Speakers
New speakers are being confirmed daily. Please check back often to see the latest additions to the ETech program.
Subutai Ahmad
Subutai Ahmad brings experience in real time systems, computer vision, and learning to his leadership of the Numenta Engineering team. Prior to Numenta, Ahmad served as VP Engineering at YesVideo, Inc., and helped grow YesVideo from a three-person start-up to a leader in automated digital media authoring. YesVideo's real time video analysis systems have been deployed internationally on a variety of platforms: large-scale distributed clusters, retail minilabs, and consumer set-top DVD recorders. In 1997, he co-founded ePlanet Interactive, a spin-off from Interval Research.
Click here for more info.
Charles Armstrong
Charles Armstrong is an ethnographer turned technology entrepreneur. He studied social and political science at St. John's College Cambridge and was mentored by the eminent sociologist Lord Young of Dartington. Following a year-long study of information sharing on an island of 80 people Charles founded Trampoline Systems (www.trampolinesystems.com) to translate social mechanisms into enterprise software. Trampoline's products harness collective intelligence to pinpoint expertise, leverage relationships and relay knowledge where it's needed. The company's client list includes Raytheon Company, the UK Foreign Office and Channel 4 Television. Trampoline received a UK Government Research Award in 2004 and Oracle’s UK Partner Innovation Award for 2006. The company raised series A finance of $5.8m from the Tudor Group in March 2007.
Click here for more info.
Michael Bayne
Michael Bayne is CTO and co-founder of Three Rings, an independent maker of massively multiplayer online games and worlds. In addition to exploring ways to create computer-mediated fun, he endeavors to make it easier for others to do the same. He's also currently laboring under the foolish notion that writing piano training software will improve his playing.Click here for more info.
Arthur Benjamin
Arthur Benjamin is one of the world's fastest "lightning calculators." He is a professor of mathematics at Harvey Mudd College, and a
professional magician, frequently performing at the Magic Castle in Hollywood. In 2005, Reader's Digest called him "America's Best Math
Whiz." His most recent book is Secrets of Mental Math: The Mathemagician's Guide to Lightning Calculations and Amazing Math Tricks.
- Event: Secrets of Mental Math
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Ken Berkun
Ken Berkun is the founder and President of Labels That Talk (LTT). LTT has developed innovative technology to print audio on paper. Prior to founding LTT, Ken was a co-founder of Singingfish.com, the first, and still the best, audio/video search engine. Now residing in Hawaii, Ken spent most of his career in Seattle working in a variety of high-tech enterprises.
Click here for more info.
Scott Berkun
Scott Berkun is an author and consultant. He wrote the bestselling The Art of Project Management for O'Reilly, teaches creative thinking at the University of Washington, and writes on management and design at www.scottberkun.com. His next book, The Myths of Innovation, will be published by O'Reilly in 2007.
- Tutorial: How to Innovate on Time
- Session: The myths of Innovation
Click here for more info.
Peter Biddle
Peter Biddle was Microsoft's DVD evangelist in the mid 90's, a founder of CPTWG and the ill-fated SDMI, and the original inventor of the DarkNet. He is the father Palladium and NGSCB, and his team shipped TWC-derivative technologies in Windows Vista, including BitLocker™ Drive Encryption. Cory Doctorow is the Canada-US Fulbright Chair at USC, a DRM-hating copyfighter who has been part of several successful projects to destroy DRM standards-setting efforts, and is presently writing a book about it called SET-TOP COP: HOLLYWOOD'S WAR ON YOUR LIVING ROOM.Click here for more info.
Peter Bloom
Peter Bloom is a Managing Director at General Atlantic LLC, where he has worked since 1996. General Atlantic is a leading global private equity firm providing capital for growth companies driven by information technology and differentiated intellectual property. Founded in 1980, General Atlantic manages approximately $12 billion and invests between $800 million and $1 billion per year in growth, recapitalization and buyout opportunities worldwide. The GA portfolio currently consists of over 50 companies in primary global economic centers including the NY Stock Exchange in the U.S., Lenovo in China, Genpact in India, Saxo Bank in Europe and NET1 in South Africa.- Session: Web 2.0 and Wall Street
- Keynote: Keynote
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danah boyd
danah boyd is a doctoral candidate in the School of Information at the University of California-Berkeley and a fellow at the USC Annenberg Center for Communications. Her dissertation focuses on how youth engage in networked publics like MySpace, YouTube, Facebook, Xanga, etc. In particular, she is interested in how American teens formulate a presentation of self and negotiate socialization in mediated contexts where the audience is often unknown. This work is funded by the MacArthur Foundation as part of a broader grant on digital youth and informal learning.
danah also maintains a blog on social media called Apophenia - http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/
Click here for more info.
Ron Brinkmann
Ron Brinkmann is the author of 'The Art and Science of Digital Compositing' and has supervised work on a number of films including 'Speed', 'James and the Giant Peach' and 'Contact'. He is the designer of the Shake compositing software from Apple Computer and co-host of the VFXShow podcast. Mr. Brinkmann has lectured on the topics of visual effects and digital filmmaking in Europe, China, Australia, Japan and India.
Click here for more info.
Barry Brumitt
Barry Brumitt is a software engineer with Google, Inc. who has been working on maps-related applications since joining the Kirkland, WA office in November 2005. Prior to coming to Google, he was at Microsoft Corp for 8 years, working in both MS Games Studios and MS Research. At MGS, he was responsible for the Artificial Intelligence in Forza Motorsport, a simulation-style Xbox racing game. Previously at MSR, he worked in Ubiquitous Computing, exploring location-based services, geometric models, and multi-modal interfaces for smart environments. He received his PhD in Robotics from Carnegie Mellon in 1997. Offline, he's currently fascinated by yoga, downhill skiing, bridge, juggling, electronic music, and community building.
Click here for more info.
David Brunton
David Brunton is a lifelong hacker and entrepreneur whose ambition is The Next Big Thing. He believes in some form of Strong AI, Panpsychism, Universal Automatasim, and God, all at the same time.- Session: Deus Ex Automata
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Avi Bryant
Avi Bryant is the co-CEO of Dabble DB, a Vancouver startup focused on web-based data management and collaboration tools. He is the author and maintainer of the Seaside web application framework, and is active in the open source Squeak Smalltalk community.
- Tutorial: Applied Web Heresies
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Michael Buffington
Michael Buffington has been an entrepreneur and web application developer for over 10 years. Buffington cofounded Price.com Inc. in 1998, authored an advanced level book on Macromedia's ColdFusion, and has been developing clever web applications for companies like Xerox, Adaptive Path, Robot Coop, Values of N, and Federated Media Publishing.
Most recently, Buffington stopped being serious and has become known in the Ruby on Rails community for developing and managing the open source llor.nu multiplayer game, a highly addictive and massive game with some very simple underlying principles.
- Session: Your Web App as a Text Adventure
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Jim Bumgardner
Jim Bumgardner cowrote "Flickr Hacks" and wrote "Building Tag Clouds in PHP and
Perl" for O'Reilly, and teaches advanced Flash classes at Art Center,
in Pasadena.
Jim is a senior technical yahoo at Yahoo! Music and the creative mind behind
CoverPop.com and KrazyDad.com. An expert in graphics and music software,
Jim explores innovative and graphically novel interface ideas using
Flash, Perl,
PHP and other tools.
- Tutorial: Advanced Flash: Exploiting Flash 8
Click here for more info.
Mike Chambers
Mike Chambers has spent the last eight years building applications that target the Flash runtime. During that time, he has worked with numerous technologies including Flash, Generator, .NET, Central, Flex, and Ajax. He is currently the Principal Product Manager for developer relations for Adobe AIR. He has written and spoken extensively on Flash and Rich Internet Application development and is coauthor of the Apollo for Adobe Flex Developers Pocket Guide, Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) for JavaScript Developers Pocketguide, Flash Enabled: Flash Design and Development for Devices as well as Generator and Flash Demystified. Mike received his Masters in International Economics and European Studies from the John Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) in 1998.Click here for more info.
Lili Cheng
Lili Cheng is the Director of the Creative Systems team in Microsoft Research. Lili has been at Microsoft since 1995. Lili recently finished working on Windows Vista, where was the Director of User Experience for the Windows Division. Prior to working on Windows, Lili created the Social Computing Research team, where she researched and built projects studying identity, presence, and social networking. Her work on personal memory influenced ideas in Windows Vista, and other projects, such as the Wallop prototype, spun out of Microsoft just over a year ago as an independent startup.
Click here for more info.
Maurice Cloutier
Maurice Cloutier, the Sr. Product Manager for Project Blackbox - the world's first virtualized datacenter, has extensive experience with the productization of large, complex and integrated compute solutions. During his career at Sun, Maurice managed the venerable Sun Enterprise 10000 (E10K) server as well as successive generations of UltraSPARC III, IV, and IV+ midrange and enterprise servers. Prior to working at Sun, Maurice worked as a product manager in the Semiconductor Equipment Industry and as a Japanese Information Officer for the U.S. Government. He has a Masters degree in International Pacific Affairs - International Management from the Graduate School of International Relations and Pacific Studies at University of California, San Diego.Click here for more info.
Robert Cook
Robert Cook has spent years building computers, software and video games – and also has the rare distinction of appearing inside a video game. He was the model for one of the characters in Jordan Mechner's game “Prince of Persia”.
Cook co-founded Metaweb Technologies, Inc. in July, 2005 and serves as Executive Vice President of Product Development. At parent company Applied Minds Inc., Cook lead led the San Francisco office as Director of Knowledge Product Development.
Click here for more info.
Dick Costolo
Dick is cofounder and CEO of FeedBurner, Inc., the leading provider of media distribution and audience engagement services. Previously, he cofounded and was CEO of Spyonit.com. Spyonit was sold to 724 Solutions in September 2000. Prior to Spyonit, Dick cofounded Burning Door Networked Media, a web design and development consulting company. Burning Door was acquired by Digital Knowledge Assets in October 1996. Prior to Burning Door, Dick was at Andersen Consulting for 8 years, where his roles included Senior Manager, Strategy, Application Products Group and Senior Manager, Application Infrastructure, Eagle Advanced Technology Group.
- Session: 1/2 Baked
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Mike Culver
Mike Culver joined the Developer Relations Group of Amazon Web Services in May, 2006.Mike brings with him fifteen years of technology leadership experience, including at companies such as Microsoft. In addition Mr. Culver has a strong background running an IT organization, with over a decade of experience in the Electrical Wholesale Distribution industry. As a Web Services Evangelist at Amazon, he helps developers take advantage of disruptive technologies that are going to change the way we think about computer applications, and the way that businesses compete.- Session: Web Scale Computing
Click here for more info.
John Curlander
Dr. John C. Curlander is internationally recognized for his work in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) systems and data processing. His research efforts have led to many of the operational techniques currently used in today’s SAR processors. Dr. Curlander worked at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena for many years where he became responsible for all SAR ground system activities and space borne SAR programs. In 1992, Dr. Curlander accepted the position of President and CEO of Vexcel Corporation in Boulder, Colorado.
- Session: The Making of Virtual Earth
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Doug Cutting
Doug Cutting has worked on search technology for 20 years. This includes five years at Xerox PARC, three years at Apple, and over four years at Excite. In 1998 he wrote Lucene, an open-source search library which became an Apache project in 2001. In 2003 he founded Nutch, an open-source web search application, and in 2006 he started Hadoop, an open-source distributed-computing framework, both at Apache. Doug currently works for Yahoo!.
- Session: Introduction to Hadoop
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Alex Daley
Alex Daley is Senior Product Manager for Microsoft Live Labs. Daley first joined Microsoft in June 2004, serving as an academic relations manager working with top universities interested in doing research or teaching with Microsoft® development technologies. Following that, Daley was product manager and technical evangelist for Microsoft Virtual Earth, where he worked to enable developers and businesses to build location-enabled applications on the Microsoft Virtual Earth platform, and to provide advertisers with solutions to take advantage of the growing local and place search markets.Click here for more info.
Jacob DeHart
Jacob DeHart, 25, is a Chicago-based entrepreneur and the Chief Techical Officer of skinnyCorp (www.skinnycorp.com ). Over the past 7 years, DeHart and partners Jake Nickell and Jeffrey Kalmikoff have created many community-based websites - most notably Threadless, Naked & Angry and ExtraTasty. He has taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and lectured at distinguished institutions such as MIT, Parsons School of Design, UCLA and the University of Copenhagen. Most recently, Jacob was honored as one of Crain's Chicago Business "40 under 40".
Click here for more info.
Chad Dickerson
Chad Dickerson is Sr. Director of the Yahoo! Developer Network (http://developer.yahoo.com/). The Yahoo! Developer Network is the central source for developers to leverage the Yahoo! platform in their own applications and includes web services and SDKs that allow developers to build software and services that leverage Yahoo's platform excellence, highly-scalable infrastructure, and leadership position in social media. In his role, Chad oversees the development and evangelism of the Yahoo! technology platform, including services like Yahoo! Messenger, del.icio.us, Flickr, Yahoo! Maps, Yahoo! Music, Yahoo! Search, Yahoo! Shopping, and Upcoming.org.
- Keynote: Big Company Hacks at Yahoo!
Click here for more info.
Cory Doctorow
Cory Doctorow (craphound.com) is a science fiction novelist, blogger and technology activist. He is the co-editor of the popular weblog Boing Boing (boingboing.net), and a contributor to Wired, Popular Science, Make, the New York Times, and many other newspapers, magazines and websites. He was formerly Director of European Affairs for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (eff.org), a non-profit civil liberties group that defends freedom in technology law, policy, standards and
treaties. Presently, he serves as the Fulbright Chair at the Annenberg Center for Public Diplomacy at the University of Southern California.
Click here for more info.
Rael Dornfest
Rael Dornfest is Founder and CEO of Portland, Oregon-based Values of n. Rael leads the Values of n charge with passion, unearthly creativity, and a repertoire of puns and jokes — some of which are actually good.
Prior to founding Values of n, he was O'Reilly's Chief Technical Officer, program chair for the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, series editor of the bestselling Hacks book series, and instigator of O'Reilly's Rough Cuts early access program. He built Meerkat, the first web-based feed aggregator, was champion and co-author of the RSS 1.0 specification, and has written and contributed to six O'Reilly books.
Rael's programmatic pride and joy is the nimble, open source blogging application Blosxom, the principles of which you'll find in the Values of n philosophy and embodied in Stikkit: Little yellow notes that think.
- Keynote: Announcements
- Keynote: Announcements
- Event: ETech Opening Salvos
- Keynote: Welcome and Announcements
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James A. Duncan
James Duncan is Fotango’s Evangelist and spends
a lot of his time attempting to improve software and save us from "yak-shaving". He has been active in the open source community for over 10 years and a speaker at conferences for 5. In his spare time he tries to become proficient at all forms of DIY. This effort has, thus far, been futile.
- Session: JavaScript: It's Happening All Over Again!
- Session: Commoditisation of IT and What the Future Holds
Click here for more info.
Esther Dyson
Esther's primary activity is investing in
start-ups and guiding many of them as a board
member. Her board seats include Boxbe, CVO Group,
Eventful, Evernote, IBS Group (Russia, advisory
board), Meetup, Midentity (UK), NewspaperDirect,
Yandex (Russia)äand WPP Group (not a start-up).
As a two-time weightless flyer, she is also
active in the commercial space/airline start-up
world. She will run the third annual Flight
School conference, on the new air-taxi market,
this June 20 to 22 in Aspen, CO. She also blogs
occasionally for the Huffington Post. In both
her investments and her nonprofit activities, she
has always been concerned with the impact of
information (technology) on business and society.
Click here for more info.
Lee Felsenstein
Lee has been designing electronic products for over 35 years and has created several pioneering designs in the personal computer industry. He has won awards from the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Tech Museum of Innovation for his groundbreaking work in several fields. He holds 12 patents.
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Eric Freeman
Eric Freeman is currently Vice President of Technology at Disney Online. He's also the co-author of two bestselling titles (Head First Design Patterns and Head First HTML & CSS) and previously the co-director of the Head First series at O'Reilly Media. Eric holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Yale University and Masters degrees from Yale and Indiana University. Eric lives in Los Angeles.
Click here for more info.
Seth Goldstein
Seth is the Co-Founder & CEO of SocialMedia.com
He is also an angel advisor to a number of Web services companies such as Aggregate Knowledge, Lijit and Downfly. He was the first investor in Web 2.0 pioneer del.icio.us (now part of Yahoo!)
Click here for more info.
Adam Greenfield
Adam is an internationally-recognized writer and user-experience consultant. Before starting his current practice, Adam was lead information architect for Razorfish in Tokyo; he's also been, at various points, a rock critic for SPIN, a medic at the Berkeley Free Clinic, and a PSYOP sergeant in the US Army's Special Operations Command.
Click here for more info.
Brad Greenlee
Brad Greenlee is a developer at Wesabe, a personal finance startup, and has been developing web applications since 1995. He is a startup junkie, having been a co-founder or key architect/developer at four startups. His first startup experience was co-founding iSYS, one of Hungary's first ISPs. Later, Brad was critical to the early success of iSyndicate, a content aggregator, and served as CTO of Triporama, a group travel planning startup. Brad has a degree in Computer Science from the University of Michigan.
Click here for more info.
John Hagel
John Hagel is an independent management consultant and author. He works with senior management of large enterprises around the world to shape business strategies and improve business performance. His experience includes senior management positions in technology businesses and sixteen years as a consultant with McKinsey & Co. He continues to serve as Senior Advisor to McKinsey & Co.
Click here for more info.
Jeff Hawkins
Jeff Hawkins is best known as co-founder of two companies, Palm and Handspring, and as the architect of many computing products such as the PalmPilot and Treo smartphone. Throughout his life Jeff has also had a deep interest in neuroscience and theories of the neocortex. His interest in the brain led him to create the non-profit Redwood Neuroscience Institute (RNI), a scientific institute focused on understanding how the human neocortex processes information. While at RNI, Hawkins developed a theory of neocortex which appeared in his 2002 book, On Intelligence. With the team of Dileep George and Donna Dubinsky, Hawkins founded Numenta in 2005 to develop a technology platform derived from his theory.
- Session: The Numenta Platform for Intelligent Computing
- Keynote: Why Can’t a Computer Be More Like a Brain? How a New Theory of Neocortex Will Lead to Truly Intelligent Machines
Click here for more info.
Rob Hayes
Rob joined First Round Capital in 2006. Rob came to First Round Capital from Omidyar Network where he was their first venture investor. He led most of Omidyar Network's initial venture capital deals and later built and ran the technology investing group.
Prior to joining Omidyar Network in 2004, Rob was at Palm where he started up their corporate venture fund. While in that role he also managed the strategy effort around Palm OS that led to the spinout of PalmSource. Rob started at Palm as product manager for the initial device-independent releases of Palm OS. During this
time, Rob was responsible for the versions of Palm OS on dozens of devices including the initial Treo products.
- Session: 1/2 Baked
Click here for more info.
Marc Hedlund
Marc Hedlund is Chief Product Officer at Wesabe, a personal finance startup. (He blogs at "Wheaties for Your Wallet": http://www.wesabe.com/blog/.) Before starting Wesabe, Marc was an entrepreneur-in-residence at O'Reilly Media. Prior to that, he was VP of Engineering at Sana Security; co-founder and CEO of Popular Power, a distributed computing startup; and founder and general manager of Lucas Online, the internet subsidiary of Lucasfilm, Ltd. During his early career, Marc was Director of Engineering at Organic Online, and was CTO at Webstorm, where he wrote one of the Internet's first shopping cart applications in 1994. He is a graduate of Reed College.
- Tutorial: Coder to Co-Founder: Entrepreneuring for Geeks
- Session: Super Ninja Privacy Techniques for Web App Developers
Click here for more info.
Forrest Higgs
Dr. Forrest Higgs has previously held posts at organisations such as the American Institute of Architects, den Svenska Byggforskningsrådet, the South African CSIR and the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He was the founding editor of the Journal of Energy and Buildings. Dr. Higgs is currently CEO at Brosis Innovations and participates in the RepRap Project.Click here for more info.
David Hindman
David Hindman is a musician and alternative video game interfacer. Since obtaining is M.M. from Yale University in classical guitar performance, David has turned his attention to technology and is exploring ways of blending digital media with traditional art forms. He recently graduated from ITP at NYU where he developed methods for controlling video games with musical instruments. He is co-founder of the Modal Kombat guitar duo, which has recently performed guitar-controlled video game battles in New York, Paris, and Los Angeles
- Session: Sonic Body Pong
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David Hornik
David is a General Partner with August Capital. He invests broadly in information technology companies, with a focus on consumer facing software and services, enterprise applications and infrastructure software. Prior to joining August Capital, David was an intellectual property and corporate attorney at Venture Law Group, Cravath Swaine & Moore, and Perkins Coie LLP. David teaches business and law at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business and writes about the venture capital industry in VentureBlog (www.ventureblog.com).
- Session: 1/2 Baked
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Andrew Huang
Andrew "bunnie" Huang is a nocturnal hacker and the hardware lead; his responsibilities include the architecture, design and production of the chumby's electronics, as well as writing drivers for and maintaining the Linux kernel on the chumby. With a PhD in EE from MIT, he has completed several major projects, ranging from hacking the Xbox (and writing the eponymous book), to designing the world's first fully-integrated photonic-silicon chips running at 10 Gbps with Luxtera, Inc., to building some of the first prototype hardware for silicon nanowire device research with Caltech.
Click here for more info.
Tara Hunt
Celebrated as the 'Marketer 2.0 ', Tara has been infusing the marketing world with her roguish style - working in a plethora of industries, from non-profit to consumer beverages to technology - for the past 8 years. Not familiar with her casual-styled musings at HorsePigCow? Well, Tara's current project, Pinko Marketing, is a good place to start to get an idea of her marketing style. The basis? You need to be part of the community you serve. This goes beyond the conversation and into building deep and real relationships with your community of customers. Speaking of community, Tara is a community-based movement evangelist, spending all of her free time on Barcamp, Coworking and Winecamp. She is also a supporter of the Open Source movement, the EFF, Creative Commons and the Intelligrid.
Click here for more info.
William H. Janeway
A senior adviser at Warburg Pincus, Bill's experience encompasses over thirty years of practical finance in investment banking and venture capital. On joining Warburg Pincus in 1988, he initiated and managed implementation of the investment strategy for Information Technology that established the firm as a global leader in the domain, including funding from start-up such prominent providers of infrastructure software as BEA Systems and VERITAS Software. Bill is a member of the Board of Directors of BEA Systems, Inc., Fortent, O'Reilly Media Inc., Nuance, Inc., NYFIX, Inc., and Wall Street Systems, Inc.
- Keynote: Keynote
- Session: Web 2.0 and Wall Street
Click here for more info.
Nebojsa Jojic
Nebojsa Jojic is a senior researcher at Microsoft Research, Redmond, where he is conducting research in the areas of machine learning, computational biology, computer vision and signal processing. His main interests are in modeling structure of natural signals, such as images, audio recordings, DNA sequences, etc. The applications of the algorithms for extracting such models from data are diverse: from personal media summarization and browsing tools to rational HIV vaccine design.
Click here for more info.
Jeff Jonas
Jeff Jonas is chief scientist of the IBM Entity Analytic Solutions group and an IBM Distinguished Engineer. In these capacities, he is responsible for shaping the overall technical strategy of next generation identity analytics and the use of this new capability in the overall IBM products. Today, Jonas applies his real world and hands on experience in software design and development to drive technology innovations while delivering higher levels of privacy and civil liberties protections.
- Session: Advanced Analytics in the Anonymized Data Space
- Keynote: Keynote
- Session: From Manufacturing to The Attention Economy
Click here for more info.
Jeffrey Kalmikoff
Jeffrey Kalmikoff is your average 27-year-old tattooed metal-head with an eye for design and nose for tomfoolery. Any time not spent with his fiancé and his small family of cats (named Murder, Mick Mars and Alabama) is spent as partner and Chief Creative Officer of the Chicago-based, community-business-centric skinnyCorp.
The focus of his work is design and strategy for skinnyCorp's numerous community-based web projects. These projects range in scale from Threadless, a multi-million dollar tee shirt business and ongoing design competition which sells more than 90,000 tees per month and has over 500,000 registered users, to YayHooray, a just-for-fun design and technology community site.
His work has been published numerous times, and he has had the pleasure of speaking for students and peers all over the world from MIT to the University of Copenhagen to CNN to NPR.
Click here for more info.
Bill Katz
Bill Katz is a Senior Scientist in the Dept. of Bioengineering at Stanford University. He works with the Stanford Cardiovascular Biomechanics Lab to develop open source simulation software. Aside from his academic research, Katz is developing Writertopia, a Ruby on Rails web app for the writing community. His past work includes software for neurosurgery and cancer radiotherapy, and a sci-fi short story that won grand prize in the 2003 Writers of the Future contest. He studied biology and computer science at Stanford and received an M.D. and a Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering from the University of Virginia.Click here for more info.
Paul Kedrosky
Dr. Kedrosky is a venture capitalist, media personality, and entrepreneur. He is a sought-after speaker; an analyst for CNBC television; a columnist for TheStreet/RealMoney; the editor of Infectious Greed, one of the best known business blogs on the Internet; and he is frequently quoted in major publications around the world.
Click here for more info.
Andy Kessler
Andy Kessler is a bestselling author, most recently of The End of Medicine: How Silicon Valley (and Naked Mice) Will Reboot Your Doctor. After a BSEE from Cornell and MSEE from Illinois, he worked at Bell Labs and then on Wall Street for almost 20 years, as an analyst, investment banker, venture capitalist and hedge fund manager. Andy has written for the Wall Street Journal op-ed page, Forbes, Wired, The Weekly Standard and various websites and has appeared on CNBC, CNN, Fox News and Dateline NBC.
- Session: Silicon is Invading Medicine
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Amy Jo Kim
Amy Jo "AJ" Kim is an internationally known designer of networked games and gaming communities. Her clients include Electronic Arts, eBay, Limelife, Digital Chocolate, MTV, Square/Enix, and Yahoo! She's also the author of Community Building on the Web, a design handbook for networked communities.
Click here for more info.
Spencer Kiser
Spencer Kiser is an interactive audio enthusiast, exploring the role that sound can play as a tool in the interactive designer's tool chest. His recent projects include a synesthetic turntable that "plays" colors, an audio calendar for the visually impaired, a web-based oral story map and an audio version of the video game pong played in real space. He has presented his work at O'Reilly's Emerging Technology Conference and the Emerging Telephony Conference, and has spoken at the Grassroots Media Conference. He is currently Special Projects Technologist at Audio Video & Controls, an AV design consultancy in New York City.- Session: Sonic Body Pong
Click here for more info.
Raph Koster
Raph Koster is the President of Areae, Inc, a developer of online worlds. A
professional game designer and frequent writer on issues of virtual world
design, Raph was the lead designer on the seminal online world ULTIMA
ONLINE, which first brought online worlds to the mass market. Until March
2006 he was Chief Creative Officer for Sony Online Entertainment, makers of
EVERQUEST, where he previously led the design of STAR WARS GALAXIES. His
essays and writings on online world design include widely reprinted and
influential pieces such as "Declaring the Rights of Players", "The Laws of
Online World Design", and "A Story About a Tree" on his website. His book A THEORY OF FUN FOR GAME
DESIGN was published in 2004 by Paraglyph Press and is used in several
university courses as study material.
- Keynote: The Core of Fun
Click here for more info.
Edward Kozel
Prior to joining Skyrider, Mr. Kozel served a Managing Director of Integrated Finance, Ltd., a private advisory services firm and spent five years as Managing Member of Open Range LLC., a private venture firm. Mr. Kozel, an early employee at Cisco Systems, helped to grow the company into a multinational technology leader as its Chief Technology Officer and Senior Vice President of Business Development.
Click here for more info.
Mike Kuniavsky
Mike Kuniavsky researches, designs and writes about people's experiences at the intersection of technology and everyday life. Companies and universities around the world use his 2003 book, "Observing the User Experience," to understand and teach techniques that bring the design of products closer to the people who use them. His next book, "Smart Things," expected in 2007 from Elsevier, will discuss user experience design for mobile devices and ubiquitous computing.
- Keynote: The Coming Age of Magic
Click here for more info.
Tessa Lau
Tessa Lau is a research staff member at IBM's Almaden Research Center in San Jose, CA. Her work centers on intelligent user interfaces, a cross-disciplinary field that sits at the intersection of artificial intelligence and human-computer interaction. Her research focuses on programming by demonstration, whose goal is to enable regular end users to automate routine tasks simply by demonstrating to the computer what it should do. She recently served as Program Co-chair of IUI 2007, the international conference on intelligent user interfaces. Tessa completed her PhD at the University of Washington in 2001, spent four years at IBM's T.J. Watson Research Center just north of New York City, and moved to California in late 2005 to be closer to family and friends. Outside of work, Tessa pursues a variety of interests including knitting, gardening, and flying remote-controlled model airplanes.Click here for more info.
Tom Loosemore
Tom Loosemore is a senior manager at BBC New Media. Some of his recent projects including a 7-day record-everything DVR, the million-strong BBC Programme Catalogue (http://open.bbc.co.uk/catalogue) and BBC Macro, an online testbed containing tens of thousands of BBC TV shows. He is currently leading of a review of the BBC's Web portfolio, in the light of all this 2.0 malarkey.Click here for more info.
Don MacAskill
Don MacAskill is the co-founder, CEO, and Chief Geek at SmugMug. Back in the mists of time, Don built the network that powered eBay, Hotmail, and fatbrain. He lost his mind and spent an exhilirating few years making video games, but found it again with SmugMug. With no outside investment, he bootstrapped SmugMug into a business that's profitable and growing - but most of all, fun!Click here for more info.
Matt MacLaurin
Matt Maclaurin has been an entrepreneur, programmer, and visual effects artist. He was a member of the original Newton team at Apple, brought the Myst world in realtime 3d for Cyan, helped design Vista and search for Microsoft, and is currently at Microsoft Research exploring ways to help everyone access the creative power of the computer.
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Roger Magoulas
Roger Magoulas is the director of market research at O'Reilly Media, Inc. Magoulas runs a team building an open source analysis infrastucture providing analysis services, including technology trend analysis, to business decision makers at O'Reilly and beyond. In previous incarnations, Magoulas has designed and implemented data warehouse projects for organizations ranging from the San Francisco Opera to the Alberta Motor Club.- Session: Backing Up Instinct with the Numbers
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Dave McClure
Dave McClure has been geeking out in Silicon Valley for over fifteen years as a software developer, entrepreneur, startup advisor, angel investor, and internet marketing nerd. In the early 90's Dave was a database consultant for several evil empires, including Microsoft and Intel.
- Session: 1/2 Baked
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Adrian McDermott
Mr. McDermott is the Vice President of Engineering for BEA’s Business Interaction Division, based in San Francisco California. He is responsible for the AquaLogic User Interaction family of products and joined BEA as part of the recent Plumtree Software acquisition. Mr. McDermott was the first engineer hired by Plumtree in early 1997 and worked on the architecture and development of every Plumtree Portal product version. Prior to Plumtree he worked as an itinerant software consultant in London, Hong Kong, Sydney and Guam.
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Jane McGonigal
Jane McGonigal is a game designer and games researcher, specializing in massively collaborative play. Recently named by MIT Technology Review as one of the top 35 young innovators changing the world through technology, Jane focuses on improving quality of life through reality-based gaming. She is the founder of the experimental design project Avant Game (Cruel 2 B Kind, Ministry of Reshelving), a former lead designer for 42 Entertainment (I Love Bees, Tombstone Hold ‘Em), and the resident game designer with the Institute for the Future. She has a Ph.D. in performance studies from the University of California at Berkeley.
- Keynote: Creating Alternate Realities
- Event: Werewolf
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Rich Miller
Rich Miller is the founder and editor of Data Center Knowledge,
providing comprehensive news and analysis about the data center industry and
its growing importance in the Internet economy. Rich has been tracking the
data center and web hosting sectors since 2000, when he began writing for
the web after many years as an award-winning prnt journalist and editor at
newspapers in his home state of New Jersey. Rich has written extensively on
hosting trends, domain names, e-commerce (especially SSL certificates) and
Internet security in his work as an analyst with Netcraft Ltd.
Click here for more info.
Tikva Morowati
Tikva Morowati: artist, researcher, designer. Concentrated on the effects of the Internet and mobile devices on social behavior and interaction, her work integrates an array media including video, sound,
electronic circuitry, wearables, telephony, and the web.
In May she will complete her Master's degree at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP), where she has worked on creating interactive experiences for the non-virtual world.
- Session: Sonic Body Pong
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Duane Nickull
Speaker biography coming soon.Click here for more info.
Scott Nielsen
Speaker biography coming soon.Click here for more info.
Quinn Norton
Quinn Norton is a San Francisco-based journalist, photographer and blogger covering hacker culture, body modification, radical copyright, and killer robots. Her work has appeared in Wired News, O'Reilly Network, the Irish Times, the UK Guardian, Make Magazine, and more. According to Wikipedia, she suffers from an irrational fear of sixth floors, collects versions of Gloria Gaynor's song I Will Survive and had a magnet implanted in the tip of her ring finger. Only one of these is a lie.- Session: Body Hacking
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Tim O'Reilly
Tim O'Reilly is founder and CEO of O'Reilly Media, Inc., thought by many to be the best computer book publisher in the world. In addition to publishing pioneering books like Ed Krol's The Whole Internet User's Guide & Catalog (selected by the New York Public Library as one of the most significant books of the twentieth century), O'Reilly has also been a pioneer in the popularization of the Internet. O'Reilly's Global Network Navigator site (GNN, which was sold to America Online in September 1995) was the first Web portal and the first true commercial site on the World Wide Web.
- Event: The O'Reilly Radar
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Chris Pendleton
Chris Pendleton is the Technical Evangelist for Microsoft Virtual Earth®. Chris first joined Microsoft in 2002 leading a Professional Services organization focused on the technical acquisition integration of Vicinity Corporation migrating over 500 customer applications to Microsoft .Net Web Services. Following that, Chris focused on technical sales as the Technology Specialist for Virtual Earth and MapPoint centered on B2B integration of Microsoft mapping platforms for the enterprise customer base.- Session: Microsoft Virtual Earth
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Alec Proudfoot
Alec was a member of the engineering team at AeroVironment that created the GM Impact prototype. The Impact entered production as the GM EV1, the first modern high power AC induction electric vehicle. Alec has followed the alternative fuel vehicle scene as an engineer, a consumer, and journalist -- some of his footage appeared in the recent documentary film "Who Killed the Electric Car." In addition to his alternative fuel vehicle work, Alec has a diverse engineering career, spanning fields from aviation to medical devices to telecommunications, and has also worked as a professional helicopter pilot. Currently Alec is an engineering manager at Google, working on imaging related applications for projects including Google Book Search and Google Maps. In his "20% time," Alec is advising Google's philanthropy organization on energy and transportation issues.
- Session: Energy Innovation
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Allison Randal
Allison Randal is co-chair of O'Reilly's Open Source Convention and Energy Innovation Conference. Her first geek career was as a research linguist in eastern Africa. But eventually her love of coding drew her away from natural languages to artificial ones. Allison is the architect of Parrot, on the board of directors of The Perl Foundation, and founder and president of Onyx Neon. She co-authored Perl 6 and Parrot Essentials, and has edited various O'Reilly books on dynamic languages including Perl Hacks and Programming PHP.
- Session: Energy Innovation
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Seth Raphael
Seth Raphael, of the MIT Media Lab, studies the emotion of wonder. Straddling the world of academia and magic, he is using technology to discover what physiological and cognitive effects the emotion of wonder has. He has a degree in "Technology and the future of magic" from Hampshire College.
- Session: Sufficiently Advanced Magic
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Anthony Ravitz
Anthony Ravitz joined Google's Real Estate and Workplace Services team
just over a year ago. He has worked extensively on the installation
of Google's solar photovoltaic system as well as numerous other
planning and construction projects at the company's headquarters.
Before joining
Google, Anthony worked in fundraising at Stanford University, where he
had previously earned his bachelor's degree in civil engineering.
- Keynote: TBD
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Melanie Rieback
Melanie Rieback is a Ph.D. student in Computer Systems at the Vrije
Universiteit in Amsterdam, where she is supervised by Prof. Andrew
Tanenbaum. Melanie's research concerns the security and privacy of Radio
Frequency Identification (RFID) technology, and she leads
multidisciplinary research teams on RFID privacy management (RFID
Guardian) and RFID security (RFID Malware) projects. Melanie's recent work
has won several awards, and attracted worldwide attention, appearing in
the New York Times, Washington Post, Reuters, UPI, Computerworld, CNN,
BBC, MSNBC, and many other print, broadcast, and online news outlets.
Click here for more info.
Kevin Roche
Kevin Roche is an advisory engineer/scientist in IBM Almaden's Magnetoelectronics and Spintronics group. An expert in ultra-high-vacuum systems and thin-film deposition, data acquisition and laboratory automation, Roche is a key member of the team that designs and builds the automated deposition and experimental apparatus that has made the group so productive. The IBM Research Division has recognized his contributions with an Outstanding Contribution Award (1992) and an Outstanding Technical Achievement Award (1999).
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Pasha Sadri
Pasha Sadri is a Principal Software Engineer in the Advanced Development Division at Yahoo! He holds a B.Sc. in Mechanical Engineering from UC San Diego.- Session: Pipes: A Tool for Remixing the Web
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Amit Sharma
Speaker biography coming soon.Click here for more info.
Mike Shaver
Mike Shaver is a co-founder of the Mozilla project, and leads the Mozilla Corporation's work to support the developer ecosystem that has grown up around Firefox and Mozilla technologies. A veteran of open source development, Mike has worked on code at virtually every level of the open source application stack, ranging from the Linux kernel and Lustre clustered filesystem to Mozilla's Gecko layout engine and even, when he was younger and didn't know better, some CORBA infrastructure.
- Session: A Manifesto for Web Innovation?
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Kathy Sierra
Kathy Sierra is the author of Creating Passionate Users, and has been interested in the brain and artificial intelligence since her days as a game developer (Virgin, Amblin', MGM). She is the co-creator of the bestselling brain-friendly Head First series (winner of the Jolt Software Development award in 2004).
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Richard Sprague
Richard is the Principal Group Program Manager of Microsoft’s Speech Components Group (SCG). Recent SCG work includes producing eight languages of speech recognition (SR) integrated into Windows Vista. Richard has been with Microsoft since 1997, when his previous employer WebTV was acquired by Microsoft.Click here for more info.
Mike Stenhouse
Mike spent several years doing the rounds in various London web agencies as a web standards and accessibility specialist, working for clients including Virgin, the BBC, the Greater London Assembly, PriceWaterhouse Coopers, BusinessLink and Red Bull. In pursuit of a broader interest in how and why people use the web Mike settled into User Experience, helping to conceive and implement effective and usable interfaces for web applications.
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Bill Tancer
A self-confessed data geek, Bill Tancer is the general manager of global research at Hitwise, the world’s leading online competitive intelligence services. Tancer and his team of analysts are widely quoted throughout the industry on the latest Internet trends. He appears as a frequent guest on CNBC, has been quoted in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, the Washington Post and USAToday on topics ranging from the state of e-commerce to predicting American Idol winners using search term research. Tancer also writes a weekly column for Time magazine (Time.com) entitled "The Science of Search."
- Session: Backing Up Instinct with the Numbers
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Jonathan Trevor
Jonathan Trevor works in the Advanced Development Division at Yahoo!, where he gets to improve, innovate, and create Yahoo! applications. Prior to Yahoo! he was a senior research scientist at FX Palo Alto Laboratory, where he worked on ubiquitous systems, computer-supported cooperative work and human computer interaction. He received a PhD in computer science from the University of Lancaster, UK.- Session: Pipes: A Tool for Remixing the Web
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Werner Vogels
Dr. Werner Vogels is Vice President & Chief Technology Officer at Amazon.com where he is responsible for driving the company’s technology vision, which is to continuously enhance the innovation on behalf of Amazon’s customers at a global scale.
Prior to joining Amazon, he worked as a research scientist at Cornell University where he was a principal investigator in several research projects that target the scalability and robustness of mission-critical enterprise computing systems.
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Brian Warshawsky
Brian Warshawsky, VP of Operations, Potenco Inc is an engineer and operations manager with experience in fast growth high volume consumer electronics manufacturing. Brian was an early member of the Apple iPod operations team, and was the operations lead for the development and introduction of the iPod mini. Brian went on to manage the introduction of a number iPod products and manufacturing processes, and was responsible for the evaluation and bring up of new production facilities in China and Europe. Brian earned a M.S. from MIT in Materials Engineering, and worked at startups in Boston and San Francisco prior to joining Apple. Brian completed his undergraduate work at Brown University.
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Matt Webb
Matt Webb is a principal of the creative design consultancy Schulze and Webb where his work has included material prototyping for Nokia, Web strategy for the BBC, and exploration into the future uses of RFID. S&W works in near-term product R&D and, as embodied in the USB puppet Availabot, has a special focus on the social life of stuff. Matt speaks on interaction design and technology, is co-author of Mind Hacks, cognitive psychology for a general audience, and builds polite social software and Web toys. He can be found at Interconnected and in London.
- Keynote: From Pixels to Plastic
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