Schedule: Speakers

John Adams (Twitter Operations) has worked in computer security, operations, and systems engineering for over 15 years. Prior to Twitter, he has worked at Apple, Inktomi, c|net, and a major video-on-demand site, improving security, performance, and reliability at large scale.

Dion Almaer is the director of Developer Relations at Palm where he has the pleasure of working with Ben Galbraith. The pair co-founded Ajaxian.com together and the are now focused on delivering a fantastic developer experience on the mobile Web.

Dion has been a technologist and a developer writing Web applications since it took over from Gopher. He has been fortunate enough to speak around the world, has published many articles, a book, and of course covers life the universe and everything on his blog at almaer.com/blog.

He has been called a human aggregator, and you can see that in full force if you follow him on Twitter @dalmaer.

Chris Anderson is Editor-in-Chief of Wired magazine, a position he took in 2001. Since then he has led the magazine to five National Magazine Award nominations, winning the prestigious top prize for General Excellence in 2005, a year in which he was also named Editor of the Year by Advertising Age magazine. He is the author of New York Times bestselling book The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More, which was published in 2006, and runs a blog on the subject at www.thelongtail.com.

Previously, he was at The Economist, where he served as U.S. Business Editor, Asia Business Editor (based in Hong Kong); and Technology Editor. He started The Economist’s Internet coverage in 1994 and directed its initial web... Read More.

As a User Experience Designer at Adaptive Path and formerly for Lextant, Alexa has architected online and offline experiences for financial professionals, nuclear pharmacists, smartphone users and social networkers. From the 2008 MySpace redesign to the ongoing transformation of Smart.fm into a motivating world of learning, Alexa has helped clients reimagine products from the ground up.

Following in the footsteps of Adaptive Path colleagues who’ve started their own UX-driven ventures, including Get Satisfaction, Measure Map, and TypeKit, Alexa is investing her end-to-end experience into founding Foodspotting – a web and mobile app that lets you find dishes, not just restaurants. To create an engaging, game-like experience for food lovers, Alexa looks forward to drawing upon her interest in how companies can achieve business goals and... Read More.

Anamitra Banerji is part of the product management team at Twitter with a focus on advertising products. Before joining Twitter in March 2009, Banerji was the Director of Product Marketing and Management at Yahoo! Inc. working on a variety of search and display ad offerings. He started his internet career at Overture working on search distribution strategy and planning. Banerji holds an MBA from Cornell University and a Bachelor’s degree in Engineering from the National Institute of Technology, Jamshedpur.

Simon is still surprised that he’s a software engineer, despite the fact that he’s been doing it for a decade now.

After a varied career involving Estate Agents, internet radio, amateur writers, fine art, international websearch and babelfish, Simon joined Flickr in late 2006 as the site’s lead internationalisation engineer.

You may know him from such Flickr features as the site’s invites system, and “People in Photos”. He now leads Flickr’s Application Engineering team, and still spends a lot of time dreaming up new and inventive ways to combat spam.

Gene Becker is founder and managing director of Lightning Laboratories, a consultancy focusing on strategy and action for the Connected World of ubiquitous computing, augmented reality, social media & the internet of things. At Hewlett-Packard’s technology research unit HP Labs, Gene led advanced research and business development for Cooltown, a web-based platform for mobile and ubiquitous computing that was a key part of HP’s turn-of-the-century technical vision. Also at HP Labs, Gene led the creation of utility computing services used in the production of DreamWorks Animation’s feature films Shrek 2 and Madagascar, and co-founded a new cloud services business unit within HP’s Services business sector. Gene was worldwide Director of Product Development for extreme performance and mobility brand Voodoo PC, where he built the engineering... Read More.

Fred Beecher is a Senior User Experience Consultant at Evantage Consulting in Minneapolis. Fred has been working in the user experience design industry for 11 year, doing research, information architecture, interaction design, and usability evaluation for a diverse array of clients like Medtronic, UnitedHealthcare, 3M, RBC Dain Rauscher, General Mills, Thomson Reuters, and the National Marrow Donor Program.

A recognized expert in rapid prototyping, Fred speaks frequently on the topic at national professional conferences and local user experience group meetings. In 2007, Fred developed the official training program for the Axure RP Pro rapid prototyping tool at the request of the makers. He has since trained additional consultants to give the courses and currently leads a broader Axure training program for Evantage.

Fred and... Read More.

An honors graduate of Stanford University with a Bachelors in Computer Science, Armen’s primary research focus was Human-Computer Interaction, where he worked closely with professor Clifford Nass, author of the groundbreaking HCI work, The Media Equation. Later, Armen went on to obtain a Master’s Degree in Management Science and Engineering, also at Stanford, with an emphasis on Organizations, Technology and Entrepreneurship. Armen was also a Mayfield Fellow, a prestigious fellowship that provides intensive training in entrepreneurship in the field of engineering. Armen’s idea for Experience Project came about in response to his support of a friend who was diagnosed with the life changing illness of Multiple Sclerosis; he designed an online support community that would empower MS patients by sharing knowledge and experiences... Read More.

Put to a vote I might have been chosen “least likely to succeed” in my New York City high school class.  My path has taken me from repairing fighter planes during the Vietnam War in Thailand, to spook stuff in undisclosed location(s), and I was lucky enough to arrive at the beginning of the boom times of Silicon Valley in 1978.

After 21 years in 8 high technology companies I retired in 1999.  My last company, E.piphany, started in my living room in 1996. My other startups include two semiconductor companies (Zilog and MIPS Computers), a workstation company (Convergent Technologies), a consulting stint for a graphics hardware/software spinout (Pixar), a supercomputer firm (Ardent), a computer peripheral... Read More.

Adam Blum is CEO of Rhomobile, the open mobile framework company, and a seasoned speaker. He is a longtime CTO/VP of Engineering of several successful startups in the web services and mobile spaces (Commerce One, Systinet, Good, Mobio). He is also an adjunct professor at Carnegie Mellon and advisor to several other software companies.

Andrew Bridges is a partner in Winston & Strawn’s San Francisco office who litigates and counsels clients in high-stakes and complex commercial matters relating primarily to trademark, copyright, advertising, consumer protection, unfair competition, trade secrets, media, Internet regulation, and e-commerce law. He is vice chair of the firm’s intellectual property practice and leads the firm’s non-patent intellectual property efforts.

Christopher Brown is VP of Engineering at Opscode and previously of Microsoft, where he was a Director of Engineering for the Edge Computing Network within Global Foundation Services. Prior to Microsoft, Christopher was a Founding Member, Architect, and Lead Developer for Amazon.com’s Elastic Compute Cloud (“EC2”). He holds several patents in the areas of Internet routing, VM/runtime hosting, content delivery and cloud computing.

Paul Buchheit is a founder of FriendFeed, which was recently aquired by Facebook, and also an active angel investor. He was also one of the first engineers at Google, where he started Gmail, suggested the “Don’t be evil” motto, and created the first AdSense prototype. Paul has a degree in Computer Science from Case Western Reserve University.

Adam Burrell is the Sr. Innovations Technologist, Delivery Channels at Navy Federal Credit Union. With $39 billion in assets and 3.4 million members, Navy Federal is the world’s largest credit union with branch offices located worldwide. At Navy Federal, Adam has been one of the principal strategists behind the Credit Union’s recently launched mobile banking initiative. He is also the lead UX Architect on a team that is tasked with the redesign of the entire Navy Federal online experience. Before joining Navy Federal, he worked as a software engineer/architect in support of the US Navy designing and implementing collaborative solutions. Adam’s current role includes the design and socialization of numerous initiatives including social media and gen-Y channel strategy. As part of the channel strategy group,... Read More.

Christy Canida is the Community and Marketing Director at Instructables.com. She earned her SB in Biology from MIT, and has previously worked in big biotech, transgenic mouse labs, and an aquarium.

Jessica Faye Carter is the founder and CEO of Nette Media. She counsels businesses on social media strategy, implementation, policy development, and niche campaigns. She blogs on multicultural social media at Technicultr and is a contributor to Mashable.

A nationally-recognized expert on cultural and gender diversity, Jessica is the author of Double Outsiders (JIST Works, 2007), an award-winning look at professional multicultural women in the workplace. Her work has been featured in the Associated Press, MSNBC.com, and Working Mother. She is a frequent speaker on issues related to diversity and technology.

Jessica was previously a corporate lawyer and holds a JD and an MBA from Duke University, and a BA in economics from Spelman College. She’s on Twitter @jescarter.

Aseem Chandra is VP of Product Marketing at the Omniture Business Unit, Adobe Systems Incorporated. In this role, Mr. Chandra is responsible for the positioning and pricing of Omniture products and services and articulating Omniture’s vision for online business optimization. He brings more than 15 years of general management, marketing, partnering and M&A experience across a broad spectrum of enterprise applications.

Before Omniture, he led product strategy for the Application Integration Architecture at Oracle, and held business analyst and operational roles at Eaton Corporation’s Semiconductor Division, 3M Corporation and Behlen Manufacturing. Aseem holds a Bachelor’s in Mechanical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), New Delhi and a Master’s in Manufacturing Systems from the University of Texas.

As Executive Producer of TED Media, I’m focused on extending TED in new directions — particularly those that help spread ideas. I led the charge to bring the conference online, launching TEDTalks in 2006, and the new TED.com in 2007. I also co-produce and co-host the annual conference, and manage our talented media team. Before TED: I developed one of the world’s first multimedia magazines in 1991, at Stanford; helped launch HotWired.com in 1994; launched Webmonkey.com in 1996; and served as Wired Digital’s VP of Content through 2000.

Josh has worked in the interactive media and technology industries for over 15 years, serving in numerous senior business and product development roles. He joined Media-Screen to capitalize on the strength of market intelligence in the development of successful, cost effective products and businesses. He has designed and managed qualitative and quantitative studies for numerous clients including Google, RedEnvelope, Protrade Fantasy Sports, Inc., Bar Association of San Francisco, Plaxo, and DHL. Prior to Media-Screen, he served as Director of Online Media and Applications for Electronic Arts. Between 1994 and 1998, he held numerous positions at DIRECTV in the New Media and Interactive Department developing new platforms for emerging DIRECTV data and interactive services. He holds a Master of Arts degree in Motion... 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 co-founder of foursquare, a service that mixes social, locative and gaming elements to encourage people explore the cities in which they live. Previously, Dennis founded dodgeball.com, one of the first mobile social services in the US, which was acquired by Google in 2005.

He has been named one of the “Top 35 Innovators Under 35” by MIT’s Technology Review magazine (2005) and has won the “Fast Money” bonus round on the TV game show Family Feud (2009). His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Wired, Time Magazine, Newsweek, MTV, Slashdot and NBC. He is currently an Adjunct Professor at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program.

Dennis holds a Master’s degree from New York... Read More.

Christian Crumlish has been participating in, analyzing, designing, and drawing social interactive spaces online since 1994. These days he is the curator of Yahoo!’s pattern library, a design evangelist with the Yahoo! Developer Network, and a member of Yahoo!’s Design Council. He is a director of the Information Architecture Institute and co-chair of the monthly BayCHI program.

He is the author of the bestselling The Internet for Busy People, and The Power of Many, and co-author most recently of Designing Social Interfaces with Erin Malone. He has spoken about social patterns at BarCamp Block, BayCHI, South by Southwest, the IA Summit, Ignite, Web 2.0 Expo, PLoP, IDEA, and Web Directions. Christian has a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from Princeton.

He lives in Oakland with... Read More.

Jef is a senior interaction designer at IDEO. He has worked on a diverse portfolio of projects including a device to monitor the human nervous system in spinal surgery; a new paradigm in banking; the future of mobile interactions; and a major web and mobile system to enable bottom-up global travel.

Practicing as a multidisciplinary designer he uses techniques from Filmmaking, Graphic Design, Animation, Typography and Sound Design to create emotional experiences that empower users to express their view of the world.

He strives for simplicity in form and function. Mostly he likes stories.

Christopher Dean, Skype’s CSO, has 20 years of experience in business and corporate development, strategy consulting and advising startups. He specializes in deals to grow revenue, create new distribution channels and develop and launch new products.

Christopher has led several business development and strategy teams that have defined and prioritized strategic partner targets and identified, negotiated and closed partnerships. He was most recently the co-founder of Texada Capital and responsible for new business development. Earlier, he spent four years as the senior vice president of marketing and business development at Face Time communications, a leading vendor of security, management and control solutions for enterprise-oriented instant messaging.

Christopher also was an executive in business development at Epoch Partners, SmartAge.com, Worlds, Inc. and a consultant at... Read More.

Paul Dix is the author of the upcoming book “Service Oriented Design with Ruby and Rails” to be published by Addison Wesley. In the past he has worked at Google, Microsoft, McAffee, Air Force Space Command, and various startups filling positions as a programmer, software tester, and network engineer. He has been a speaker at RubyConf and multiple regional Ruby conferences on the subjects of machine learning, collaborative filtering, service oriented design. He is the author of the open source Ruby libraries SAXMachine, Feedzirra, and Typhoues. Paul has a degree in computer science from Columbia University.

Adam DuVander writes about APIs and mashups for Programmable Web. His location-related work for BestPlaces.net has been seen on MSN, Yahoo and the Wall Street Journal. No Starch Press will publish his how-to book about mapping and location in 2010.

Eric Enge is the President of Stone Temple Consulting, an SEO consulting firm with offices in Boston and Northern California. Eric is a regular speaker at search industry conferences, such as Search Engine Strategies and Search Marketing Expo. Eric also makes regular contributions on the topic of SEO to Search Engine Land and Search Engine Watch, SEOmoz, and his own blogs. Eric is particularly known for his in depth interviews of major players in the search engine industry including dozens of people who work in senior capacities at the search engines. Eric is also asked to make guest contributions to Website Magazine, other SEO related blogs and news web sites, and is a senior editor for the SEO section of the... Read More.

Will Evans is Director, Experience Design for Semantic Foundry with 14 years industry experience in interaction design, information architecture, and user experience strategy. His experiences includes directing UX for social network analytics and terrorism modeling at AIR Worldwide, UX Architect for social media site Gather.com, and UX Architect responsible for the interaction design of Kayak.com. He worked at Lotus/IBM where he was the senior information architect, and for Curl – a DARPA-funded MIT project when he was at the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science. Prior to Curl, Will was an interaction designer for Dataware working on various search and KM related product suites including KM Suite II and QueryServer.

Will earned an MBA as well as Masters... Read More.

F. Randall “Randy” Farmer has been creating online community systems for over 30 years, and has co-invented many of the basic structures for both virtual worlds and social software. His accomplishments include numerous industry firsts (such as the first virtual world, the first avatars, and the first online marketplace). Randy worked as the community strategic analyst for Yahoo!, advising Yahoo properties on construction of their online communities. Randy was the principal designer of Yahoo’s global reputation platform and the reputation models that were deployed on it.

Rand Fishkin is the CEO & Co-Founder of SEOmoz. Rand has been in the field of search marketing since 2002 and spoken around the world at dozens of events, including keynoting events in Portland, Montreal & Madrid. He has presented to the search quality teams at Google and Microsoft on SEO topics and consulted for dozens of notable organizations including NPR, Real Networks, Zillow & Yelp. Rand is especially passionate about the SEOmoz blog and the professional SEO toolset, used by tens of thousands of search professionals each day. When he’s not on the road or in the office, Rand spends as much time as possible with his amazing wife, Geraldine.

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.

Dawn Foster provides consulting services for companies wanting to engage with online communities by focusing on the business value of engaging with online communities and social media and helping companies find a way to engage that supports the overall strategies and business goals of the company. Dawn has more than 14 years of experience in business and technology with expertise in strategic planning, management, community building, community management, open source software, market research, social media, and RSS.

Dawn has experience and a passion for bringing people together through a combination of online communities and real-world events. Dawn has experience building new communities, managing existing communities, and providing consulting and advice to companies with a particular emphasis on developer and open source communities.... Read More.

A self-described, “usability fanatic,” Anthony Franco, president of Denver-based EffectiveUI, co-founded his company in 2005 under the core belief that people deserve better software.

In his role as president, Anthony is responsible for building and strengthening business relationships, identifying new business opportunities and market solutions for clients and in communicating the value and importance of user experience-driven business strategies.

Anthony considers himself a “serial entrepreneur.” He has founded many successful technology-based consultancy companies beginning in 1998. He is most proud of his success with EffectiveUI, which has experienced substantial grown in just four years, beginning with three employees to nearly 100 to date, and was awarded one of Colorado’s “Best Places to Work” by the Denver Business Journal in 2008.

Anthony has an extensive consulting... Read More.

Matt Galligan, 25, is the CEO and Co-Founder of SimpleGeo, based out of Boulder, CO that provides a ready-to-use location infrastructure for app developers. He previously founded Socialthing, a company that was chosen to be part of the inaugural year of TechStars. Socialthing.com went into private beta in March, 2008 at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas. The company was acquired five months later by AOL. Socialthing was later rebranded as AOL Lifestream.

Matt currently resides in Boulder, CO and is an active member of the startup community there.

Lauren Gelman has been a leader in the field of cyberlaw and policy since 1995. Working in Washington DC and in Silicon Valley she played a part in many of the most important issues the Internet community has faced since its early development, specializing in privacy and surveillance, speech, intellectual property, social media and virtual worlds. She founded BlurryEdge Strategies in January 2010 to assist companies and institutions as they navigate the complex legal, policy and business strategy landscape of the social web.

BERNARD GERSHON has been responsible for developing new revenue opportunities and distributing Disney and ABC content to all digital media platforms—globally. He served as General Manager for all business initiatives in the narrowband, broadband, wireless, cable, video-on-demand, home video and international markets for Disney and ABC products.

Acknowledged within the industry as a pioneer in streaming media, as early as 1995 Gershon started ABC’s first streaming media Internet site—ABCRadioNet.com. In March 2003 he created ABC News Live, the Web’s first 24/7 streaming news network. In July 2004 ABC News Live was re-launched as ABC News Now—a groundbreaking service available on digital cable, broadband and wireless. Peter Jennings anchored gavel-to-gavel convention coverage and contributed to special election night programming.... Read More.

Elad is the co-founder and CEO of Mixer Labs, which operates GeoAPI.com. GeoAPI.com provides location as a service for mobile developers and enterprises with geo-information needs (e.g. location broadcast social apps, geo-annotation of Tweets, etc.)

Elad has a long history in mobile local services. Prior to Mixer Labs, Elad started Google’s mobile wireless team. In this capacity he helped to buy 3 companies including Android and was the original PM on Google Mobile Maps. Elad also launched Google’s first location/GPS enabled service – Google Ride Finder on Google Labs.

Prior to Google, Elad was at multiple venture backed startups and at McKinsey & Company.

Elad is an investor or advisor to a number of silicon valley mobile and social media startups.

He recieved his... Read More.

Maria Giudice is the CEO and Founder of Hot Studio, Inc., a San Francisco-based, human-centered design studio dedicated to making the complex beautifully clear. Maria is considered a pioneer in the field of information architecture and was prominently featured in the 1996 book Information Architects by Richard Saul Wurman. In 2002, she was included in the book 1000 Most Creative Individuals in the USA. Maria has coauthored two best-selling books about web design: Web Design Essentials and Elements of Web Design. Since 1997 Maria has lead Hot Studio’s team of individuals dedicated to creating design systems that are both beautiful and highly functional. Maria has more than 20 years of experience working with and mentoring people from many different disciplines. Maria holds a... Read More.

Bryce Glass is a Principal Interaction Designer at Manta Media, Inc. and has worked on Internet community products and platforms for more than 10 years, with some of the Internet’s best-known brands (Netscape, America Online and Yahoo!). Bryce was the User Experience lead for Yahoo’s Reputation Platform and consulted with designers and product managers on a number of properties (Yahoo! Buzz, Yahoo! Answers and Message Boards, amongst others) that employed it. Bryce distilled the research and best practices from those engagements into a series of User Experience Patterns for Reputation that have garnered much attention in the social software design world.

As an evangelist for design ethnography, Kelly Goto is dedicated to understanding how real people integrate products and services into their daily lives.Goto is a sought-after international keynote lecturer and author on the topics of web and mobile strategies, usability, and design ethnography. Her book, Web Redesign 2.0: Workflow that Works has been translated into 14 languages and is an established standard for workflow methodologies and user-centered design principles worldwide.

Kelly is principal of gotomedia, LLC, a global leader in research-driven, people-friendly interface design for web, mobile and product solutions for clients including Seiko Epson Japan, Adobe, VeriSign, Nokia, WebEx and CNET. For the past 20 years, she has worked in the digital media industry launching brands and initiatives for Toyota, Paramount, Infiniti,... Read More.

Mr. Gotta is a Principal Analyst at Burton Group. His research agenda focuses on strategies and technologies related to collaboration and social networking. Mr. Gotta has been in the IT industry since 1980. He has over 13 years experience as an industry analyst advising global organizations on best practices related to informal learning, teaming and community-building initiatives and has published hundreds of articles on collaboration and social computing trends. He is a recognized subject-matter expert and a frequent speaker at industry events. Mike is also an avid blogger.

Jason Grigsby was one of the project leads on the Obama iPhone Application and helped design the user inferface for the Wall Street Journal’s Blackberry application. He founded and organizes Mobile Portland, a local mobile group.

Jason is a co-founder of Cloud Four, a small start-up focused on mobile and web development. He blogs at CloudFour.com and provides a frequent updates about mobile on Twitter.

Dr. Moira Gunn is Host of Tech Nation and BioTech Nation, which air in such venues as National Public Radio’s SIRIUS Satellite Radio channels NPR Now and NPR Talk, and internationally to 177 countries via American Forces Radio International. Produced at the studios of KQED in San Francisco, the programming can also be heard on over 200 domestic public stations and through podcasts via iTunes and other Internet distribution venues.

Tech Nation is the sole national weekly radio program on the impact of technology, and its weekly BioTech Nation segment enjoys the same status in the area of biotech issues. Dr. Gunn’s weekly commentaries touch all aspects of our lives in these unpredictable times.

In over 2,000 in-depth interviews, Dr. Gunn... Read More.

Kristina Halvorson is the founder and president of Brain Traffic, a nationally-renowned agency specializing in content strategy and writing for websites.

Widely recognized as one of the country’s leading content strategists, Kristina speaks regularly to audiences around the world about how to deliver useful, usable content online, where and when your customers need it most. She is the author of Content Strategy for the Web (New Riders, August 2009), the first book to be published defining content strategy and its value.

In 2009, Kristina curated the first Content Strategy Consortium to facilitate a national dialogue about this emerging discipline. She has appeared as a featured speaker at Web 2.0 Expo, IA Summit, Future of Web Apps, Future of Web Design, An Event Apart, Voices That... Read More.

Jack started wikiHow, a wiki based how-to guide. With over 23 million unique visitors, wikiHow is one of the most popular sites on the web. As wikiHow’s steward, Jack works with a community of thousands of volunteers who create, edit and maintain wikiHow’s 75,000 how-to articles.

Prior to starting wikiHow, Jack was co-owner and co-CEO of eHow.com. Under Jack’s leadership, eHow became the world’s most popular how-to manual. Jack sold eHow.com to Demand Media in 2006. Previous companies Jack co-founded include Luminescent Technologies, a leading provider of computational semiconductor lithography technology and BigTray.com, the largest online vendor of restaurant equipment and supplies. Earlier in his career Jack worked at McKinsey & Company.

Jack currently serves on the board of directors for StatusNet, an open... Read More.

Bess Ho is a co-founder of GaGaLab.com, a stealth mode mobile location-based real-time startup. She is an active publisher and developer in Apple iPhone App Store, Nokia OVI Store, and other mobile platforms. She has released at least 10 mobile app within a year with her single-girl team. She is invited to guest lecture at Stanford University School of Engineering course “Engineering for Good – Save the World and Have Fun Doing It” and stays as Technical Adviser to lead engineering students on mobile technology in global health projects in US, Haiti, Africa, etc. Her concept design won the Healthcare category at iPhone Dev Camp 2009.

She co-leads the open source healthcare project “Chief Medical Officer” which is based on the Google Health Read More.

For more than a decade, David has worked with technology startups throughout the software sector. In 2000, David joined August Capital to invest broadly in information technology companies, with a focus on enterprise application and infrastructure software, as well as consumer facing software and services.

Prior to joining August Capital, David was an intellectual property and corporate attorney at Venture Law Group and Perkins Coie. In his legal practice, David represented high tech startups in all aspects of their formation, financing, and operations, including the likes of Yahoo!, Evite (Ticketmaster) and Ofoto (Kodak). Before that, David was a litigator in New York City at Cravath, Swaine & Moore.

David has an eclectic educational background. He holds an AB in Computer Music from Stanford University, an... Read More.

Drew is the cofounder and CEO of Dropbox, the leading way to store and share files online. Dropbox lets you get to your important files from any of your computers or the web. The company launched at the TechCrunch50 conference in 2008 and is backed by Sequoia Capital and Y Combinator.

Drew was named one of the top “Twentysomething Entrepreneurs” by BusinessWeek in April 2008. Before founding Dropbox, he was a lead software engineer at Bit9, a venture-backed network security company, cofounded a profitable online SAT prep company called Accolade, and held engineering roles in various startups since the age of 14. He received his S.B. in computer science from MIT.

Kevin Hoyt is a Platform Evangelist with Adobe Systems, Inc. Passionate about engaging user experiences, you’ll most often find him meeting with customers, speaking at conferences, presenting online seminars, or just enjoying the chance to share ideas and brainstorm with other developers. When not on the road, Kevin enjoys spending time with his family, photography and general aviation.

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 a former journalist turned dot com entrepreneur who has a knack for nailing the zeitgeist. He has been credited with bringing Internet memes to the mainstream and popularizing Internet culture. The success of his business is attributed to his knowledge of memes, viral content, and crowd sourcing. Ben graduated with a BSJ from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism.

Mr. Jalichandra is a veteran Internet executive whose media experience includes leadership roles across the media spectrum: as a client, at an agency, as a publisher, and with an advertising network. Currently, he is the President and CEO of Technorati Media, the largest blog and social media ad network. Prior to Technorati, he worked as an M&A and strategy consultant for several Internet properties and investment firms, and served as SVP of Corporate Development for Exponential Interactive, Tribal Fusion’s parent company. Previously, Mr. Jalichandra was SVP of Business Development for Fox Interactive Media, and was the Vice President of Business & Corporate Development at IGN Entertainment (acquired by Fox Interactive), where he led the company’s M&A, business development and international activities.... Read More.

As CEO of Animoto, Brad leads the charge in driving Animoto to be the global standard for consumers and businesses to automatically create professional-looking video from images, video clips and music. Prior to co-founding Animoto in 2006, Brad spent eight years with Onyx Software where he saw the company grow from a 17-person start-up to an 800-person public company and eventually through an acquisition. At Onyx, Brad managed Sales Operations and the Professional Services team and customer base in the western US. Brad graduated from Dartmouth College and currently resides in Oakland, CA.

Melissa Jordan has worked at BART as senior marketing representative since June 2008. Her areas of responsibility include content management for the www.bart.gov website and development of BART’s social web strategy. She produces BART’s Twitter feed at “www.twitter.com/sfbart”http://twitter.com/sfbart and blogs at sfbart.posterous.com. Before joining BART, she spent two decades as a reporter and editor for news organizations including The Associated Press and the San Jose Mercury News. She is a graduate of Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and the University of Georgia.

Raman Khanna has 20 years of operating experience and 15 years of investment experience in information technology. Raman was named on the Forbes Midas List as a top 100 dealmaker in 2008 and 2009. He has been involved in many start-ups that had exits valued at over $1 Billion. At ONSET, Raman is focused on software, internet infrastructure and digital media sectors. He currently serves on boards of Permuto, Serus, FirstRain and Nitronex.

Prior to becoming a managing director of ONSET, Raman co-founded Diamondhead Ventures in June 2000 where he led the firm’s investments in Cavium Networks (IPO: CAVM), Reactivity (acquired by Cisco Systems), PassMark Security (acquired by RSA Security/EMC), Orative (acquired by Cisco Systems), Intraspect (acquired by Vignette), Serus,... Read More.

Brian is Loopt’s Chief Operating Officer responsible for leading the execution of day-to-day company activities and operations, as well as corporate development, legal affairs, and privacy matters.

Previously an associate at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati with a focus on intellectual property technology transactions. Counseled clients regarding Digital Millennium Copyright Act compliance, data privacy practices, and intellectual property portfolio strategies. Prior to joining WSGR, served as an extern to Justice Ming W. Chin of the Supreme Court of California.

Additionally, before law school, held senior positions in business development with Barnes & Noble.com, Dun & Bradstreet, AllBusiness.com, and Penguin Publishing Group. Graduated with a J.D. cum laude, in 2005 from University of San Francisco School of Law; Law Review staff member and elected... Read More.

In his role as Senior Director of Ad Products, David Kopp leads the team defining and developing Yahoo!’s display advertising solutions for advertisers. His marketing career spans over 16 years, including leadership roles in both client-side consumer marketing with Disney and the last 12 years concentrated on Internet advertising, including both search and display advertising solutions.

Since joining Yahoo! in September of 2005, Kopp has driven several innovations in Yahoo! advertising including most recently, Search Retargeting and Enhanced Retargeting. Advertiser solutions like Consumer Direct (a partnership with Neilsen Homescan), custom behavioral targeting and Smart Ads are also part of his purview. Early in his time at Yahoo!, Kopp also oversaw a number of innovations in the intersection of social media and advertising in Yahoo! Groups... Read More.

Kara is a part of Social Media team at Dell. Among other things, she runs Dell’s “SMB Powered by Dell” and Dell’s Facebook presence.

Ranjith Kumaran is the founder and CTO of YouSendIt, a leader in web-based digital content delivery. In this role, he is responsible for overseeing the company’s product roadmap and conducting competitive analysis and has actively contributed to launching YouSendIt’s paid subscription services. Prior to YouSendIt, Kumaran worked with Verisity Design, a key provider of verification process automation (VPA) solutions, where he managed product marketing for the software tools of Access Systems. Previously, he was the director of sales engineering at Celoxica, a leading provider of C-based design and behavioral synthesis tools, where he built the company’s sales applications and established its engineering team. Kumaran also was a software systems engineer at Red Hat, one of the largest and most recognized companies dedicated to... Read More.

Scott brings 12 years of experience building technology, developing business strategy and leading engineering teams with companies like Amazon.com, Rulespace, JanRain and now Urban Airship. Urban Airship builds messaging and content delivery solutions for mobile publishers. Scott was the co-founder of the Open Source Lab helping open source projects like Mozilla, Linux, Apache, Drupal grow into mainstream usage. Scott was an active supporter of open web standards having co-founded the OpenID and Open Web Foundations. He currently lives in Portland, OR.

Elizabeth Lane Lawley is the director of the Lab for Social Computing at the Rochester Institute of Technology, where she is also an associate professor of Interactive Games & Media. Her current teaching and research interests focus on social computing technologies such as weblogs, wikis, virtual worlds, collaborative information retrieval, and gender imbalances in technology and education.

Steve Lee has global responsibility for all Google geo-related mobile products, which include Google Maps, Google Latitude, and Google’s location service platform.

He has 14 years industry experience, ranging from entrepreneurship to software development to product management. Before coming to Google, he worked at IBM, Yahoo, and 2 startup endeavors, NewMonics and Verdada. He has an MBA from UC Berkeley Haas and a double major in Computer Engineering and Computer Science from Iowa State University. He has been known to play poker and enjoys cycling, traveling, and reading.

Paul Levine heads up National Geographic’s Global Media’s Interactive Platforms division, which includes the company’s mobile, games, maps and interactive publishing businesses. Paul is also responsible for Global Media’s corporate strategy and business development organization, which encompasses digital media, entertainment and film, kids, travel, mobile, music, maps, magazines, books and television. He also drives and manages M&A and strategic alliance activities. An industry veteran with 20 years of experience, Paul has extensive knowledge of traditional and new media and video and content distribution across all platforms. Paul is an expert on branding strategy and implementation and has successfully spearheaded numerous branding campaigns for organization such as National Geographic and AOL.

Charlene Li is the founding partner of Altimeter Group, which provide strategic consulting on how organizations can work with disruptive technologies. She has a blog, “The Altimeter” that discusses these topics at blog.altimetergroup.com.

She is also the co-author of the business bestseller, “Groundswell: Winning In A World Transformed By Social Technologies”, published by Harvard Business Press in May 2008.

Charlene is one of the most frequently-quoted industry analysts and has appeared on 60 Minutes, The McNeil NewsHour, ABC News, CNN, and CNBC. She is also frequently quoted by The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, USAToday, Reuters, and The Associated Press. She is a much-sought after public speaker and has presented frequently at top technology conferences such as Web 2.0 Expo,... Read More.

Linksvayer manages Creative Commons, which he joined as its CTO in 2003, where he has been a leader in scaling innovation and creativity through Creative Commons’ legal and technical infrastructure that enable the realization of the potential of digital networks to increase collaboration for business, institutions, and individuals. In 2000 Linksvayer co-founded Bitzi, an early semantic web, open content, open data, and mass collaboration service for annotation of all types of files which was integrated into many leading peer to peer applications. Previously he worked as a web and enterprise software developer and consultant. Linksvayer holds a degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in economics, a field which continues to strongly inform his approach to optimizing the social benefits of creativity and... Read More.

Angela LoSasso manages Community and Blogs for Hewlett-Packard’s Imaging and Printing Group, Americas region. Her conversational marketing programs include a Wiki Community for home users and a Small Business Community Wiki for HP’s “What Do You Have to Say?” campaign. Angela also writes an internal HP blog, The Conversation.

Angela’s web career started in 1993 as a moderator for a technology forum. From there she led content and editorial development teams for Internet pioneers and award-winning websites such as CNET (as an Executive Editor) and Netflix (as Director of Editorial). Angela’s editorial and journalism credits include the Los Angeles Times and Entrepreneur Magazine and Future Publishing. Her dream is to retire in Parma, Italy and serve handmade Tortelli... Read More.

Daniel Lu is a self-described Swiss Army knife at SlideShare. His responsibilities span metrics, advertising operations, search engine optimization, user experience and community. Daniel is constantly turning knobs and tinkering with formulas to optimize performance. Recently he worked on large campaigns with Adobe Acrobat 9 and Microsoft Office as well as helping launch SlideShare’s own LeadShare, AdShare and the recent Channels product.

Before SlideShare, Daniel explored virtual worlds at RocketOn and had a brief stint in the automotive industry that included time at Jaguar Cars & Fisker Coachbuild. Daniel graduated Magna Cum Laude from the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley.

As chief technology officer and senior vice president, Experience & Technology Organization, Kevin Lynch oversees Adobe’s experience design and core technology across business units. This role includes driving Adobe’s technology platform for designers and developers across desktops and devices, including Adobe® Flash® Player, Portable Document Format (PDF), Adobe Flex® and Adobe AIR™, the cross-operating system application runtime that bridges the computing power and data capabilities of the desktop with the real-time dynamic capabilities of the web. He also oversees Adobe’s developer relations program, including the integration of customers and partners in the development process through Adobe Labs and customer advisory councils.

Prior to being named CTO in 2008, Lynch served as senior vice president and chief software architect for Adobe’s Platform Business Unit.... Read More.

Currently a lead developer at Zynga, Amitt Mahajan began his career in the games industry at Electronic Arts developing Sims 2 for the PS2, Xbox, and GameCube. After that, he joined Epic Games and received programmer credits on Gears of War and Unreal Tournament 3. Post-Epic he co-founded a social gaming startup called MyMiniLife where he lead development efforts. The MyMiniLife team and technology were acquired by Zynga in June 2009. Amitt joined Zynga with the acquisition and was a core developer and designer of FarmVille from conception to launch and beyond.

Fran Maier is the Executive Director and President of TRUSTe, the leading brand in online privacy. Ms. Maier brings 15+ years of experience building consumer brands and enhancing consumer trust.

Since Ms. Maier joined TRUSTe in 2001, the independent, non-profit has evolved to expand consumer choice from websites to email and most recently consumer downloadable software. TRUSTe has strengthened its monitoring and dispute resolution activities while certifying more than 2000 websites including leading brands such as Yahoo!, MSN, eBay, AOL, Intuit, Nestle, Symantec, the NFL, and Intercontinental Hotel Group. TRUSTe has experienced consistent annual double-digit budget growth under her leadership.

Ms. Maier speaks widely on the issues of privacy, security, and trust, has appeared before the Federal Trade Commission and the US... Read More.

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.

Kendra builds persuasive technology tools for healthy behavior change. She works with the Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford University on mobile persuasion, the psychology of Facebook, and social networking for health. She does research at Kaiser Permanente using technology tools to help patients manage obesity and chronic conditions. Her company AlterActions.org produces tools for mental health, including recovering from depression, learning mindfulness, synthesizing happiness and building willpower. You can sign up to play with her new tools when they get released into the wild as pilots at AlterActions.org. Check out twitter.com/alteractions to learn more about brain science and persuasive behavior change.

Paul is the CEO and cofounder of Aggregate Knowledge, which is the fourth company that he has founded over his 20 year technology career. Paul was previously the CTO and founder of Tribe Network, which was recently acquired by Cisco. In addition to being a serial entrepreneur, he has held senior business development positions at Intertrust and SkyPilot. The highly scalable architecture of Pique is based on the research work Paul did on massively parallel graph algorithms while a Ph. D. candidate at Princeton University. Paul also holds a B.S. in Computer Science from Lehigh University and an M.S. in Computer Science from Princeton.

Hilary is the lead scientist at bit.ly, where she is finding sense in vast data sets. She is a former computer science professor with a background in machine learning and data mining, has published numerous academic papers, and regularly releases code on her personal site, www.hilarymason.com. She has discovered two new species, loves to bake cookies, and asks way too many questions.

John McRee brings 10 years of experience to his role as a lead user experience architect for EffectiveUI. Specializing in design process management, user research, persona development, information architecture and interaction design, John creates highly engaging architecture and interaction models that drive exceptional user experiences.

John joined EffectiveUI in 2007 as an interaction designer and has worked on high-profile projects such as Herff Jones’ eDesign and ABN AMRO. In this role, he partnered with Adobe to provide UX consultation to Mercedes Benz. Most recently, he worked on Qwest Communication’s business-to-business Web portal, which has seen in an increase in site traffic and lead generation within months of its launch.

Earlier in his career, John worked as a lead interaction designer for Quark Inc., where... Read More.

Peter Merholz is a founding partner and president of Adaptive Path, an experience strategy and design firm. He has worked with a wide variety of clients from large multi-national companies to smaller, avant-garde firms and start-ups. Peter is an internationally recognized thought leader on user experience. He co-authored Subject To Change: Creating Great Products and Services for an Uncertain World, published by O’Reilly. Peter’s thought leadership is perhaps most dubiously demonstrated in his coining of the term “blog” in 1999 when it was a nascent genre.

Tammy H. Nam is Vice President of Content and Marketing at Scribd, the largest social publishing company in the world with tens of millions of readers each month. At Scribd, she observes content and reading behavior trends and identifies strategic relationship opportunities with interesting companies and individuals. Nam believes that social publishing presents a huge opportunity for content producers to engage with and build larger readerships across the social web and on multiple platforms. Nam has helped brands such as Slide, Akamai, Visa and Starbucks grow and maintain leadership positions and identify new opportunities. She was recently named one of Top 25 Women to Watch in Tech by AlwaysOn.

Nicole A. Ozer is the Technology and Civil Liberties Policy Director at the ACLU of Northern California. She works on the intersection of new technology, privacy, and free speech and is spearheading the organization’s new online privacy campaign, Demand your dotRights.

Nicole graduated magna cum laude from Amherst College, studied comparative civil rights history at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, and earned her J.D. with a Certificate in Law and Technology from Boalt Hall School of Law, University of California Berkeley.

Before joining the ACLU, Nicole was an intellectual property attorney at Morrison & Foerster LLP. Nicole was recognized by San Jose Magazine in 2001 for being one of 20 “Women Making a Mark” in Silicon Valley.

Nicole’s legal publications... Read More.

Mike joined Flickr in July as a backend engineer. Before that, he worked on internal tools at Yahoo! Before that, he attended Washington University in St. Louis and played around with THE INTERNETS a lot. Before that… well… he sort of crawled around, drooled a lot, and was generally incoherent. Because he was a baby.

Denise Paolucci began working on the LiveJournal.com project in 2001. Since then, she’s done everything from customer service to product planning to documentation to user advocacy to QA testing to falling over exhausted because she’s trying to do too much at once. Denise lives in Baltimore, Maryland, USA with her long-suffering girlfriend, who fortunately enjoys the frequent “c’mere, look, isn’t this cool?” invocations, and two cats, who don’t care about the internet as long as they get fed on time.

Neil Patel is the co-founder of 2 Internet companies: Crazy Egg, and KISSmetrics. Through these 2 companies he has helped large corporations such as AOL, General Motors, Hewlett-Packard and Viacom make more money from the web. By the age of 21 not only was Neil named a top 100 blogger by Technorati, but he was also one of the top influencers on the web according to the Wall Street Journal.

Satya joined Battery in 2007 and focuses on the Software, Consumer Internet and Digital Media markets. He is on the boards of BlueKai, BrightEdge, ChoiceVendor, Freewheel Media, LiveIntent, and Lotame and is a board observer for Angie’s List and Bazaarvoice. Satya’s prior experience spans more than a decade in online media and software, both in operating and investing roles. Before joining Battery, Satya spent several years at Google, most recently as Senior Product Manager for AdSense. Beginning in 2003, he helped to build the AdSense business through various partner development and product management activities. Before Google, Satya was a Senior Product Manager at DoubleClick, leading the company’s efforts in the search marketing business. Satya also worked on various product and operational initiatives for the Read More.

Tobias Peggs is the General Manager at OneRiot, the realtime search engine company. Prior to OneRiot, Peggs led strategic initiatives at Netdecisions where he directed cross-functional teams in the US, UK and India. He has spent 10+ years in both consumer web and enterprise software industries. Peggs holds a PhD in Search Algorithms from Cardiff University, UK and obtained a First Class Hons Bachelor’s degree in Civil Engineering from Loughborough University. He currently lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. Contact him via email at tobias@oneriot.com or on Twitter @TobiasPeggs.

BRE PETTIS is a founder of Makerbot, a company that produces robots that make things. Bre is also a founder of NYCResistor, a hacker collective in Brooklyn. Besides being a TV host and Video Podcast producer, he’s created new media for Etsy.com, hosted Make: Magazine’s Weekend Projects podcast, and has been a schoolteacher, artist, and puppeteer. Bre is passionate about invention, innovation, and all things DIY.

Eric Picard is the Advertising Technology Advisor to the Advertising Platform Engineering team at Microsoft, where he works on long term vision and coordinates between the business and technology teams. Eric has held several pivotal advertising technology roles at Microsoft where he covered several key areas, including working on the long term ad platform and product strategy – determining what the end-state of Microsoft’s ad platforms and other advertising offerings should look like. He also managed emerging media planning, and the advertising technology acquisition planning from 2005 through 2007. Formerly, Eric was founder and director of product management at Bluestreak, where he invented and oversaw advertising products. A frequent speaker across the online advertising industry, Eric has written a monthly column about advertising technology since... Read More.

Brian Pokorny is a General Partner SV Angel LLC investing in new consumer Internet companies with a special focus on the realtime web alongside Ron Conway and David Lee. Brian is passionate about social media. Most recently he was a founding team member and partner at Baseline Ventures, a leading seed-stage investment firm. Prior to joining Baseline, Brian spent 3.5 years at Google within various positions in the Content Partnerships team and Direct Sales Organization. Before this, he had various roles within sales operations and finance at Juniper Networks, TIBCO Software, and Applied Materials. Brian is an angel investor in Twitter, OMGPOP, Dailybooth, Tweetdeck and has advisory positions with Ooyala, Spotzer, Stitcher, and Rupture. Brian graduated with a degree in Operations and... Read More.

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.

Ilana Rabinowitz is the V.P. of Marketing of Lion Brand Yarn Company, a 131 year old brand. She started a website for the company in 1996 and has developed an media initiative for the company that includes 1 million email newsletter subscribers, a catalog with a circulation of 1.2 million per year, a podcast was awarded best podcast by P.R. News top with 30,000 listeners a month, a corporate blog, as well as Facebook, Twitter and Flickr presences.

Sam Ramji brings over 15 years of industry experience in enterprise software, product development, and open source strategy. Prior to Sonoa, Ramji led open source strategy across Microsoft. He was a founding member of the AquaLogic product team and has built large-scale enterprise and Web-scale applications, leading the Ofoto engineering team through its acquisition by Kodak. Other experience includes hands-on development of client, client-server and distributed applications on Unix, Windows and Macintosh at companies ranging from Broderbund to Fair Isaac. Sam holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Cognitive Science from the University of California at San Diego, and is a member of the Institute for Generative Leadership.

Cordell leads Kapitall’s interaction design and user experience. He is passionate about creating products that people fall in love with. He has designed a wide assortment of software applications and hardware devices for all types of people—from six-year-old girls to astronauts.

During a nine-year career at Apple, Cordell led Apple’s Human Interface Group, which designed major releases of the Macintosh operating system from Mac OS 8 through Mac OS X. As a Creative Director at Frog Design, Cordell designed compelling products for companies such as Disney, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, Yahoo!, Intel, Johnson & Johnson, and DaimlerChrysler.

Born and raised in the Midwest, Cordell has spent the past 25 years enjoying the California sunshine.

CEO of ArtisTech Media, Emily Richards, is an independent musician and entrepreneur. Ms. Richards has been a leader in the digital music space for more than a decade. Prior to co-founding ArtisTech Media in early 2009, she served as the President of MP3tunes from its inception in 2005 to September 2008. With 11 self-released albums, Ms. Richards was the most downloaded pop/rock artist on MP3.com and headlined its 50-city international tour in 2000. Ms. Richards worked as a CPA for Pricewaterhouse Coopers from 1993 to 2004, while simultaneously managing her music career. Ms. Richards is the artist ‘Snowflake’ on ccMixter, and in October of 2009, Creative Commons transitioned operation of ccMixter.org to ArtisTech Media.

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.

Cary began serving as the CEO of IMVU in November 2007. Previously, he served as either CEO or Chief Marketing Officer at four other technology startups, including mySimon.com (acquired by CNET) and Autoweb.com (acquired by Autobytel). Cary was VP and General Manager at Intuit, responsible for QuickBooks Payroll, which he grew from $100 million to $200 million over a three-year period (2003-2006). Cary began his career in marketing and brand management at Procter and Gamble, where he was Tide Brand Manager. He then went to Clorox, where he rose up the marketing ranks before becoming General Manager of the Clorox Pet Products Company.

Cary earned an A.B. in International Relations from Stanford University and an M.B.A. from the Stanford Graduate School... Read More.

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.

Alon Salant is a founder and owner of Carbon Five, a software development firm dedicated to delivering high value software through an agile collaboration with its clients. Alon has over ten years experience delivering web applications to his clients. His areas of expertise include Agile Coaching, software design, automated testing and rubber-hits-the-road software development.

Alon has written articles and book contributions for O’Reilly and spoken at the Commonwealth Club of California, South by Southwest, Web 2.0 Expo, JavaOne, CodeCon and Bay Area-based user groups on technology and process topics. He holds a degree in Mathematics from the University of Pennsylvania.

Ingrid leads business development for AdAdvisor® a verified audience targeting solution by TARGUSinfo®. Working closely with leaders throughout the digital ecosystem, she provides strategic support to agencies, demand-side platforms, ad networks, ad exchanges, publisher optimizers, website analytics and site optimization platforms seeking to effectively leverage 3rd party data.

Ingrid joined TARGUSinfo from Active Network, where, as General Manager Online Advertising, she was responsible for the profitability of www.Active.com media properties. Previously she worked with search marketing firm Acronym Media to launch new practice areas in online advertising, affiliate marketing, and website analytics. Ingrid also held the position of Director, Strategy & Research, for www.IridiumGroup.com and spent four years working in Milan, Italy, where she lead multi-national digital marketing programs for... Read More.

Tucows, one of the original Internet services companies now operates four distinct online services. OpenSRS manages over 9 million domain names and millions of email boxes through a reseller network of over 9,000 web hosts and ISPs in over 100 countries. Hover is the easiest way for individuals to manage their domain names. YummyNames owns premium domain names that generate revenue through advertising or resale. Butterscotch.com is an online video network building on the foundation of Tucows.com.

Prior to joining Tucows in 2006 Ken had spent eight years as a consultant helping dozens of companies develop their Internet strategies.

Ken conceived and oversaw Sony Music Canada’s early online initiatives. From their first site in 1995, Ken’s team built a global web presence for 25 Canadian... Read More.

Toby Segaran is the author of the O’Reilly titles “Programming Collective Intelligence”, one of the top-selling AI books, “Programming the Semantic Web” and editor of “Beautiful Data”. 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 online dating to financial risk models.

I am a software entrepreneur and currently the co-founder and CEO of HubSpot, a software company building a revolutionary software platform for Internet Marketing. HubSpot is my third software startup. To learn more about HubSpot, read the Internet Marketing Blog for Small Business.

Deep down inside, I’m a technology guy (more specifically, a soffware development guy). I’ve built and shipped about ten commercial software products across my various startups. I still write code as it keeps me in touch with reality and makes me a better entrepreneur. Plus, I enjoy it.

Prior to founding HubSpot, I founded Pyramid Digital Solutions, an enterprise software company in the financial services sector. Bootstrapped with less than $10,000 in capital, Pyramid went on to demonstrate exceptional growth and... Read More.

Clara helped kick off the Social CRM movement in 2007 with her Faceconnector application, which integrates Facebook and Salesforce CRM. She is author of the newly released bestseller, The Facebook Era: Tapping Online Social Networks to Build Better Products, Reach New Audiences, and Sell More Stuff about Facebook and Twitter for business, which has been featured in The New York Times, Entrepreneur Magazine, CRM Magazine, and is being used as a textbook at Stanford and Harvard Business School.

Clara recently left her position as Product Line Director of the AppExchange at salesforce.com to found Hearsay Labs, which provides social media tools enabling sales, marketers, and IT to manage customer engagements across Facebook, Twitter, and their own websites. Clara has also worked at... Read More.

Darian Shirazi started working in Web tech at the age of 15 as an intern at eBay testing code. After working for two summers at eBay, he joined Facebook for two years as an engineering intern. He then left to study philosophy at UC-Berkeley. In October 2008 he started Fwix, the first ever real-time local news wire.

As CEO of Skype, Josh Silverman oversees the company’s direction and strategy and is ultimately responsible for its performance.

An experienced entrepreneur, Josh has helped build several startups to become world-class brands and companies. He joined Skype from Shopping.com, where he served as CEO following eBay’s acquisition of the recently-listed company. Prior to that, he launched eBay’s European online classifieds business, and built it into the pan-European leader through a combination of acquisitions and organic growth. Under his direct management, Marktplaats.nl (the leading Dutch eCommerce business) grew traffic, revenues and profits more than five-fold in a period of three year.

Josh was co-founder and CEO of Evite, the leading social event planning site on the Web, which he led until its sale... Read More.

Mike Smith has been developing websites for 13 years and is currently webmaster for The Association of Former Students at Texas A&M. AggieNetwork.com has over 115,000 members within the overall Texas A&M former student population of 350,000+. Prior to his work at The Association, he worked on StandardCall.com, a leader in call measurement and monitoring services for yellow pages and directory publishers. He has led design and development for two web companies and specializes in database driven websites and web operations management and strategy. He also served as an officer in the United States Navy for six years as an analyst and briefer.

Adam Smith co-founded Xobni Corporation. Adam served as a Program Manager at Expedia.com and as a Developer at Vecna Technologies. He served as a Consultant of Siteadvisor before and after acquisition by Mcafee Corporation. His efforts were focused on the application of machine learning to email. He has been working in the email space for seven years. He is interested in machine learning, data mining, and large scale systems. Mr. Smith is a computer science graduate of The Massachusetts Institute of Technology and started his Master’s Degree at MIT doing research in the Networking and Mobile Systems research group.

Mark Smith began volunteering with LiveJournal.com in 2001. He joined the staff in 2004 and concentrated on backend development, where he contributed heavily to systems such as Perlbal (load balancer) and MogileFS (distributed file storage).

He has since worked for companies such as Six Apart, Mozilla, and Google on tasks from systems administration to software development to site architecture.

Mark resides near San Francisco, CA, USA with his wife Janine and their canine companions.

Steve Souders works at Google on web performance and open source initiatives. His books High Performance Web Sites and Even Faster Web Sites explain his best practices for performance along with the research and real-world results behind them. Steve is the creator of YSlow, Cuzillion, and SpriteMe. He is co-chair of Velocity and co-founder of the Firebug Working Group. He taught CS193H High Performance Web Sites at Stanford, and frequently speaks at conferences including OSCON, The Ajax Experience, SXSW, and Web 2.0 Expo.

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.

Rob Spiro is the co-founder of Aardvark, a startup in San Francisco working on Social Search. As assistant curator of birds, he leads user research and product design. Aardvark is being built with a user-centered design process and agile engineering methods.

Previously, Rob worked in consulting and co-founded Mifly, a mobile software startup. Rob holds a BA in History from Yale.

Aaron Springer was iStockphoto’s first full-time employee. He started his career in high school doing pre-press in the graphic design industry. A self-taught technologist, he holds a BFA degree and considers himself a left-brain right-brain person. Aaron joined iStockphoto in 2003 and spent the first three months answering customer and contributor e-mails and phone calls because he wanted to understand what the community needed before he started evolving the site. His primary goal in his current role as vice president of research and development is to create unique and creative solutions to critical problems, doing lots of analysis and leveraging the unique strengths of iStockphoto team members along the way. His greatest challenge at iStockphoto is “synthesizing the diverse needs of many audiences,... Read More.

Responsible for strategically aligning opportunities, resources and divisions as well as overseeing the entirety of PointRoll’s market-facing brand positioning and communications programs, as the Vice President of Strategy and Marketing Catherine leads strategic business, client, and marketing efforts that span product and partnership development, market education, and internal team development. The driving force behind PointRoll’s innovative and effective marketing approach, Catherine strategically built the company’s marketing team in 2006 before turning the tables and working directly with PointRoll clients to further their digital goals as the Regional Director of Sales for the Southeast. Catherine successfully established and built out PointRoll’s Southeast sales office in Atlanta, leading the team in providing compelling and measurable rich media video, social and mobile programs to clients including Read More.

Brice Stokes is a Manager in the Digital Access Marketing group leading a User Experience (UX) design group in support of the more than 13 million digital interactions that FedEx supports each business day. The UX team is focused on improving the up front requirements gathering process and developing early stage prototype designs well in advance of the traditional development phase. Over the past 10 years in the Digital Access marketing group, Brice managed various applications on fedex.com, such as online tracking, shipping, and billing, and led several strategic corporate initiatives centered on Quality Improvement and Innovation. Prior to joining FedEx, he spent time as brand project manager at Leopard www.leopard.com in Boulder, CO, leading several eCommerce initiatives targeting the supply chain and... Read More.

Brad Stone joined The New York Times in December 2006. He covers Internet trends and consumer technology from the newspaper’s San Francisco bureau. In addition, he contributes to the Times’ technology blog, Bits. From 1998 to November 2006, Mr. Stone served as the Silicon Valley Correspondent for Newsweek magazine, writing for the technology and business sections of the magazine and authoring an online column, Plain Text, on our evolving digital lifestyles. Originally from Cleveland, Mr. Stone graduated from Columbia University in 1993 and lives with his wife, Jennifer Granick, and their two daughters.

Jessie Stricchiola is a search industry veteran and founder and CEO of the highly-respected SEO firm Alchemist Media, Inc., consistently recognized by BtoB Magazine as one of the top search marketing vendors in the US. Jessie lectures extensively on all matters related to SEO and search at leading industry conferences worldwide, including ad:tech, SMX, Incisive Media’s Search Engine Strategies, O’Reilly Media’s Web 2.0 Summit, Webmaster World’s PubCon, Shop.org, Stanford’s Web Publishing Workshop and others. She is one of the original nine founders of SEMPO (Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization), serving two years on the Board of Directors for the organization while chairing the Membership Committee. Jessie is widely recognized for identifying and publicizing the first case of PPC click... Read More.

Widely considered a leading “search engine guru,” Danny Sullivan has been helping webmasters, marketers and everyday web users understand how search engines work for over a decade.

Danny’s expertise about search engines is often sought by the media, and he has been quoted in places like The Wall St. Journal, USA Today, The Los Angeles Times, Forbes, The New Yorker and Newsweek and ABC’s Nightline.

Danny began covering search engines in late 1995, when he undertook a study of how they indexed web pages. The results were published online as “A Webmaster’s Guide To Search Engines,” a pioneering effort to answer the many questions site designers and Internet publicists had about search engines.

Danny currently heads up Search Engine Land as editor-in-chief,... Read More.

Jamie started one of the first ISPs in San Francisco so he could get a better Internet 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 in Freebase by watching over data operations at Metaweb. And somewhere along the line he received a Ph.D. from Harvard University in Behavioral Economics.

Kelly Thompson serves as the chief operating officer of iStockphoto, overseeing the global strategy and operational leadership of iStockphoto’s products, services, technology and sales.

Kelly has served in several roles at iStockphoto, most recently, executive vice president. In his initial role as vice president of marketing in 2004, he propelled the company from a few thousand photographers and thousands of clients to a worldwide presence with half a million clients, making microstock a compelling new business for Getty Images to acquire. With a degree in computer science, Kelly is still a programmer at heart, despite his business acumen, and has been the driving force behind many iStock innovations, such as the patent-pending CopySpace™, which many in the industry are now trying to duplicate.

Prior... Read More.

Rebecca manages community and PR at the start-up company Alice.com in Madison, Wisconsin. Alice.com is changing the way consumers shop for and purchase Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) like toilet paper, and provides eCommerce and interactive marketing services exclusively to the CPG industry. The company’s eCommerce platform allows CPG manufacturers to create branded storefronts that make it easy for the mainstream consumer to buy all of their household goods online. Alice has been featured on CNN, Rachael Ray, The Today Show, and more, due in large part to Alice.com’s social media efforts. The Alice co-founders Brian Wiegand and Mark McGuire have an entrepreneur track-record that includes three previous start-up successes including their last company Jellyfish.com which sold to Microsoft. Rebecca’s favorite brand... Read More.

Chris Tolles: CEO Chris came to Topix from Spoke Software, a business social networking company, where he was a co-founder and VP of marketing. Before Spoke, Chris was a Director of Marketing at AOL/Netscape for AOL Music, Netscape Search and Directory Products. Chris was a co-founder and VP of Marketing at NewHoo, and led the sale of the company to Netscape. After the acquisition, NewHoo was relaunched as the Open Directory Project at Netscape and became the world’s largest human edited directory of the web, and is still used by companies like Google, Alexa and AOL. Previous to NewHoo, Chris held a variety of sales, marketing and management positions at Sun Microsystems. Chris graduated from the University of California at San... Read More.

Adam Trachtenberg is the Director of Platform and Services at eBay. He began his eBay career evangelizing Web services and later ran the eBay Developers Program Website and conference.

Before eBay, Adam co-founded and served as Vice President for Product at two companies, Student.Com and TVGrid.Com. Adam is the author of Upgrading to PHP 5 and co-author of PHP Cookbook. He lives in San Francisco, California.

Russ Unger is the Director of Experience Planning for Draftfcb, the largest advertising/marketing agency in the Midwest and currently serves on the board of directors of the Information Architecture Institute as president. Russ has been working on websites since 1993—when there was only Notepad to code with and Mosaic was the only browser around. That was when he found his interest in User Experience Design and Information Architecture began to flourish.

Since then, he has worked with a number of major brands, including Sharpie, Kraft, Kmart, Gatorade, Propel, Quaker and Celebrity Cruise Lines, as well as on large scale Intranet and Extranet applications for such companies as Volkswagen Credit, Audi Financial Services, Information Resources, Inc. and Marsh. He has been involved in the Information... Read More.

Jeffrey Veen is a founder and CEO of Typekit, a cloud-based font subscription service for web designers. Jeffrey was also one of the founding partners of Adaptive Path and project lead for Measure Map, the well-received web analytics tool acquired by Google in 2006, where he managed the user experience group responsible for some of the largest web apps in the world. As a consultant, he has been involved in designing the leading blog and social media applications on the web, including Blogger, TypePad, Flickr, and and National Public Radio.

Previously, Jeffrey served as the Executive Director of Interface Design for Wired Digital and Lycos Inc., where he managed the look and feel of HotWired, the HotBot search engine, Lycos.com and others.

In... Read More.

Jon S. von Tetzchner, along with colleague Geir Ivarsøy, started developing a Web browser while working for Norwegian Telecom Research (Telenor) in 1994. Soon after, the Opera browser was available for the public and is now widely used, pioneering many innovations that have revolutionized Web browsing.

As CEO of Opera Software, Tetzchner spreads the company’s vision of One Web, which means giving people universal access to the Web the way they like it. Opera, the oldest browser company still in business, believes the Web is too important to be available to the privileged few. Opera’s cross-platform browser provides the best possible Internet experience regardless of platform, device capability or network quality. Opera’s leading Web technology is now popular the world over for its unique... Read More.

Tristan Walker is a student at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business and is vice president of business development for Foursquare.

Ekaterina Walter is a marketer, thinker, speaker, and connector. As a Social Media Strategist for Intel, Ekaterina works at the intersection of high tech and integrated marketing—driving campaigns and helping colleagues to leverage new media in support of business goals. She is aggressive in pursuing corporate challenges and is passionate in transcending cultural boundaries along the way. She believes that building relationships with customers should be at the core of any business and that social media provides a perfect opportunity to do so. Ekaterina’s work experience also includes Accenture, Wells Fargo, and Wedbush Morgan Securities. You can find her on Twitter @ekaterinawalter.

Alice Wang is a director for Burton Group’s consulting service. She covers identity and access management, governance, provisioning, federated identity, role management, operations and process improvement, data management, and security and risk management. Prior to joining Burton Group, Alice performed duties as a systems engineer, project manager, and industry consultant at Sun Microsystems and PricewaterhouseCoopers. With over 10 years of experience, Alice has assisted Fortune 500 companies with designing and / or implementing large scale IT projects and authored numerous technical whitepapers. Alice is also ITIL Foundation, JAVA Programmer, and Solaris Systems Administrator certified.

Ge Wang is the Co-founder, CTO, and Chief Creative Officer of Smule (a.k.a. SonicMule, Inc.), a developer of interactive sonic media. Smule’s mission is to intensely explore expressive audio, enabling creativity for a wide population and new social interactions. Smule’s bestselling iPhone apps include I Am T-Pain, Leaf Trombone World Stage and Ocarina. Concurrently, Dr. Wang is an assistant professor at Stanford University in the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA). He is the chief-architect and co-creator of the ChucK audio programming language, and the founding director of the Stanford Laptop Orchestra (SLOrk) and the Stanford Mobile Phone Orchestra (MoPhO).

Eric is the founder and CEO of Instructables.com, a DIY project-sharing website. He earned his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering at MIT, and is a co-founder of several companies including Squid Labs, Potenco, MakaniPower, and OptiOpia that are respectively involved in innovation research, distributed human-energy, high-altitude wind, and vision measurement and correction.

Prior to Sprout, Carnet built and sold several Facebook applications, founded ChipIn (a widget-based fundraising service), was a professional snowboarder, and ran International Trade Policy for The Nature Conservancy. Carnet has over a decade of experience in the high-tech and Internet industries, having been the Director of Business Development at TurboLinux, a Linux OS and enterprise solutions startup, and the co-founder of NetCorps, a nonprofit technology assistance organization in Oregon. Carnet graduated from the University of Berkeley and has a law degree from the University of Oregon School of Law.

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.

Paul Yiu is the group program manager behind Bing’s real-time and social efforts.

Raven Zachary is President of Small Society, working with big brands, established companies, investors, and startups on iPhone strategy and product development. Raven directed the Obama ‘08 for iPhone application for the Obama Campaign, and has worked with companies such as Whole Foods Market, Zipcar, CLIF BAR, and Air New Zealand on iPhone application initiatives. He is the founder of iPhoneDevCamp, a not-for-profit iPhone developer conference. Raven is also a Contributing Analyst with The 451 Group, an IT industry analyst firm and works closely with O’Reilly Media on iPhone and mobile technology related events and coverage. He is regularly quoted by the press about the iPhone market and is a frequent conference speaker on the topic.

Todd Zaki Warfel is a Principal Design Researcher and founder of Messagefirst, a Philadelphia-based design research consulting firm, where he blends research and design to evolve products in innovate and beautiful ways. Todd is a dynamic speaker and storyteller by nature. He’s rarely short on details. He is an active member in a number of industry communities and organizations, including the Information Architecture Institute, IxDA, and UPA.

Todd’s clients have included Albertsons, AT&T Wireless, Bankrate, Bank of America, Citibank, Comcast, Cornell University, IntraLinks, The Hartford, LA Times, Motorla, Palm, and SBC.

Todd currently lives in Philadelphia and blogs at toddwarfel.com. His upcoming book ‘Practical Prototyping’ will take a hands-on approach, enabling you to develop prototypes with minimal muss and fuss. The book discusses... Read More.