Launch Pad

John Battelle is an entrepreneur, journalist, professor, and author. Currently founder and chairman of Federated Media Publishing, he is also a founder and executive producer of conferences in the media, technology, communications, and entertainment industries and “band manager” with BoingBoing.net. Previously, Battelle was founder, chairman, and CEO of Standard Media International (SMI), publisher of The Industry Standard and TheStandard.com. Prior to founding The Standard, Battelle was a co-founding editor of Wired magazine and Wired Ventures. He is the author of The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture” (Portfolio, 2005).

• Web site

I am a lead writer at ReadWriteWeb.com, one of the leading blogs covering new web applications. Prior to RWW I was a lead writer at TechCrunch.

• Web site

Editor and CEO of VentureBeat

• Web site

Anand joined Microsoft in January 2005 as an Evangelist, Microsoft’s ambassador to the Northern California region. During his tenure there, he has been in the midst of several launches, such as Visual Studio, SQL Server, Vista, Office and many others. He has spoken at over a hundred conferences on a variety of topics. Anand is actively involved in the startup community in the Silicon Valley and works closely with Microsoft’s Emerging Business Team. Before joining Microsoft, Anand worked for Cisco Systems’ New Business Ventures team, pioneering XML-based manageability solutions. During his five-year tenure as a Technical Lead and Software Engineer, Anand worked closely with customers to fine-tune his product features. Anand has extensive experience software methodologies, and has worked on several development platforms, including Linux and Unix. He is fluent in C, C++, Java, and PERL. Anand has also earned two patent awards related to manageability solutions on networking platforms. Anand graduated from Purdue University (Go Boilers!) with a degree in Computer Engineering.

• Web site

DubMeNow is Manoj’s brainchild and as CEO of the company his focus is to drive the strategic vision and direction, build the executive team and establish strategic partnerships. Manoj is an entrepreneur with more than 10 years of experience starting and growing firms in the Information Technology arena. His experience spans IT and management in the healthcare, eLearning and federal consulting verticals as well as development of enterprise mobile applications. Prior to DubMeNow, Manoj founded Astegic Inc, an information technology firm specializing in providing commercial and government solutions. Manoj built Astegic into a multi-million dollar organization with offices around the world. He has over 10 years of experience in the IT industry and has management experience in the healthcare, eLearning, Federal IT consulting and Enterprise Mobile application verticals. He has successfully managed many organizations such as MRInfosys, Astute, Acutus, NoesisMD and Astegic in various senior management roles. Currently he serves on the board of MPTrax, TaxScan, Jobzoomer and NoesisMD. Manoj is a graduate of George Washington University’s

• Web site

John Rourke is a serial entrepreneur in technology and media ventures. Since 1995, John has focused exclusively on ventures and projects in the internet space. At Bantam Networks his role is to oversee all Company operations and spearhead the go-to-market strategy. John is also the co-founder of Aperio Networks, LLC, a Web 2.0 internet development and consulting company that John founded with Bantam CTO Henry Poydar in 2003. Developing both B2B and B2C web applications, the Ruby-on-Rails firm publishes user-generated content sites such as ConferencingNews.com, KeyPeopleDirectory.com, EventSpan.com, and WebinarWire.com in the web collaboration space, as well as other B2C promotional sites for brands. John started his work in the internet sector in 1995 as the creator of SmartRoute Systems’ award-winning SmarTraveler.com, the internet’s first traffic information site, and SmarTravelerTV, cable television’s first traffic channel. Before his integrated-media brand experience with SmartRoutes, which was acquired by Viacom/Westwood One, John was a co-founder of other technology ventures which included Automatic Toll Communications, Inc. (1990 – 1995) a non-stop electronic toll collection and smart-car technology developer acquired by SAIC, and MultiLink, Inc. (1985-1989) a leading teleconferencing systems and services company acquired by PictureTel.

John was appointed by two Massachusetts Governors to serve consecutively on an oversight committee for the state’s e-government initiatives. John is a director on the board of the IMCCA, the conferencing and collaboration industry trade association. He holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from Boston College, 1984, and is a co-inventor of US patent 5289183 related to smart-car technology.

• Web site

Andre Charland is the co-founder and CEO at Nitobi Inc. He’s been involved in Internet software development for almost a decade. As an advocate for usability and user experience, he speaks regularly on Ajax and web usability. Most recently Andre presented at MAX, the Adobe AIR Bus Tour, and AjaxWorld. Andre is the co-author of “Enterprise Ajax”, published by Prentice Hall this summer, and maintains his own blog at http://blogs.nitobi.com/andre.

• Web site

Shion is an executive at Creeris Ventures, a venture capital and incubation firm. At Creeris, Shion works on the management teams of a few of the firm’s portfolio companies, including Computational Crawling and Plura Processing. With both companies, his primary responsibilities are marketing, business development, and assisting with overall strategy. He also helps implement customer-facing technologies for these companies.

Prior to joining Creeris, Shion ran his own software consulting firm that developed predictive software for the oil industry. Shion holds a B.S. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University and an MBA from Rice University.

• Web site

Aaron Hurley is the founder and CEO of zeaLOG.com, where you can find him tracking his weight, meditation and his meager sleep regimen. Aaron is a SF Bay Area based web developer with more than 15 years of development behind him, beginning with a jurassic age Orlando Magic website in the early 90’s and more recently overseeing the development, production, and launch of a variety of large, scalable websites in the social networking space, including zeaLOG.  Aaron also served as founder and CEO of FilmFX, a motion image processing software company with products primarily intended to make video look like film. You have likely seen FilmFX in music videos, television shows, and feature films including Pixar’s “The Incredibles.”

• Web site