Mike McDerment

FreshBooks

Mike is the co-founder and CEO of FreshBooks, planet earth’s leading online invoicing app for service oriented professionals, freelancers and teams. Back in 2003, Mike built FreshBooks for his design firm and scratched his own itch. Since launching in May 2004 FreshBooks has touched over 600,000 lives and Mike and his team dedicate themselves to being a great service for people who love their work, and want to focus on it – instead of focusing on their paperwork.

Raffi Krikorian

Twitter

Raffi @raffi is the lead at Twitter behind its Geospatial APIs. He architects the Platform's API and drives the notion of adding "where" to Twitter's sense of "when" not only on twitter.com but also throughout the Twitter ecosystem. Before Twitter he used to create technologies to help people frame their personal energy consumption against global energy production, and also ran a consulting company building off-the-wall projects. At one point, he used to teach at NYU's ITP and spent way too much time as a student at MIT and the MIT Media Lab.

Simon Wardley

Canonical

As a geneticist with a love of mathematics and a fascination in economics, Simon has always found himself dealing with complex systems, whether it’s in behavioural patterns, environmental risks of chemical pollution, developing nove computer systems or managing companies. These days Simon works as the Software Services Manager for Canonical, helping define future cloud computing strategies for Ubuntu. He is a passionate advocate and researcher in the fields of open source, commoditisation, innovation and cybernetics . He is also fond of ducks. As he says “they’re fowl but not through choice”.

Christian Heilmann

Yahoo

Christian Heilmann is a geek and hacker by heart. He’s been a professional web developer for about eleven years and worked his way through several agencies up to Yahoo! where he delivered Yahoo! Maps Europe and Yahoo! Answers. He has written two and contributed to three books on JavaScript, web development and accessibility, led distributed teams as a manager and made them work with one another and released dozens of online articles and hundreds of blog posts in the last few years.

Christian was nominated standards champion of the year 2008 by .net magazine in the UK and currently sports the fashionable job title “International Developer Evangelist” spending his time going from conference to conference and university to university to speak and train people on systems provided by Yahoo! and other web companies that want to make this web thing work well for everybody.”

Eoghan McCabe & Des Traynor

Contrast

Contrast is web app development company based in Dublin. They've built many apps for clients and for themselves. They've seen it done right and done wrong, and they've learned lots along the way. Contrast are currently pouring all their spare time into their error tracking app, Exceptional. Eoghan is the visual design lead and managing director of Contrast, Des is the user experience lead.