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Kathy Sierra
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Kathy Sierra has been interested in learning theory since her days as a game developer (Virgin, MGM, Amblin'). More recently, she's been a master trainer for Sun Microsystems, teaching Sun's java instructors how to teach the latest technologies to customers, and a lead developer of several Sun certification exams. Along with her partner Bert Bates, Kathy created the Head First series. She's also the original founder of the Software Development/Jolt Productivity Award-winning javaranch.com, the largest (and friendliest) all-volunteer Java community.
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Kevin Rose
Kevin Rose is the founder and chief architect of Digg. He oversees all aspects of the management and development of the Web site.
Kevin started Digg in September 2004 as a personal project. His initial idea was to conduct a social experiment in how masses of users could control and promote news and other content on the Web, without external editorial control. After a very short time, he realized the power of his idea, as Digg was becoming a resource for breaking news stories and developed a strong user following.
Kevin is also a co-founder of the Internet Television Network Revision3 where as a member of the board he provides strategic direction to the company.
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Erick Schonfeld
Erick is the Co-Editor of TechCrunch and has been covering startups and technology news for 14 years. At Business 2.0 he wrote feature stories and ran their main blog, Next Net. He also does a lot of video work and hosts regular panels of industry luminaries called Disruptor Round Tables.
Prior to Business 2.0, Erick was an editor-at-large for eCompany and a contributing editor for Fortune. In 1999, Schonfeld won the prize for best information technology submission at LondonÕs Business Journalist of the Year Awards, and in 2001 he won the prize for best space submission at the Aerospace Journalist of the Year Awards in Paris.
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Cal Henderson
Originally from London, England, he currently works at Yahoo! Inc, as the Director of Engineering for Flickr, in San Francisco, California. He's been working on Flickr from the day it started development (on his laptop) to the present day (where it's now the "Offical website of the Internet"). In 2006, he wrote the book Building Scalable Websites for O'Reilly Media.
Before Flickr, he was the technical director of Special Web Projects at emap, a UK media company. By night he works for a whole slew of web sites and communitites, including the creative community B3TA and his personal site, iamcal.
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Matt Mullenweg
Matt Mullenweg blogs at PhotoMatt.net. He is best known as the founding developer of WordPress, the blogging software he guided from a handful of users to the most widely used open source blog tool. In late 2005, he left CNET to found Automattic, the company behind WordPress and Askimet.com. In his spare time he enjoys taking photographs and playing jazz.
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Kevin Marks
Kevin is author of the weblog Epeus Epigone and a software engineer at Google. He became principal engineer for Technorati after doing work for both Apple and the BBC. He is one of the founders of Microformats.
In 2003, Marks was an early experimenter with and contributor to the technologies that became popular under the names podcasting and iPodder in 2004.
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Leah Culver
Leah Culver founded Pownce with her friends Kevin Rose and Daniel Burka as a way of sending messages, links, files and events to each other. Leah is the lead developer for the site and spends most of her time working on feature development, fixing bugs, and re-writing her SQL queries. She's a recent computer science graduate from the University of Minnesota and loves the challenge of developing a web application from scratch. Leah also writes a blog about her experiences as a software developer at leahculver.com.
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Blaine Cook
Blaine Cook is the Architect at Twitter. He is currently building and maintaining Twitter's Jabber-based real-time backend infrastructure that tracks and distributes millions of updates every day to users on the Web, instant messaging, and SMS.
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Kevin Hale
Kevin Hale is the Co-founder of Infinity Box Inc, a Y Combinator seeded company. He is responsible for safe guarding and designing the user experience of their online HTML form builder, Wufoo. Kevin writes about interface design issues for the web development blog, Particletree and served as Editor-in-Chief of the web development magazine, Treehouse. As a child, Kevin was the kid in class who who ate a box of crayons for a dollar.
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Emily Boyd
Emily Boyd, co-founder & interface designer. Emily is also the founder of MatMice, a website which has been used by more than one million children worldwide to create their own webpages. She has received a number of awards for her work, and is a former NSW Young Australian of the Year.
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Gary Vaynerchuk
Gary Vaynerchuk, the star of Wine Library TV, is Director of Operations at Wine Library in Springfield, NJ. Gary's love affair with wine began at a young age when he started reading Robert Parker and Wine Advocate and blossomed over the years as he traveled around the world to various wine-producing regions (his wife remains blissfully unaware of this affair). But it troubled Gary to observe the stuffiness of the industry-conceited sommeliers, snobby shopkeepers unwilling (or unable) to educate their consumers, and seemingly mystical conventions all combine to make wine seem intimidating to the uninitiated. Wine Library TV seeks to change all that.
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Dan Rubin
Dan is a highly accomplished user interface designer and usability consultant, with over ten years of experience as a leader in the fields of web standards and usability, specifically focusing on the use of (X)HTML and CSS to streamline development and increase flexibility and accessibility. In addition to his work for clients including Microsoft, Yahoo!, Google and Geffen/Universal Media, he is a sought-after public speaker and author, most recently penning Pro CSS Techniques (Apress, 2006) and Web Standards Creativity (friends of ED, 2007).
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Joseph Smarr
Joseph Smarr is Chief Platform Architect at Plaxo. He is currently leading Plaxo's "Open Social Web" initiative to put users back in control of who they know when using socially-enabled sites by using open data-sharing standards. An active participant in the Web 2.0 community, Joseph has built web applications for many years, including Plaxo's online address book, web widgets, and was architect and lead developer of the Plaxo 3.0 rich AJAX address book, calendar, and sync tool. Joseph has a BS and MS from Stanford University in Artificial Intelligence.
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Joe Stump
Joe Stump is the Lead Architect of Digg.com in San Francisco, California. He's responsible for making sure the applications built at Digg will scale into infinity and beyond. For the last 10 years he's specialized in building highly scalable LAMP solutions. When not working on Digg he spends time maintaining a number of PEAR projects and explores San Francisco.
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Matt Marshall
Matt Marshall covered venture capital for the San Jose Mercury News until he left in Sept. 2006 to launch VentureBeat as an independent company. VentureBeat focuses initially on Silicon Valley and will gradually expand to cover innovation hubs around the globe.
Matt covered the venture capital beat for the Mercury News from 2001-2006. He significantly expanded the newspaperÕs coverage of venture capital during that time, in daily articles and a weekly column called the VC Insider, and then online with his blog SiliconBeat from 2004.
Matt was awarded Journalist of the Year by the Northern California Society of Professional Journalists in 2002, and the James Madison Freedom of Information award in 2003.
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Edwin Aoki
Edwin Aoki is a Technology Fellow at AOL. Holding a joint degree in Computer Science and Sociology from Harvard College, Edwin believes strongly in the ability of technology to bring people closer together and to make our lives easier. He's worked at Apple Computer, Go Corporation, and Intuit before joining Netscape Communications in 1996. At Netscape, Edwin worked on the Netscape Communicator browser, enterprise products, and web applications prior to the company's acquisition by AOL. Currently, Edwin oversees architecture and technology strategy for most of AOL's consumer facing products and represents the company at the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). A published author and California native, Edwin is based out of AOL's Silicon Valley office.
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Carlos Garcia
Carlos Garcia is the founder and CEO of Scrapblog, the first web-based service for creating and sharing multimedia scrapbooks. Carlos' vision of "design online" led to the development of Scrapblog which enables everyday people to express themselves in creative ways. Users of Scrapblog tell stories about their families, their memorable vacations, their best friends, and even the occasional Second Life adventure. Carlos is also one of the founders of Nobox, an award-winning interactive agency with long-term clients that include Toyota, Lexus, Procter & Gamble and Mozilla (Firefox).
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Sean Seibel
Sean Seibel is a User Experience Strategy and Design professional covering the East Coast with over 13 years of interactive strategy, design, and technology experience. Having been President and CEO for 7 years of a Web agency, Halo Technologies, Sean is driven by the pursuit of aligning user needs with business objectives through the use of good design and appropriate technology. More recently, Sean was the director of User Experience and Interactive Strategy for Young and Rubicam Brands where he lead the Microsoft account on all web related marketing campaign activities such as email, landing pages, Web sites, and marketing technology infrastructure.
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Ed Burns
Ed Burns is a senior staff engineer at Sun Microsystems. Ed has worked on a wide variety of client and server side web technologies since 1994, including NCSA Mosaic, Mozilla, the Sun Java Plugin, Jakarta Tomcat and, most recently JavaServer Faces. Ed is currently the co-spec lead for JavaServer Faces, a topic on which Ed recently co-authored a book for McGraw Hill. Ed is an experienced international conference speaker, with consistently high attendence numbers and ratings at JavaOne, JAOO, W-JAX, No Fluff Just Stuff, JA-SIG, The Ajax Experience, and Java and Linux User Groups.
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Jeremy Suriel
Jeremy Suriel is the CTO and Chief Architect at goowy media, inc., where he is responsible for overseeing all aspects of the development for products including the yourminis widget platform and the goowy webtop. He also serves as a System Architect at AOL working with the Product Group on widgetizing various AOL content and properties, and working closely with Platform-A on extending advertising through widgets. Previously, Jeremy was part of the founding team of two other Internet communication and CRM companies including eAssist Global Solutions and eShare Technologies.
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Alex Bard
Alex Bard is the President & CEO at goowy media, where he is responsible for the corporate vision, product strategy, and marketing/business development initiatives. Currently, he also works inside AOLÕs product group helping guide the vision and strategy for AOL's Widget initiatives. Previously, Alex was part of the founding team of two other Internet communication companies including eAssist Global Solutions and eShare Technologies.
Confirmed speakers
Program chairs
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Brian Oberkirch
Brian Oberkirch consults on marketing, social media and web development projects, helping companies use new tools to have better conversations with those who matter to their business.
In Brian's past lives, he was a marketing consultant and writer for hire, managed national brand accounts at large and small advertising and PR shops, started a social media consultancy called Weblogs Work and helped build a suite of applications for those clients, taught literature and creative writing, wrote newspaper articles, did the morning news at a radio station, and many other things. Phew!
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Tantek Celik
Tantek is an expert in the field of Microformats, currently working as a freelance consultant. Prior to this, he was Chief Technologist at Technorati Tantek leads the design and development of new standards and technologies. Before Technorati, he was a veteran representative to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) for Microsoft, where he also helped lead the development of the award-winning Internet Explorer for Macintosh. As co-founder of the microformats.org community and the Global Multimedia Protocols Group, as well as Steering Committee member of the Web Standards Project and invited expert to the W3C Cascading Style Sheets working group, Çelik is dedicated to advancing open standards and simpler data formats for the web.