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James Adam
James is a Ruby developer for Reevoo, and has been developing using Ruby since 2001. He is one of the primary instigators of the London Ruby User Group, and has presented to Ruby and Rails developers in Vancouver, London, Santa Clara and Portland. He's been an active member of the Rails community since its inception, and is the developer behind the Engines plugin. He's also author of the "Rails Plugins" book. He pretends not to have a blog at interblah.net
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Relly Annett-Baker
Relly Annett-Baker lives in Brighton with her husband, Paul Annett, and their two-year-old son. As a result she thrives on the sea air and can be guaranteed to stand on Lego at least once a day. As well as being a copywriter, she is employed as live-in domestic staff by two cats who often supervise her typing and make editorial suggestions such as 'I think it's dinner time'. When not being purred into submission she writes copy and content for clients, magazine articles for titles as diverse as .net magazine and Scrapbook Inspirations and is currently writing a children's novel.
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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 many of AOL's consumer facing desktop, web, and mobile products. A published author and California native, Edwin is based out of AOL's Silicon Valley office. When he's not at work, Edwin is involved in wildlife conservation and likes to spend time with big cats.
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Jeremy Baines
Jeremy is the Creative director and a founding partner at Howard Baines, a web strategy design and development agency based in London, whose clients include Reuters and Dow Jones and who have been mentioned recently in BBC News, Guardian, TechCrunch and others. Jeremy is also a entrepreneur and co-founder of boxedup.com, an online shopping tool and co-creator of AlertThingy, a desktop Adobe AIR application which went from concept to 20,000 users in just 4 weeks. A member of the prestigious ISTD (International Society of Typographic Design), Jeremy has lead creative projects for clients ranging from web start-ups to FTSE 100 companies.
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Jeff Barr
Jeff Barr is focused on furthering awareness among software developers of the opportunity to innovate and build businesses using Amazon Web Services. Launched in July 2002, Amazon Web Services exposes Amazon.com technology and product data that enables developers to build innovative and entrepreneurial applications on their own. Barr meets regularly with developers in the U.S. and internationally to introduce Amazon Web Services and to help them build businesses and applications with the program’s services. He joined Amazon in August 2002 as a Senior Software Developer on the Associates team. Barr has a longstanding interest in Web services and programmatic information interchange. He has held development and management positions at KnowNow, eByz, Akopia, and Microsoft, and was a co-founder of Visix Software.
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Gavin Bell
Gavin designs web applications and social software for the Nature Publishing Group. Large scale web applications covering identity, on-demand media and social software have been the main focus of his work. Since the early 90s he has worked in academia, advertising, publishing and developed multimedia software. He is writing a forthcoming book on social web applications for O'Reilly Media Inc. He lives in London with his wife and son. He keeps track of the world on take one onion and you can keep track of him on gavinbell.com were he generally avoids the third person.
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Matt Biddulph
Matt Biddulph is the nomadic CTO of Dopplr, the social network for intelligent travellers. He started out in 1994 building search engines on CD-ROM, and now specialises in digital media, social software and putting data on the web. In past lives he was a creative technologist for hire, working with companies like Nature, Joost and the BBC to bring cutting-edge technologies into the mainstream.
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Tim Bray
Tim Bray managed the Oxford English Dictionary project at the University of Waterloo in 1987-1989, co-founded Open Text Corporation (Nasdaq:OTEX) in 1989, launched one of the first public web search engines in 1995, co-invented XML 1.0 and co-edited "Namespaces in XML" between 1996 and 1999, served as a Tim Berners-Lee appointee on the W3C Technical Architecture Group in 2002-2004. Currently, he is a Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems where he serves as Director of Web Technologies. He publishes a popular weblog recently shut down the IETF Atompub Working Group after three years of co-chairing it through the production of RFCs 4287 and 5023. Recently, he has been working on issues around modern programming frameworks like Django and Rails, and problems of many-core computing.
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Mike Butcher
TechCrunch UK & Ireland is edited by Mike Butcher. Mike has written for UK national newspapers including the The Financial Times, The Guardian, The Times and magazines including The New Statesman. He is a former editor of New Media Age magazine, the leading new media weekly in the UK, and The Industry Standard Europe and he has launched or re-launched several media web sites. In 2000 he was nominated as NetMedia’s European Internet Journalist of the Year. In 2004 he was voted ‘One of the 100 Innovators of the UK Internet Decade’ by GfK NOP, the fourth-largest custom research business in the world. In July 2008 Mike was put at No. 47 out of the Top 100 people in London’s creative industry the UK by The Independent newspaper and The Hospital Club. He has appeared on BBC News, Sky News, Channel 4 and Bloomberg, commenting on technology and new media. In August 2008 TechCrunch UK was named the best “Web 2.0 and business blog” in the UK, by the readers of Computer Weekly magazine.
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Jason Calacanis
Jason McCabe Calacanis is the founder and CEO of Mahalo.com, a human-powered search engine. Prior to Mahalo.com's launch in May, 2007, he was an "Entrepreneur in Action" at Sequoia Capital, a position he held since December 2006. Jason co-founded and was the CEO of Weblogs, Inc., a network of popular weblogs that was sold to AOL in November 2005. Upon joining AOL, he was appointed senior vice president. In addition, he was named general manager of AOL's Netscape. Prior to forming Weblogs Inc., Jason was the founder of Rising Tide Studios, which sold its flagship publication to Dow Jones.
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Suw Charman
Suw Charman-Anderson is a social software expert specialising in the use of blogs wikis, and other Web 2.0 tools in business. She's worked with British and American companies - in the tech, pharma, travel, media, financial and public relations sectors - to help them understand how social software can be used both behind the firewall and for customer communications. Suw worked as a freelance web designer and project manager from 1998 to 2002, designing websites and intranet sites for companies such as PricewaterhouseCoopers and Hutchison3G (now 3). She then ran her own internet start-up for two years before turning her passion for blogging into a successful consultancy.
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Blaine Cook
Blaine Cook is a developer of fine internet software and evangelist for the open web. While at Twitter he created OAuth, experimented with federating social networks, and taught whales to fly. Before that, he cut his Ruby and Rails teeth building Odeo, and helped move non-profits online. Most recently, he has helped Yahoo! Brickhouse's Fire Eagle soar to new heights. A native of Vancouver, BC, he now lives north of Belfast, NI by way of San Francisco.
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Rufus Evison
Rufus Evison has been in Web Analytics since 1996 and has been a C level executive of such web related companies as Clickstream Technologies, Global Diagnostics and Green Cathedral. On a technical note he was the creator of the first hybrid mechanism for data gathering as well as what was possibly the earliest of the “if you are buying this you might also like that” cross-sell engines. Currently Evison is working for data insight company dunnhumby, helping the retail experts to apply their knowledge and expertise throughout the digital arena.
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Tony Fish
Tony is known for delivery, his probing questioning, clear decision making, simple no-nonsense attitude and robust financial views and governance controls. He brings an innovative flare to delivery, deal execution and fund raising. With an enviable professional reputation, he has a wide and diverse professional network. Tony features in the top 10 of ‘The Observer Guardian’ newspapers “The future 500 rising stars” “Mobile Web 2.0” is Tony’s second book and provides a detailed strategic analysis of the changing relationships in mobile, media and retail as the markets move towards openness. Tony Fish MBA BEng CEng FIET FCIM has been involved for over 20 years in the Technology Media and Telecoms industries, and has been associated with building hi-tech companies since his first IPO (OFEX) in 1994.
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Stefan Fountain
Half Dutch and half New Zealand entrepreneur living in the Netherlands, Stefan has founded a successful internet agency and an advertising agency. Currently he is CEO of Soocial, a startup aiming to create the next generation contact management platform. Stefan holds a MSc in CS and is a published academic author with his work on Trust and Network Effects. Stefan still loves the grassroots of creating simple interfaces, usable web applications and crazy movies featuring David Hasselhoff.
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Michael Galpert
Michael is a rising entrepreneur and co-founder of Aviary, a suite of collaborative web based design tools. In his day to day he works on strategic business development, expanding Aviary's footprint and product offerings. He is driven by a passion to help others do what they love and helps organize Barcamp New York and is actively involved with the NYC-based tech community group NextNY. When he is not traveling on the information super highways or actual highways he enjoys taking pictures and wearing many hats.
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Adam Gross
Adam Gross is vice president of Platform and Developer Marketing at salesforce.com. At the company, Gross focuses on bringing platform, integration and development technologies to developers, ISVs and companies around the world to build on-demand applications on the Force.com platform and deliver them through the AppExchange marketplace. This work includes launching the company’s first Web services API, which has grown to become one of the most popular business Web services available, accounting for over 50 percent of all of salesforce.com’s traffic. Prior to salesforce.com, Adam was an early innovator in the Web services market, serving as Vice President of Product Marketing at GrandCentral Communications (recently acquired by Google). Prior to GrandCentral, Gross co-founded Personify, a San Francisco-based software company that provided personalization and analytics systems for some of the largest sites on the Web, and served as a technology analyst in Stanford Research Institute's Media Futures Program. Gross holds a B.S. in New Media Systems and Policy from Carnegie Mellon University.
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Brent Hoberman
Brent co-founded lastminute.com in April 1998 with Martha Lane Fox and was CEO and took the company to profit and gross bookings of over $2bn. The company floated in March 2000 when the dot-com bubble was at its peak - the IPO was 40 times oversubscribed and the price increase during the process was a record for a UK company. lastminute.com acquired 14 businesses after the IPO to supplement the annual growth of the core brand which was over 100% from 1998 – 2004. In 2005 lastminute.com was sold to Sabre for $1.1bn. Brent most recently founded another VC-backed internet based startup, mydeco, the online interiors site that will revolutionise the way we shop and design for our homes.
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Ben Huh
Ben Huh is the Chief Cheezburger (A.K.A. CEO) of the lolcat phenomenon I Can Has Cheezburger?. Since purchasing ICHC with a group of investors, Ben has turned the blog into a financially viable network of sites -- generating 2 million page views a day -- all driven by community contributions. The I Can Has Cheezburger? Network includes failblog.org, ihasahotdog.com, graphjam.com and punditkitchen.com. ICHC plans on continuing to grow its network of sites.
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Tony Lucas
CEO Tony Lucas founded XCalibre in 1997 and is the creator of FlexiScale Cloud Computing. Tony describes himself as an entrepreneurial evangelist who's more interested in doing something disruptive and exciting that helps business than in chasing money. All the same he's more than delighted to see his business flourishing.
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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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Andy McLoughlin
Andy McLoughlin is co-founder and product director at Huddle.net, the online collaboration, project management and document sharing service. A frustrated economist and web designer, he spends his days scrutinising font sizes, worrying about usability and discussing pricing & packages. Andy has been working with the web and collaboration for almost a decade and is heavily involved in the London start-up community. He enjoys fencing (badly) but excels at sitting in sunny beer gardens discussing films, music and cool stuff he recently saw online.
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Chris Messina
Chris Messina arrived in San Francisco four years ago and began volunteering for the Mozilla Foundation, leading the Spread Firefox community marketing project, helping to raise over $220,000 in microdonations to put a two-page spread, which he also designed, into the New York Times helping to increase Firefox's downloads to over 50 million in its first six months. He went on to co-found social web browser Flock. Later, he co-founded Citizen Agency with Tara Hunt, and was named one of the Digital Utopians and People Who Populate Web 2.0 in the San Francisco Chronicle in 2006 after his work on WineCamp. Chris now works for Vidoop, LLC, a provider of secure internet identity, on a distributed social network project called DiSo that he co-founded with Steve Ivy in December 2007. He has spoken at numerous conferences around the world and has been quoted in national publications such as The New York Times, Business Week, LA Times, MIT Technology Review and Wired. Chris is well-known in the Web 2.0, open source, and startup worlds for his community advocacy and work on open standards initiatives like microformats, OpenID and OAuth. He has been a key leader of worldwide community efforts such as Coworking and BarCamp.
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Julie Meyer
Julie Meyer has 20 years of investment and advisory experience, helping start-up businesses and industry standards to emerge and become established. She is CEO of Ariadne Capital, the investment and advisory firm that backs entrepreneurs in the life services, media, communications and net development sectors. Julie is known for founding First Tuesday, the largest global network of entrepreneurs, which many credit for igniting the Internet generation in Europe. Julie has raised hundreds of millions in capital for start-ups, and overseen another $150million in seed capital for start-ups through First Tuesday. Named a World Economic Forum "Global Leader of Tomorrow” and one of the Wall Street Journal’s 30 most powerful women in Europe, Julie's mission is to back the best entrepreneurs in Europe with global ambitions. She was named "Entrepreneur of the Year" in October 2000 by Ernst & Young U.K.
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Dave Morin
Dave Morin is the Senior Platform Manager at Facebook, where he is responsible for the company’s platform strategy and further expanding the Facebook developer community. Dave joined Facebook from Apple, where he became the Manger of Creation & Collaboration technologies after his tenure as Manager of Student Marketing. Prior to Apple, Dave founded DM Design Studios, a design focused technology and Internet software company. Dave received a bachelor’s degree in economics and business from the University of Colorado at Boulder.
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Richard Moross
Richard is the Founder and CEO of moo.com, a multi Webby Award Nominee and one of the UK's top dot coms. MOO launched in September 2006 with its first product, MiniCards: designed as a calling card for the internet generation. More than 10m MiniCards were shipped in 2007, to more than 140 countries, making them the first ever mass-produced personal calling card. MOO has subsequently expanded its product line to include Stickers, Post Cards, Greeting Cards and Note Cards and aims to disrupt the 100 year old, $30b+ stationery market. Originally built on top of the photo sharing site Flickr users can now use other popular services such as Facebook, Etsy and Bebo. Find out more about Moo on their company blog.
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Tom Nixon
Tom is a co-founder and director of NixonMcInnes – the UK’s largest social media agency with clients including Channel 4, O2, Cisco, Boots and Oxfam. His first foray into web apps was in 2000 when he wrote the first commercial beta version of ‘Wisdom of the Crowds’ application BrainJuicer , which went public in 2006. Tom’s passion is applying the democratic principles of Web 2.0 (freedom, trust, openness, participation) to running a business and believes that ultra-democratic working practices, which are on the fringes today, will become an essential recipe for business success in the future.
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David Recordon
David Recordon is Open Platforms Tech Lead for Six Apart, the largest independent blogging company in the world. In 2005, Recordon collaborated with Brad Fitzpatrick in the original development of OpenID, which has since become the most popular decentralized single-sign-on protocol in the history of the web. Recordon was recently recognized by Google and O'Reilly as the recipient of a 2007 Open Source Award for his efforts with OpenID and is the youngest recipient in the history of the award.
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Ron Richards
Ron Richards is the Director of Marketing and Product Management for Revision3, an Internet Television network and home to such popular shows as Diggnation, Tekzilla, The Totally Rad Show and many more. Focused on creating Internet television shows that focus on community and interests of the Internet Generation, Revision3 is an industry leader and Ron serves as a member of the senior management team working to spread awareness and provide the best experience for Revision3's audience. In addition to Revision3, Ron is also a founder of iFanboy a website and Internet TV show about comic books. Originally hailing from New York, Ron currently resides in San Francisco.
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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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Neal Sample
Neal is currently Chief Architect of Platforms at Yahoo! As a technologist, his research and development efforts include data indexing, techniques for the management of semistructured data, Grid computing, and data streams. He has published numerous articles and scientific papers in major international conferences. Neal is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the University of Wyoming with BS and MS degrees in Computer Science. He also holds an MS and Ph.D. in computer science from Stanford University. Neal was also a CIA Postdoctoral Research Fellow.
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Euan Semple
Euan Semple is an independent advisor on social computing for business. He is a well known writer, thinker and public speaker on the subject and has worked with a large number of global corporations including BP, Nokia and The World Health Organisation. Euan pioneered the use of weblogs, wikis and online forums while at the BBC. Euan also worked on their award winning leadership programme and gained unparalleled experience in how to engage and inspire people with the possibilities of social computing as a business tool.
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Kathy Sierra
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, the largest (and friendliest) all-volunteer Java community.
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Gavin Starks
Gavin has been combining Business, Technology, Science and Media for more than a decade. As the 5th employee at Richard Branson’s "Virgin Net" ISP he helped shape parts of the UK internet and the streaming media industry - co-founding the International Webcasting Association in Europe. In 1999 he created the award-winning cross-media company, Tornado Productions, and sold it to a larger media group in 2003. Having led projects with clients as diverse as; UK Government, Google, BBC, Rolls Royce, Tate Modern, EMI, Shell and Christian Aid, he has broad and deep knowledge of how worlds collide. Gavin is Founding Director of d::gen and AMEE, Managing Director of CI and non-exec Director of DRDC. He is a Fellow of The Royal Society of Arts, contributes to Nesta/PAL workshops, the AmbientTV collective and Acoustic Space Lab in Latvia – exploring links between technology, science and the arts.
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Joe Stump
Joe Stump is the Lead Architect of digg 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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Bret Taylor
Bret Taylor is one of the founders of FriendFeed, a site that enables you to keep up-to-date on the web pages, photos, videos and music that your friends and family are sharing. Before starting FriendFeed, Bret was at Google for four years, where he launched Google Maps, Google Local, the Google Maps API, and founded Google's Developer product group. Bret has a MS and BS in Computer Science from Stanford University.
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Francisco Tolmasky
Francisco is a co-founder of 280 North and the creator of the Objective-J programming language. 280 North is bringing desktop-class applications to the browser with their new open source framework, Cappuccino. They recently launched 280 Slides, the first application built on Cappuccino. Before 280 North, Francisco was an early member of the iPhone team at Apple, working on Mobile Safari and Maps.
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Andrew Turner
Andrew is co-founder of Mapufacture, where he works developing open-standards and building tools to make it easy for people to create dynamic, customized maps using complex geospatial tools. He also actively participates in the open-source community and develops several mapping tools such as Mapstraction and GeoPress. Prior to starting Mapufacture, Andrew developed high-fidelity realtime vehicle simulation software at Realtime Technologies and designed spacecraft control algorithms and sensor systems at EADS Astrium. Andrew writes for O'Reilly and published the shortcut "Introduction to Neogeography" and "Trends in Where2.0" business report in Spring 2008. He also publishes in MacTech and Make magazine on his home-automation hacking.
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Crick Waters
Crick Waters, SVP of Strategy and Business Development Crick leads Ribbit's strategy and business development in order to empower developers in the new frontier of voice, web, and computer convergence, to bring the value of voice to their individual markets. Prior to starting Ribbit, Crick led development and delivery of consumer voice and data services including fiber to the home, VoIP, DSL, and WiFi for AT&T Consumer Services. Before that, he was Director of Value Added Services at NorthPoint Communications where he was responsible for developing North Point's product strategy for delivering services over the company's high-speed data network. Crick has served on the Boards of Directors of the DSL Forum and International Packet Communications Consortium. He has B.S.E.E and M.B.A degrees from Duke University, and a M.S. in Nuclear Engineering.
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Elaine Wherry
Elaine is a co-founder of meebo.com in Mountain View, California. She majored in Symbolic Systems at Stanford and upon graduating, joined Synaptics and led their Usability team for several years. In 2005, she started meebo with two friends from Stanford, Seth Sternberg and Elaine Wherry. Shortly thereafter, Nielsen/NetRatings named meebo the fastest-growing IM destination in the US - ahead of Google Talk and Skype Messenger. Investors include Sequoia Capital and Draper Fisher Jurvetson. Elaine plays the violin and migrated west to California after growing up on a goat farm.
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Keir Whitaker
Keir started his career as an IT support technician in an East London NHS organisation and progressed to the position of Web Services Manager for a large NHS Trust. He was instrumental in developing a secure intranet still in use today with over 2000 users. He joined Carsonified in February 2008 and is passionate about web technologies and can often be found tinkering with APIs.
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Alvin Woon
Alvin Woon is the UI lead for Plurk, a social network with a focus on short messages. His primary work is focused on designing user interface and leading aspects of usability research. He likes cheesecake.
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Mark Zuckerberg
Mark Zuckerberg is the CEO of Facebook, which he founded in 2004. Facebook is a social utility that helps people communicate more efficiently with their friends, families and coworkers. Mark is responsible for setting the overall direction and product strategy for the company. He leads the design of Facebook's service and development of its core technology and infrastructure. Mark attended Harvard University and studied computer science before moving the company to Palo Alto, California.
Confirmed speakers
Program chairs
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Simon Wardley
The companies that Simon has helped range in size from start-up operations to global conglomerates and have been geographically dispersed from Amsterdam and Athens to Barcelona, London and Warsaw. The consistent theme is Simon's ability to provide practical, workable solutions and to bridge the gap between IT and business strategy. He is also a passionate advocate and researcher in the fields of commoditisation, innovation, cybernetics, fabrication technology and open source. He is also fond of ducks. As he says "they're fowl but not through choice".
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Simon Willison
Simon Willison is a freelance client- and server-side Web developer and the co-creator of the Django Web framework. Simon's interests include OpenID and decentralised systems, unobtrusive JavaScript, rapid application development and RESTful Web Service APIs. Before going freelance Simon worked on Yahoo!'s Technology Development team, and prior to that at the Lawrence Journal-World, an award winning local newspaper in Kansas. Simon maintains a popular Web development weblog at simonwillison.net.