Dion Almaer

Palm

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

Jason Calacanis

Mahalo

Jason Calacanis is an Internet entrepreneur and former blogger. He has founded many companies including Silicon Alley Reporter and Weblogs, Inc. He is the founder of Mahalo.com and has been its CEO since 2007.
Calacanis returned to podcasting on May 1, 2009 with his new program This Week In Startups.

Selena Deckelmann

Open Source Bridge

Selena Deckelmann is an open source advocate and major contributor to the PostgreSQL project. She founded Open Source Bridge, a developer conference for open source citizens. In her spare time, she likes to mix drinks for her local Perl and Postgres user groups, and fetch eggs from her chickens. You can visit chesnok.com to find out more about Selena.

Schuyler Erle

Schuyler Erle

Schuyler Erle is a free software developer and activist. He also works in the fields of digital cartography, wireless networking, intelligent search engines and the Semantic Web. He is the lead developer of NoCatAuth which is an open source wireless captive portal. Erle grew up in Philadelphia and Springfield, PA and after graduating from Springfield High School in 1995, went on to earn his degree at Temple University. He has created the popular games Balance of Power and Squigby. Schuyler currently lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Ben Galbraith

Palm

Ben Galbraith is the director of developer relations at Palm and the co-founder of Ajaxian.com. Ben has long juggled interests in both business and tech, having written his first computer program at six years old, started his first business at ten, and entered the IT workforce at twelve. He has delivered hundreds of technical presentations world-wide, produced several technical conferences, and co-authored over a half-dozen books. He has enjoyed a variety of business and technical roles throughout his career, including CEO, CIO, CTO, and Chief Software Architect roles in medical, publishing, media, manufacturing, advertising, software and internet industries. He lives in Palo Alto with his wife and five children.

Tony Haile

Betaworks

Tony Haile currently works for Betaworks, where he is General Manager for Chartbeat and (greedily) Twitterfeed.

His career prior to Betaworks has been somewhat bizarre. After a Masters degree in International Relations from the University of St. Andrews where he spent a semester studying at a Palestinian university in the West Bank and narrowly avoided getting blown up (by both sides), He became a bowman and extreme blogger on a round-the-world yacht race where he got to experience hurricanes, knockdowns, lightning strikes and being picked up by 90ft waves and thrown against wire rigging several times an hour. This is actually more fun than it sounds.

Tara Hunt

Horse Pig Cow

Tara ‘missrogue’ Hunt makes a living avoiding doing anything “for a living”. She’s an author of a book published or about to be published in 8 languages (English, French, Dutch, Japanese, Indonesian, Korean, Spanish and Italian), speaks internationally on how the social web is changing the world, is CEO and co-founder of startup Shwowp in Montreal and admits the best idea she’s executed on to date is a karaoke roadtrip across America in an RV with 4 friends and her dog. She also spends an inordinate and somewhat unhealthy amount of time online.
Photo Credit: @evablue

Alex Hunter

Alex Hunter

Alex Hunter is a brand consultant, company advisor, and angel investor.

Alex is also a noted public speaker, appearing at events all over the world.

He has served as an adviser to the Prince of Wales’ Rainforest Trust specifically around the use of social media and engagement to propagate the Trusts’ message.

Previously, Alex served as the global Head of Online Marketing for the Virgin Group.

Before joining the Virgin Group, Alex was based in California at Virgin America, where he used the web to build a grassroots marketing campaign to garner public support for Virgin America’s certification process on a tight schedule and even tighter budget. The campaign was covered by Time magazine, CNN, and CNBC, amongst others. He also oversaw the front-end development of Virgin America’s website which has since won several accolades including ad:tech and Webby Award honors.

Alex currently splits his time between the UK and Northern California and regularly blogs at TripHunter.co.uk

Raffi Krikorian

Twitter

@raffi is the Technical Lead of Twitter’s Platform Team which runs and manages one of the largest and most widely used APIs on the web both by calls and by number of developers and applications. While at Twitter he also authored the first Geo API and drove 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.

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.

Jennifer Pahlka

Code For America

Jennifer Pahlka is the founder and executive director of a non-profit, Code for America. Previously she was the co-chair and general manager of the Web 2.0 events for TechWeb, in partnership with O’Reilly. Prior to that, she chaired Enterprise 2.0, and before that was the director of the Game Group at CMP. During her tenure in the games business, she oversaw the dramatic growth of the Game Developers Conference (GDC) from 1995 to 2003 and launched a number of notable programs, including the Independent Games Festival, known as the Sundance of the game industry, and the Game Developers Choice Awards. Her roles included publisher of Game Developer magazine and Gamasutra.com, the premiere web site for game developers, and executive director of the International Game Developers Association (IGDA), an independent non-profit association serving game developers around the world. She has served on the advisory boards of the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) and the GDC and held a board of directors position on the IGDA for three years. She is a graduate of Yale University.

Tom Preston-Werner

GitHub

Tom Preston-Werner is a cofounder of GitHub, the social coding phenomenon that has captured the imaginations of hackers around the globe. He is also a serial entrepreneur having sold Gravatar to Automattic and run a web/graphic design firm out of San Diego. When he’s not running GitHub, Tom likes to read about quantum physics and mountain bike the Bay Area’s redwood lined single track.

Aza Raskin

Mozilla

Raskin is the creative lead for Firefox and former head of user experience for Mozilla Labs. In addition to his Firefox position, the multi-faceted Raskin is co-founder of Songza, a music search engine and jukebox that was acquired in 2008, and Bloxes, which makes furniture from cardboard. Aza is recognized as a leading design guru and has appeared on the cover of Wired as well as given a TED talk.

Kevin Rose

Kevin Rose

Kevin Rose is a technology angel investor, and the Founder of Digg, a
social news website attracting more than 25 million monthly unique
visitors. Some of Kevin’s more well known investments include:
Twitter, Foursquare, Formspring, Square, ngmoco, and Zynga.

He has been featured on the cover of BusinessWeek, Inc Magazine, and
The RedHerring. Kevin was named a “Top 25 Web Celeb” by Forbes (2010),
“Top 25 Most Influential People on the Web” by Time and BusinessWeek
magazines (2008), and one of MITs “Top 35 Innovators under 35” (2007).

Joe Stump

SimpleGeo

Joe Stump has been scaling large websites for over ten years. After spending a few years as Digg’s Lead Architect he struck out on his own, with Matt Galligan, to found SimpleGeo. As CTO of SimpleGeo he’s responsible for architecting and scaling a robust GIS infrastructure for developers around the world.
Joe has authored pieces for O’Reilly’s ONLAMP.com and has spoken at Web 2.0 Expo, FOWA, FOWD, Q-Con, SXSW, MySQL Conference and PHP-Con, to name a few.
Joe is an expert in the LAMP stack and graduated from Eastern Michigan University with a BA in Computer Information Systems.

Gary Vaynerchuck

VaynerMedia

Gary Vaynerchuk has captured national attention as a businessman and Host of Wine Library TV. Gary’s fame can be attributed to his pioneering, multi-faceted approach to personal branding and business building.

Simon Wardley

Leading Edge Forum

Simon Wardley, based in the UK, is a Researcher for the Leading Edge Forum and his focus is on the intersection of IT strategy and new technologies. Simon is a seasoned executive who has spent the last 15 years defining future IT strategies for companies in the FMCG, Retail and IT industries. From Canon’s early leadership in the cloud computing space in 2005 to Ubuntu’s recent dominance as the #1 Cloud operating system.

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 novel computer systems or managing companies. He is a passionate advocate and researcher in the fields of open source, commoditization, innovation, organizational structure and cybernetics.

Deanna Zandt

Deanna Zandt

Deanna Zandt is a media technologist and the author ofShare This! How You Will Change the World with Social Networking (Berrett-Koehler, June 2010). She is a consultant to key progressive media organizations including AlterNet and Jim Hightower’s Hightower Lowdown, and is a Research Fellow at the Center for Social Media at American University. Zandt specializes in social media, is a leading expert in women and technology, and is a frequent guest on CNN International, BBC Radio, Fox News and more. She works with groups to create and implement effective web strategies toward organizational goals of civic engagement and empowerment, and uses her background in linguistics, advertising, telecommunications and finance to complement her technical expertise. She has spoken at a number of conferences, including the National Conference on Media Reform, Bioneers, America’s Future Now (formerly “Take Back America,”) Women Action & The Media, and provides beginner and advanced workshops both online and in person.