More.

Debra Lavoy has been working with collaborative and social media for over 15 years at companies such as AOL and Adobe and now serves as Director of Product Marketing for Digital and Social Media at Open Text. She is a regular speaker in the D.C. area, where Obama’s transparent government initiative has created a world of thought and activity on the need to leverage both cultural and technological advances to move ahead to new levels of customer relationships and organizational productivity.

She blogs at productfour.wordpress.com.

Erin Malone, Principal with Tangible ux, has over 20 years of experience leading design teams and developing social experiences for web and software. Prior to Tangible, she spent 4+ years at Yahoo! leading the Platform User Experience Design team where they were responsible for Community products and platforms, for helping develop the Yahoo! Open Strategy, including its social offerings, building the Yahoo! Design Pattern Library and for providing design expertise to the popular YUI (Yahoo! User Interface Library). Additionally, she led the redesign of the Yahoo! Developer Network, oversaw the redesign of Yahoo!’s registration system, and worked on cross-company initiatives. Before Yahoo!, she was a Design Director at AOL responsible for community applications, Creative Director at AltaVista and chief Information Architect for Zip2.... Read More.

Valeria Maltoni is Director, Marketing Communications at SunGard Availability Services, an IT operations company customers rely on for their business continuity and disaster recovery needs. A marketer with 20 years of real-world corporate experience across a broad array of mid-to-large sized companies, 10 of which online, she’s done brand work and people relations from Fortune 500 to small start up companies in technology, health care, chemical manufacturing, risk management consulting, and financial services. She applies this wealth of experience and insight to helping businesses understand how customers and communities have changed marketing, public relations, and communications – and how to build value and get results in this new environment. She specializes in taking companies to what’s next in their business cycle. Her blog, Conversation... Read More.

Kevin Marks is Vice President of Web Services at BT, converging telephony and the Web through open standards. Over the last 20 years he’s alternated between giant companies and founding startups – BBC, The UK MultiMedia Corporation, Apple QuickTime, Technorati, Google. The common thread has been working out how people, computers and media can complement each other, and solving the engineering and social problems where they meet. He is one of the driving forces behind microformats.org, activitystrea.ms and portablecontacts.net. He is an advisor to the Open Rights Group. He wants you to remember that URLs are people too, and his URL is http://epeus.blogspot.com.

Ross Mayfield is Chairman, President & 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. Mayfield has grown Socialtext to over 4,000 customers with Software-as-a-Service, Appliance and Open Source solutions. Mayfield partnered with Dan Bricklin, the creator of the first spreadsheet visiCalc, to co-develop and distribute SocialCalc. Socialtext is backed by Draper Fisher Jurvetson, SAP Ventures and Omidyar Network.

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. Mayfield served as the marketing director of the largest... Read More.

CEO, strategist, and author Nilofer Merchant is a leading authority on creating business strategy to win markets. She honed her unique, collaborative approach to solving tough problems while working with and for companies like Adobe, Apple, Nokia, SAP and others.

As Rubicon’s founder and CEO, Nilofer leads a distinguished team of operational veterans. Her firm works with global corporations such as Hewlett-Packard, Pinnacle, Logitech, Openwave, Symantec, among others, to create solutions to win markets.

Nilofer’s keynote presentations attract SRO crowds at business leadership events, technology expos, women’s conferences, and universities, ranging from AjaxWorld, CTIA, and PBWC, to Stanford. She’s won multiple awards for her insights on applying strategic thinking and innovation, and has been quoted or published in major... Read More.

Dwight is CEO of 10gen which sponsors the open source MongoDB project. Dwight is an active MongoDB committer.

Dwight was cofounder of DoubleClick and CTO of DoubleClick for 10 years. Dwight is the original architect of the DoubleClick DART ad serving system.

Oren Michels brings more than 15 years of experience to his job as CEO of Mashery. Michels has a proven track record with experience across multiple industries. Previously, Michels was vice president of business development at Feedster, where he negotiated partnerships with AOL, Real Networks and Mitsui, and oversaw the company’s activities in China. Prior to Feedster, Michels was president of Colt HR, a leading provider of outsourced benefits administration software and services to the mid market. He also co-founded WiFinder, an international provider of directory services for wi-fi public access hotspots; served as president of winebid.com, where he managed the company’s growth and helped establish it as a leading online wine auction market; served as COO of two manufacturing companies; and... Read More.

Sarah Milstein is TechWeb’s General Manager and Co-Chair for Web 2.0 Expo; she is also coauthor with Tim O’Reilly of The Twitter Book. Previously, she was on the senior editorial staff at O’Reilly Media, where she founded the Tools of Change for Publishing Conference (TOC) and led development of the Missing Manuals, a best-selling series of computer books for non-geeks. Before joining O’Reilly in 2003, Sarah was a freelance writer and editor, and a regular contributor to The New York Times. She was also the CSA program founder for Just Food, a local-food-and-farms non-profit, and co-founder of Two Tomatoes Records, a label that distributes and promotes the work of children’s musician Laurie Berkner.

Matt Mullenweg blogs at ma.tt. 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.com, Akismet.com, and Gravatar. In his spare time he enjoys taking photographs and playing jazz.

Jeanne Murray is Program Manager, Social Software Programs and Enablement, in IBM Software Group. She works with teams to identify how social collaboration can improve business processes and connect globally distributed teams inside and outside the company. She’s held technical, marketing, and business strategy positions at IBM and has expertise in internet technologies, web marketing, and software development.

Jeanne’s areas of expertise include social software adoption, social networking, social media, and community building, as well as content and web strategy, web and user behavior analytics, and instructional design. She has experience in developing Web 2.0 concepts and technologies, driving growth in emerging markets, and managing learning programs. She works in Research Triangle Park, NC, and prior to joining IBM was a consultant... Read More.

Ryan has been the chief architect for Element^{N for the past 7 years and is responsible for the design and implementation of the technology platform which underpins both Element}N and Apstrata. Prior to Element^N, Ryan worked as the Director of Engineering for The Net Planet, s.p.a., an innovative search technology startup in Milan, Italy where he was responsible for the productization of their search technology.

As a technology lawyer, Jeffrey Neu brings a diverse range of hands on experience to the table. He co-founded a development firm in Sydney, Australia focusing on mobile technology and wireless content delivery and is also a co-founder CharityHelp International, a non-profit organization focused on implementing technological solutions in developing countries to support women’s rights and children’s education.

Jeffrey spends the majority of his time at the firm he founded J.C. Neu and Associates consulting and strategizing with clients on a variety of issues involving intellectual property, privacy, data security, and emerging technologies. As a self confessed geek, Jeffrey specializes in matters where lawyers need to understand technology.

Beth Simone Noveck is the United States Deputy Chief Technology Officer for Open Government. She directs the White House Open Government Initiative. She is on leave as a professor law and director of the Institute for Information Law and Policy at New York Law School and McClatchy visiting professor of communication at Stanford University. Dr. Noveck taught in the areas of intellectual property, technology and first amendment law and founded the law school’s “Do Tank,” a legal and software R&D lab focused on developing technologies and policies to promote open government (dotank.nyls.edu). Dr. Noveck is the author of Wiki Government: How Technology Can Make Government Better, Democracy Stronger, and Citizens More Powerful (2009) and editor of The State of Play: Law, Games and... Read More.

In August of 2007, Charlie founded Path 101, a NYC-based startup company focused on career discovery on the web. The company is the culmination of over 7 years of efforts in the career education space starting and running mentoring programs, internship programs, and recently teaching as an adjunct at Fordham University.

Charlie is also the founder of nextNY, a grassroots a participant-driven organization of almost 1,000 up and coming digital media and technology professionals in NYC—the largest in the area.

Previously, as the Director of Consumer Products for Oddcast, he helped launch the company’s first direct to consumer avatar platform, Voki. He was responsible Voki’s product vision, functional specifications, and initial business and marketing strategy.

His initial entrance into the NYC technology... Read More.

Tim O’Reilly is the founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media, Inc., thought by many to be the best computer book publisher in the world. O’Reilly Media also hosts conferences on technology topics, including the O’Reilly Open Source Convention, the Web 2.0 Summit, and the Gov 2.0 Summit. Tim’s blog, the O’Reilly Radar “watches the alpha geeks” to determine emerging technology trends, and serves as a platform for advocacy about issues of importance to the technical community. Tim is on the boards of CollabNet and Safari Books Online, and is a partner in O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures.

Michael Ogrinz is the author of Mashup Patterns (Addison Wesley, March 2009). He is also a Principal Architect at one of the world’s largest financial institutions. His business focus is to identify and integrate emerging technologies into the enterprise and to create innovative and competitive solutions. A frequent industry speaker on various facets of Enterprise 2.0 as they relate to the financial industry, Michael has been instrumental in enhancing the environment at his firm through his work on user interfaces and usability, wikis and blogs, so-nets, and most recently, mashups.

He lives with his wife, two daughters, a collection of classic pinball vector arcade machines, and a partially completed B9 Robot in wonderfully rural Easton, Connecticut.

Jennifer Pahlka is moving on from the role of co-chair and general manager of the Web 2.0 Expos for TechWeb to become Executive Director of a new non-profit, Code for America. Previously she chaired Enterprise 2.0, and before that was the director of the Game Group at CMP. During her tenure in the games business, she oversaw the dramatic growth of the Game Developers Conference (GDC) from 1995 to 2003 and launched a number of notable programs, including the Independent Games Festival, known as the Sundance of the game industry, and the Game Developers Choice Awards. Her roles included publisher of Game Developer magazine and Gamasutra.com, the premiere web site for game developers, and executive director of the International Game Developers Association (IGDA), an... Read More.

Tobias Peggs is the general manager of OneRiot, a realtime search engine that indexes the social web. Tobias has worked across both consumer and enterprise web industries since gaining a PhD in Search Algorithms from Cardiff University, UK, in 1996.

Olivier Picciotto is co-founder of Convertigo . Olivier is involved in global management of the company. He also acts as a “mashup evangelist” for convertigo products. Olivier has over 15 years experience managing high tech IT companies.

Before Convertigo , Olivier started and managed the end user enterprise messaging products from Marben Produits.

Olivier holds an Engineer degree from E.S.M.E specialized in IT technology

Scott Porad is the Cheezburger Technology Officer of Pet Holdings, Inc., the company behind I Can Has Cheezburger? and Failblog.org. The Cheezburger Network is a collection of web sites where everyday millions of people share moments of joy through the humor and wonder of LOL.

Previously, Scott focused on e-commerce and online retailing at drugstore.com, and online media and content management systems for ESPN.com at Paul Allen’s Starwave. He writes about his experiences working with the Internet at http://scottporad.com and http://twitter.com/scottporad.

Schoeller Porter leads Wolfram|Alpha’s developer relations program, focused on fostering a vibrant community of diverse developers eager to build compelling applications based on computational knowledge. In this role, Schoeller manages the Wolfram|Alpha Webservice API, the forthcoming Wolfram|Alpha Widget Builder, and the Wolfram|Alpha App for the iPhone and iPod touch.

Prior to Wolfram|Alpha, Schoeller served Wolfram Research for nine years, spanning engineering and business roles, as a Senior engineer responsible for managing and maintaining the UNIX versions of Mathematica and as manager of the business development and third-party applications group. Schoeller began his career at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, researching methods for computational fluid dynamics, exploring best-practices for performance tuning on high-performance computing systems, and working on the Mosaic web browser team.

Steve Portigal is the founder of Portigal Consulting, a boutique firm that brings together user research, design and business strategy. Portigal Consulting helps clients to discover and act on new insights about themselves and their customers. Steve speaks regularly at design events (IDSA, IXDA, interaction09, etc.). He writes regularly for interactions magazine, Core77 and the Portigal Consulting blog, All This ChittahChattah. Steve is an avid photographer who has a Museum of Foreign Grocery Products in his home.

Olivier Poupeney is Co-Founder and CEO of DreamFace Interactive. Dreamface is built on Olivier’s vast experience; over 15 years of dedication to advancing the user experience through innovative technology. Prior to starting DreamFace Interactive, Olivier was the co-founder and VP of R&D at Ecensity Corporation, where he led the R&D team in the creation of their state of the art Composite Application Framework EPS. Ecensity was purchased in 2007. Olivier was Field Application Engineering Manager for Silverstream France, Pre-Sales Engineer for Synon France and Trainer and Consultant for Powersoft/Sybase France where he acquired real-world experience designing user-interfaces for some of the largest international companies.

Sean Power is a consultant, analyst, author and speaker. He is the co-founder of Watching Websites, a boutique consulting firm focusing on early stage startups, products and non-profits as they emerge and mature in their niches. He has built professional services organizations and traveled across North America delivering engagements to Fortune 1000 companies. He helps executives understand their competitive landscape and the future of their industry. He has done technical edition for Troubleshooting Linux Firewall for Addison-Wesley and co-authored Complete Web Monitoring for O’Reilly media with Alistair Croll.

Sean has had first-hand experience creating and implemented social computing strategies with larger companies like MTV and smaller startups like Akoha. He is active in the social computing space, using Twitter and blogs as his communication... Read More.

Apratim Purakayastha (known as “AP”) is currently a director of software development for Online Collaboration Services department of the Lotus division. His team is building LotusLive®, a socially centered set of collaboration services delivered in the software-as-a-service model. Before joining the Lotus division, he was a senior manager at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center. In his research career, he was active in the field of mobile computing, specifically in the areas of data synchronization, messaging, notification, and context. He is one of the founding contributors to the SyncML data synchronization standard and has contributed to multiple IBM products related to mobile and pervasive computing. He has authored numerous research papers in the field and has been named an IBM Master... Read More.

Web Content coordinator and community manager in the field of civil protection, and committed as volunteer in the Abruzzo Emergency (earthquake). People is my passion. Sharing knowledge is my job.

Michael Reynolds is President, CEO, Marketing and Social Media Expert at SpinWeb. SpinWeb creates, manages, and markets professional websites for associations and corporations.

Michael lives in the beautiful city of Indianapolis and he has worked in the marketing and technology sector since 1996. Michael has assisted a number of businesses and non-profits in utilizing marketing and technology. He also serve’s as a board member for a number of local and national organizations. Michael conducts regular educational workshops and seminars that include Internet marketing, technology, social media, business development, extreme productivity, and networking.

On a personal note, Michael plays tennis, loves all things Apple, and would do just about anything for good sushi. He can be found on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Good old-fashioned email... Read More.

Eric Ries is the author of the blog Lessons Learned. He was the co-founder and served as Chief Technology Officer of IMVU, his third startup. He is the co-author of several books including The Black Art of Java Game Programming (Waite Group Press, 1996). In 2007, BusinessWeek named Ries one of the Best Young Entrepreneurs of Tech. He serves on the advisory board of a number of technology startups including pbWiki, Smule, 750i and KaChing.

Bryce co-founded O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures (OATV) in 2005. At OATV he focuses on consumer and enterprise software and services investments.

Prior to OATV, Bryce sourced and lead a number of successful early stage investments at Wasatch Venture Fund, a Draper Fisher Jurvetson affiliate. In 2004, Bryce co-founded the Open Source Business Conference (sold to IDG) in order to spark a conversation around commercializing the highly disruptive technologies and services emerging from the open source community. Prior to Wasatch, Bryce was a member of a small team at vertical search pioneer Whizbang! Labs. While at WhizBang!, he defined and launched the FlipDog.com division (sold to Monster Worldwide). He began his career in technology doing large enterprise software deployments, saving his employer from the... Read More.

Named one of Rolling Stone’s “Agents of Change” for 2009, prior to boxee Ronen was the Head of Corporate Development and M&A for Comverse, Inc. a leading provider of software and service to Telecom service providers. Ronen was responsible for acquisitions valued at$450M, which were key to the company’s evolution from a Voicemail company to a Billing and VAS provider.

Ronen joined Comverse in2002 when they acquired Odigo, a company he co-founded in 1998. Odigo was one of the early Instant Messaging services on the web serving over8M users worldwide, and earned Ronen the 2002 honor of being a member of Crain’s 40 under 40.

Prior to Odigo Ronen served for 4.5 years in the Israeli Defense Force in the special computer unit, Read More.

Alexis Roos is an Principal Field Technologist in the OEM Software Sales organization where he is focusing on Services Oriented Architectures, Web 2.0 and beyond and Sun middleware (including GlassFish, Open ESB, SailFin and Java CAPS) for OEMs Worldwide. Alexis has been at Sun microsystems for over nine years. During that time he has worked in delivery and pre-sales capacity; first as a Java Architect in the DC Sun Java Center where he focussed on large J2EE architectures; later in the Communications Industry group where he supported Service Providers and Network Equipment Providers Worldwide primarily around Services Delivery Platforms, IP Multimedia Subsystem and OSS/BSS integration. Alexis leads several groups at Sun including the Global Sales and Services Application Platform Ambassador... Read More.

Kevin Rose is the founder and chief architect of Digg. He oversees all aspects of the management and development of the Web site. Under his leadership, Digg has grown to more than 30 million unique visitors per month and has been included in TIME Magazine’s “50 Best Websites” list every year since 2006.

Kevin started Digg in September 2004 as a personal project. His initial idea was to conduct a social experiment in how masses of users could control and promote news and other content on the Web, without external editorial control. After a very short time, he realized the power of his idea, as Digg was becoming a resource for breaking news stories and developed a strong user following.

Kevin is also a... Read More.

Douglas Rushkoff is the author of ten books on media, technology, and society, including Cyberia, Media Virus, Coercion, Nothing Sacred, Get Back in the Box, and the novel Ecstasy Club. He made the PBS Frontline documentaries Merchants of Cool, The Persuaders, and the upcoming Digital Nation. He is the host of the WFMU radio show The MediaSquat, and he will be teaching the New School University this Fall. His latest book, Life Inc: How the world became a corporation and how to take it back, was just published by RandomHouse and RandomHouse Audiobooks.

For more about Rushkoff and his work, visit rushkoff.com.

More than 14 years working as an engineer and leader in Silicon Valley at companies including Apple, PointCast, Netscape / Mozilla, Macromedia and Yahoo on products including Mozilla/Netscape, Dreamweaver, Flex Builder 2 and Yahoo! Messenger.

Jeff Schick has been with IBM since 1988, has held various roles in both development and the field, and is currently the Vice President for IBM’s initiatives for social software and has overall responsibility for development, marketing, sales and services. In January 2007, IBM announced Lotus Connections, the first integrated social software platform for business and one of IBM’s fastest growing products. These capabilities are being used at IBM today as well as governments and businesses around the world.

Erick Schonfeld is the Co-Editor of TechCrunch. He has been covering startups and technology news since 1993.

Prior to TechCrunch, he was Editor-at-Large for Business 2.0 magazine, where he wrote feature stories and ran their main blog, Next Net, which had nearly 50,000 RSS subscribers. He also does a lot of video work and hosts regular panels of industry luminaries.

Schonfeld started his career at Fortune magazine. In 1999, he won the prize for best information technology submission at London’s Business Journalist of the Year Awards, and in 2001 he won the prize for best space submission at the Aerospace Journalist of the Year Awards in Paris. In 1996 and 1997, Schonfeld was recognized in the TJFR Business News Reporter’s list of the... Read More.

Andy has been the go-to analyst in the hosting industry since its inception in the late 1990s. From his beginnings at Piper Jaffray where he developed and managed the VoIP industry’s primary market statistics, Schroepfer published a 270-page report on the dis-aggregation of communications, which sparked his coverage of the Web hosting industry. He then joined Goldman Sachs as VP and Senior Equity Analyst on the Internet Infrastructure Services industry during the time when Equinix, Loudcloud (now HP), and Webex (now Cisco) were executing their IPOs. In late 2000, Schroepfer founded, led, and later sold Tier 1 Research, the leading specialist research firm on the hosting and data center industry. Before joining Rackspace, Mr. Schroepfer was a technology investor and founded CagedTweets.com, an archiving firm... Read More.

Toby Segaran is the author of the O’Reilly title, “Programming Collective Intelligence”, one of Amazon’s top-selling AI book, and a co-founder of freerisk.org. His upcoming titles “Programming the Semantic Web” and “Beautiful Data” will be on shelves in July. He frequently speaks on the subjects of machine learning, collective intelligence and freedom of data at conferences worldwide.

He currently holds the title of Data Magnate at Metaweb Technologies, where he works on large-scale data reconciliation problems. Prior to Metaweb he founded Incellico, a biotechnology software company, which was acquired in 2003.

Toby holds a B.Sc in Computer Science from MIT and is deemed a “Person of Exceptional Ability” by the USCIS. He loves applying data-analysis algorithms to everything ranging from pharmaceutical trials to... Read More.

Peter Semmelhack is the founder and CEO of Bug Labs, a company that empowers users to develop truly personal devices. Previously, Peter was the founder and CTO of Antenna Software, a leading mobile enterprise software vendor. Following a 20 year career in software, Peter founded Bug Labs on the belief that users and communities should have the power to create and share devices in the same way they create and share digital content.

Clara Shih joined salesforce.com in 2006 and is responsible for Enterprise Social Networking Alliances and Product Strategy. Previously, she was the product line director of AppExchange, salesforce.com’s online business applications marketplace, for which she led the development of the Checkout payment services for partner applications. Independently, Clara developed Faceconnector (formerly Faceforce) in 2007, the first business application on Facebook. Clara is the author of a new book, The Facebook Era (Prentice Hall), about how online social networks are transforming customer relationships and what sales and marketers must do to adapt and succeed.

Prior to this, Clara worked in strategy and business operations at Google and as a software developer at Microsoft. Clara holds B.S. and M.S. degrees in computer science and economics from Stanford... Read More.

Jun is a co-founder of SetJam.com with Ryan Janssen, whom she met while she was VP of User Experience and Creative Director at Angelsoft.net. She has won numerous awards, including the Industrial Designers Society of America Award and holds patent US 7,593,954 B1, a system and method for presenting entries in a web publishing system.

She graduated top of her department at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). She also studied Business and Product Development at Harvard University and Psychology at Brown University.

She got her start at Microsoft in the late 90’s, but from there, she moved onto her first startup with Traction Software where she designed a group collaboration tool currently used by various clients including the CIA. She has been... Read More.

Shiv has been with Razorfish since 1999 and, he has worked in the Boston, New York, San Francisco and London offices. As the company’s Global Social Media Lead, Shiv helps the agency introduce its clients such as Carnival Cruise Lines, Microsoft, Citibank, Ford Motor Company, Panasonic, Novartis and Starwood to social influence marketing- or, how to incorporate social media and social technologies to support marketing and business objectives. His role also includes capability development, developing strategic partnerships, leading thought leadership efforts and encouraging experimentation with social media across the agency.

Shiv has been published widely, and he has spoken at conferences such as South by Southwest Interactive, the Direct Marketing Association’s Leader’s Forum, OMMA Global, O’Reilly Graphing Social Patterns, the ARF Annual Summit... Read More.

Vik Singh helped create and architect Yahoo! BOSS, a popular open search platform.

He developed several real-time BOSS based examples like TweetNews and the Fresh homepage for Delicious.

MIT’s Technology Review listed him as one of the Top 35 under 35 Innovators of 2009 for his contributions to search.

Vik Singh previously worked at Google and Microsoft, both in research and products, helping ship Google Custom Search and Windows XPSP2 Wireless Networking. At Microsoft Research, he worked under Dr. Jim Gray, co-authoring a publication together on data mining the SkyServer logs. He has filed 9 patents in the areas of search, social networking, and web services.

Rashmi Sinha is cofounder and CEO for SlideShare, the world’s largest community for sharing presentations. SlideShare is growing rapidly (more than 8 million monthly uniques) letting everyone from teachers to marketers to conference speakers share presentations and connect with others. Rashmi has a PhD in Cognitive Psychology from Brown University and did research on search engines and recommender systems at UC Berkeley. She is a frequent speaker at conferences such as Webvisions and Future of Web Apps. She writes a blog at rashmisinha.com about social software and running a startup.

Brett Slatkin is the co-creator of the PubSubHubbub protocol and a Software Engineer on the Google App Engine team. He joined Google in 2005. He earned his B.S. in Computer Engineering from Columbia University in the City of New York. He lives in San Francisco.

James Smith is a pioneer in the fields of online and integrated media. Having launched media properties in the past decade in the US, Europe and Japan, James plays an instrumental role in the development of the Disney.com online strategy. Focusing on all aspects of Disney online, James creates revenue streams outside of standard media through cutting edge branded entertainment products, large scale cross media programs & the development of a newly created ad network at Disney.com. Prior to joining Disney Online, James held executive roles at Nielsen & United Business Media and also spent time driving strategy in the social networking space as an executive at Leverage Software.

Janine Soika has over 18 years experience in Strategic and Business-to-Business Marketing, with over 10 years experience within Channel Marketing. Ms Soika has held numerous senior leadership Marketing positions within fortune 500 companies including IBM, Dow Jones Company, AXA Equitable, Wells Fargo Bank, and Arrow Electronics, as well as smaller organizations including Abacus – An Epsilon Company, and start up organizations. Most recently Ms. Soika was running and managing her own Marketing Consulting business called Marketing Strategies prior to joining Verio as the Marketing Leader for their Channel Partner Programs. As the Marketing Leader of Verio’s Channel Programs Ms. Soika manages all marketing responsibilities for growing and expanding Verio’s Partner Channel programs. Some of her most recent accomplishments in this new role include... Read More.

Stephan Spencer is VP of SEO Strategies at Covario, an industry leader in paid and organic search software and services for Fortune 500 companies. Covario recently acquired Netconcepts, the company that Stephan founded in 1995. The combined company has nearly 100 customers in key industries such as high tech, financial services, ecommerce, retail, consumer electronics, media, life sciences, and consumer packaged goods.

Stephan is the inventor of the automated pay-for-performance natural search technology platform GravityStream, now re-branded as Organic Search Optimizer, which powers the natural search channel for online retailers such as Cabela’s, Northern Tool, Campmor and Woolrich.

In addition, Stephan is an author of The Art of SEO, published in October 2009 by O’Reilly and co-authored... Read More.

Entrepreneur, founder of CoreMedia and Digital Media Paradox, editor of Enterprise 2.0 The Art of Letting Go, optimist, TEDster, German Fairness Prize Recipient 2009, working on an economic model for a world of abundance

Nicole Sullivan is a performance guru and CSS Ninja. She is an author, writing about Image Optimization for an upcoming book. She is also working on the redesign of the W3C website.

Previously, she researched and improved the performance of Yahoo sites worldwide as a part of their YSlow team.

She is passionate about CSS, web standards, and scalable front-end architecture for sites with large numbers of pages and visitors. She speaks about performance at conferences around the world, most recently at Ajax Experience, ParisWeb, and Web Directions North.

She has enjoyed working on large commercial sites including; Yahoo!, SFR, FNAC, Club Med, Accor, Renault, SNCF, and La Poste. She blogs, tweets, and shares her research and... Read More.

Ron Surfield is a Senior Director at Turner Broadcasting System, where he manages the eMarketing and User Registration platform teams for Turner’s portfolio of websites, including CNN.com, CartoonNetwork.com, NBA.com, NASCAR.com, and many other global brands. Ron holds an MBA from The Wharton School, and a BS Computer Science from the US Naval Academy. He can be reached at ron.surfield@turner.com.

While developing an Internet laboratory for studying economic equilibria, Jamie started one of the first ISPs in San Francisco so he could get a better connection at home. He finally got a real job as CTO at DETERMINE Software (now a part of Selectica) helping create order in the unstructured world of Enterprise contract management. He is now helping to organize the world’s structured information at Metaweb where he oversees data operations.

Karen is VP of Engineering at AdaptiveBlue. She oversees and leads the development effort for AdaptiveBlue smart browsing technologies. Before joining AdaptiveBlue Karen was the lead engineer at DataSynapse, where she worked on J2EE server virtualization.

Karen graduated with honors from UC Berkeley and resides in New York.

Baratunde exists at the intersection of comedy, politics and technology. His official duties include Web & Politics editor at The Onion, co-founder of Jack & Jill Politics and host of PopSci’s Future Of on Science Channel. Basically, he’s a smart, funny dude.

Phillip Torrone is an author, artist and hardware tinkerer and is senior editor of MAKE. Phillip has authored and contributed to numerous books on programming, mobile devices, design, multimedia, hardware hacking and is a contributing editor for Popular Science. Phillip also co-produces the MAKE audio and video content on the Makezine.com site. In his spare time he helps design open source electronics. Prior to MAKE, Phillip was director of Product Development for creative firm Fallon Worldwide, best known for their award-winning film series.

Gina Trapani is a tech blogger and web developer based in San Diego, California by way of Brooklyn, New York. The founding editor of Lifehacker.com, a weblog on software and personal productivity, Trapani authored a book based on the web site which is in its second edition: Upgrade Your Life: The Lifehacker Guide to Working Smarter, Faster, Better. Currently she is a columnist at Harvard Business Online and co-hosts This Week in Google on the TWiT Netcast Network.

Gentry Underwood specializes in social software design and strategy for IDEO. He heads the Knowledge Sharing department, which designs and deploys tools that help IDEO collaborate internally world-wide. He helps the marketing and communications department make strategic use of social media, and he works with IDEO’s clients and project teams to design effective software for groups and communities.

Prior to IDEO Gentry worked in a number of fields, ranging from software design to psychotherapy to documentary filmmaking. He has a BS in Symbolic Systems and Human-Computer Interaction (Stanford University), an MA in Psychology (Santa Clara University), and an MS in Community Research and Action (Peabody School, Vanderbilt).

Akhil Wable Akhil is the Engineering Manager at Facebook, leading the search team at the company. He was part of the early engineering team at Facebook and has played an important role in releasing a wide array of products. Prior to Facebook, Akhil was a Software Design Engineer at Microsoft. Akhil attended Carnegie Mellon University.

Michael is a developer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory where he works on operations software for surface and orbiting missions on Mars, as well as Earth science missions. His primary work is developing a mission data search system inspired by Web 2.0 paradigms.

Michael received a B.S. in Computer Science (with Honors) from the University of Central Florida in 2001. He earned a Masters and Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2003 and 2007 respectively. He was named a Microsoft Graduate Research Fellow in 2004.

James Ward is a Technical Evangelist for Flex at Adobe and Adobe’s JCP representative to JSR 286, 299, and 301. Much like his love for climbing mountains he enjoys programming because it provides endless new discoveries, elegant workarounds, summits and valleys. His adventures in climbing have taken him many places. Likewise, technology has brought him many adventures, including: Pascal and Assembly back in the early 90’s; Perl, HTML, and JavaScript in the mid 90’s; then Java and many of it’s frameworks beginning in the late 90’s. Today he primarily uses Flex to build beautiful front-ends for Java based back-ends. Prior to Adobe, James built a rich marketing and customer service portal for Pillar Data Systems.

Brock is a creator of the PhoneGap project. He is passionate about community driven projects and cares about enriching the software ecosystem. Brock is a software developer at Nitobi. He speaks regularly at conferences and is an advocate of open web standards.

A past member and manager of the Domino’s Point of Sale development team (Domino’s Pulse), design, development and deployment of the in-store software and infrastucture to enable online ordering, online store locator technology and numerous other technical contributions to the store operations. Recently, Mr Wise was a member of the Emerging Technology team at Domino’s, bring new tech into the stores and corporate office to improve operations, reduce costs and improve customer retention. He is now the manager responsible for all the design and implementation of backend services used by the Domino’s online ordering systems.

Christina is the newly minted General Manager of Social Networking at MySpace. Previously she was Principal Product Manager at Linkedin, running the activity stream, communication products, and launched the events application. Before that she founded a startup where she developed the collaborative blogging tool PublicSquare. As well, she founded Boxes and Arrows, an online magazine of design and the Institute for Information Architecture; and built the Search and Marketplace design team at Yahoo!, leading reinventions of the search and shopping product designs.

She is also a teacher, having written the best selling Information Architecture: Blueprints for the web and has spoken on the topic of the human experience in information spaces at conferences worldwide.

Dave Wolf is Vice President of Sales and Marketing. Whether traveling around the world driving strategy and developing new business for the company or on the stump stateside talking to press, analysts and conferences, Dave delivers Cynergy’s user experience thought-leadership far-and-wide.

In earlier lives, he held engineering and marketing management positions at Microsoft and Sybase, where he was responsible for enterprise software development and strategy. Officially based in Cynergy’s Capitol Hill headquarters in Washington, DC he is on the road more than he is in the District, espousing Cynergy’s passion for devising incredible new ways for all of us to experience and interact with software. You can reach Dave at dave.wolf@cynergysystems.com.

Todd Zaki Warfel, founder and principal designer at Messagefirst, has been designing products and services for over 15 years. Todd’s clients have included fortune 500 companies like AT&T Wireless, Bankrate, Citibank, and Comcast, as well as smaller companies like Numara and rPath. An internationally recognized thought leader on research and design, and member of the Web Standards Project Education Task Force, he has spoken at conferences and taught workshops around the globe. His upcoming book, Practical Prototyping (Rosenfeld Media) will discuss how prototypes are more than just a design tool and show you how to use prototyping to create a common language, market a product, gain internal buy-in, and test feasibility with your development team. Anticipated publication is in 2009. Todd currently lives in Philadelphia,... Read More.

Jennifer Zeszut is the founder and CEO of Scout Labs, which delivers visibility into the voice of the customer online and actionable analysis for marketers. Zeszut is a 15-year marketing veteran, having worked in both software and consulting. Most recently, Zeszut was the Vice President of Marketing at Leverage Software, an on-demand community and social networking software company. At Avenue A / Razorfish for 7 years, she held the position of Director of Marketing Strategy and Analytics for the west coast. In that role she and her team gleaned customer insights for the world’s top brands and advised senior executives on strategies for effective marketing and relationship building. She has also served as acting Director of Marketing at eBay, focused on product strategy... Read More.