Cennydd Bowles

Clearleft

Cennydd Bowles leapt into the world of user experience eight years ago and hasn't shut up about it since. He now works for Clearleft in Brighton, England and moonlights as a UX blogger, mentor and community evangelist.

Cennydd is a regular public speaker (SXSW, IA Summit), a widely published writer (A List Apart, Johnny Holland, .net magazine) and co-conspirator of the UX London conference. His first book "Undercover User Experience Design", written with fellow Clearleftie James Box, will be published in September 2010 by New Riders.

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.

Robin Christopherson

AbilityNet

After a degree in Engineering at Cambridge and working as an IT instructor for the Royal National Institute for the Blind (RNIB), Robin was a founding member of AbilityNet in 1998. Robin now manages AbilityNet's Web Consultancy services - heading a team that is globally acclaimed as experts in accessibility auditing, disabled user testing and designing attractive websites that are both accessible and easy to use by all. Despite being blind, Robin uses a computer very effectively by relying on speech output to access the full range of mainstream software including email and the internet. He has a first-hand appreciation of the importance of good web design practice to accessibility.

Mark DiCristina

Mark DiCristina is a brand manager at MailChimp. He's a co-founder of his family, and he's responsible for scaling his own inbox. Before joining MailChimp, Mark was the production manager at Paste Magazine. He holds a BA in Philosophy from Davidson College.

MailChimp

Iain Dodsworth

Tweetdeck

Iain Dodsworth is the CEO of TweetDeck, a Twitter desktop client. Prior to founding Tweetdeck, Iain was a senior flex developer for Prudential Financial, which he joined in June 2007. Before joining Prudential, Iain was a developer at Dashbrook (2006-2007), PriceWaterhouse Cooper(2003-2006), and a Digital Text consultant and developer for BSkyB (2000-2002). In 1999, Dodsworth co-founded and served as CTO for Sirens Communications corp., an internet industry startup based in Palo Alto.

Iain holds a BSc. from Sheffield Hollam University in Systems Modelling.

David Hauser

Grasshopper

David Hauser oversees the strategic direction and operations of Grasshopper and serves as the company's technology visionary. A passionate technologist, he's the guy you go to when you have a question about how the universe operates (or if you simply want to consult his encyclopedic inner search engine). As champion of the company's Core Values and work culture, he strives to create an environment that is professionally and personally rewarding for all employees. David leads multiple departments across Grasshopper including Labs, Engineering, Network Operations, and overall company Operations. A technology start-up veteran, David was co-founder of Return Path, an e-mail performance management company, and founder of WebAds360, an ad-serving technology provider for small and mid-sized businesses. David's strong entrepreneurial spirit has allowed him to serve as a consultant for various companies as well as a mentor to emerging entrepreneurs through his alma mater, Babson College. David is an Entrepreneurs' Organization (EO) Board Member, and a Member of the Global Advisory Board for Students for the Advancement of Global Entrepreneurship (SAGE). He also judges several young entrepreneur competitions each year. David was born and raised in New York City. David graduated from Babson College with a Bachelor of Science in Business. He also enjoys long walks on the beach.

Nick Halstead

TweetMeme

CEO & Founder of TweetMeme.com one of hottest realtime news aggregators based upon twitter, the TweetMeme Retweet Button can now be seen on 170,000+ websites and is displayed 450 million times a day. TweetMeme is at the forefront of a new breed of aggregators that use the social web to index the 'likes' of users through their social graph. Nick has been in development for over 20 years and is passionate about the future of news and Twitter evangelist.

Cal Henderson

iamcal

Cal Henderson has been a web applications developer for far too long and should really start looking for a serious job (his own words).

Originally from England, Cal is the VP of Engineering for Tiny Speck. Until recently he worked at Yahoo! Inc, as the Director of Engineering for Flickr, in San Francisco, California. He worked on Flickr from the day it started development (on his laptop) until April 2009 (when it was the "Official website of the Internet").

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 communities, including the creative community B3TA and his personal site, iamcal. In his spare time, he writes windows software, develops web publishing tools, and writes occasional articles about web application development and security.

In 2006 he wrote the best selling book Building Scalable Websites. He promises he's working on a second edition.

Molly Holzschlag

MollyDotCom

Molly works to define and create effective organizational standards and best practices to thousands of developers and designers working the Web via her 35 books; countless articles; conference workshops, sessions and keynotes; and consulting. With 20 years of online experience, Molly's strengths lie not only in the technologies and practices of today, but in understanding the complexities of how challenges emerged, and ways in which to manage those challenges in the rapid evolution of today's Web.

Sandy Jen

Meebo

Sandy Jen is a co-founder of Meebo in Mountain View. She majored in Computer Science at Stanford University and after graduation, worked as a software developer at Xilinx. In 2005, Sandy started Meebo with two friends, Seth Sternberg and Elaine Wherry. Sandy started out coding the server-side of Meebo and now heads Meebo's Engineering organization. Sandy rock climbs, loves yoga, plays ultimate Frisbee, and really enjoys a good nap.

Andrew Mason

Groupon.com

Andrew Mason is the founder and CEO of Groupon, which has been called "America's Best Website" by one of their television commercials. Andrew has been using his fingers since an early age, most recently to type this biography. A Northwestern University graduate in music, Mason's achievements date back to his 8th grade wrestling rookie of the year trophy at Mt. Lebanon High School in Pittsburgh. Andrew considers himself an online enthusiast and man.

Bob Mason

Brightcove

Bob co-founded Brightcove with Jeremy Allaire, and provides leadership for Brightcove's vision, design and architecture. He plays an instrumental role in working with Brightcove's customers and partners. Bob Mason joins Brightcove from Art Technology Group (ATG) where he was a founding member of the product development team, having joined in 1994 as the 10th employee. During his 10-year tenure at ATG, Bob provided technology leadership in formulating the company's growth and strategic positioning and as a Senior Software Architect was the technical leader for software architecture and development through over 6 major product release cycles, including ATG's Java-based Dynamo Application Server, Personalization, eCommerce, Portal and eService solutions. He was also the technical leader for ATG's pioneering services projects including MovieFone's initial online ticket system and Sony's online gaming and entertainment portal, The Station @ Sony. Bob holds a BS in Computer Science from Worcester Polytechnic Institute.

Hilary Mason

bit.ly

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.

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.

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.

Andy McLoughlin

Huddle

Andy is co-founder of business collaboration platform Huddle.net. A frustrated economist and wannabe designer, he spends his days modelling partnership revenues, wire framing stuff that never gets built and shouting about how someone buggered up his logo. Andy recently moved from London to San Francisco where he enjoys fencing and skiing (both badly), taking photos of amusing American things and sitting in cheap Mexican eateries discussing films, music and cool stuff he recently saw online.

Brad Neuberg

Google

Brad Neuberg is a software engineer at Google on the Buzz team. Previously he was a developer advocate at Google for the Open Web and HTML5. He is the creator of a number of JavaScript libraries and frameworks for expanding the capabilities of web applications, including Dojo Storage, Dojo Offline, Really Simple History, and SVG Web. Brad worked with Douglas Engelbart on the HyperScope project; explored deeply collaborative web browsers with Paper Airplane; worked on one of the first web-based RSS aggregators; and was a Developer Advocate for the Gears project. Brad also created Coworking, an international grassroots movement to establish a new kind of workspace for the self-employed.

John Resig

Mozilla

John Resig is a JavaScript Tool Developer for the Mozilla Corporation and the author of the book Pro JavaScript Techniques. He's also the creator and lead developer of the jQuery JavaScript library.

Currently, John is located in Boston, MA. He's hard at work on his second book, Secrets of the JavaScript Ninja.

David Recordon

Facebook

David Recordon is the Senior Open Programs Manager at Facebook, where he leads open source and open standards initiatives. He joined Facebook from Six Apart where he focused on platform strategies, and previously worked at VeriSign in the emerging business group. David has played a pivotal role in the development and popularization of key social media technologies, such as OpenID and OAuth. In 2007, he became the youngest recipient of the Google-O'Reilly Open Source Award.

Dorian Selz

memonic.com

Dr. Dorian Selz is serial entrepreneur and currently building his third startup memonic.com as co-founder and CEO. Memonic is your web based digital notebook of choice. Previously, he was co-founder and CEO of local.ch, the leading local search platform in Switzerland. Prior to launching local.ch, from 1999 to 2005 he was Partner and COO at Namics, the largest Swiss Web consultancy with a strong presence in Germany. He is co-author of the book "Digital erfolgreich" (Digital success) and holds a PhD in information systems from the University of St.Gallen.

Ryan Singer

37signals

Ryan Singer is Product Manager and Lead UI Designer at 37signals. Since 2003, his interface and software designs for 37signals have pushed the standards of web application usability and clarity. Ryan is an internationally recognized speaker on interface design and web software production. He lives in Chicago with his wife and two french bulldogs.

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.

Francisco Tolmasky

280 North

Francisco Tolmasky is a co-founder of 280 North and the creator of the Objective-J programming language. Before 280 North, Francisco was an early member of the iPhone team at Apple, working extensively on the Mobile Safari browser, as well as its open source WebKit backend. 280 North recently launched 280 Slides, a web based presentation program that blurs the lines between desktop and web applications.

Aarron Walter

Aarron Walter is the author of Building Findable Websites: Web Standards, SEO, and Beyond (New Riders, 2008) and the lead user experience designer for MailChimp. For more than a decade Aarron has been busy building websites for his clients, and teaching interactive design courses at colleges and universities in the US.

As a member of The Web Standards Project, Aarron leads the WaSP InterACT curriculum project, and he's a founding member of the Open Web Education Alliance, a W3C incubator group.

MailChimp

Sháá Wasmund

Smarta

An LSE graduate, Sháá has had an eclectic entrepreneurial career ranging from promoting boxer Chris Eubank's fight against Nigel Benn to working with Sir James Dyson to establish his vacuum cleaners as one of the UK's biggest brands. She helped set up deckchair.com with Sir Bob Geldof and founded mykindaplace.com which was sold to BSkyB. Sháá is an intrinsic part of the new wave of UK Entrepreneurs combining real entrepreneurial drive and experience with a genuine desire to encourage and inspire others.

Her latest venture is living proof. Smarta.com launched in January 2009 and is an innovative business platform providing free advice, networking and tools for entrepreneurs and business owners. Bringing business people together for support and inspiration, Smarta has hundreds of entrepreneur videos and bite-size guides on overcoming business challenges. Users can access free advice from business experts and find unique tools designed to take the pain out of everyday business tasks. Smarta has the support of leading UK entrepreneurs Theo Paphitis and Deborah Meaden.

Josh Williams

Gowalla

Josh Williams is CEO and co-founder of Gowalla, a mobile and Web service that gives people around the world a new way to communicate and express themselves through the everyday places and extraordinary settings they enjoy.

Prior to Gowalla, Josh founded Blinksale, one of the first online invoicing services for small businesses. Concurrently to Blinksale, Josh started Alamofire, the producer of PackRat, a pioneering collectable card game on Facebook. Previously, Josh was founder and principal at Firewheel Design from 2001-2008, a preeminent UI-design consultancy specializing in interface and icon design for desktop, mobile and web, where his clients included Microsoft, Samsung, Hewlett Packard, Thompson Reuters and Causes.

Josh is a self-taught designer and artist who has been creating online for over 15 years. Josh loves mid-century modern design, architecture, skiing, snowboarding and longboarding. He lives in Austin, Texas with his wife and two young daughters.