Speakers

Dan Ackerman Greenberg is a co-founder of 750 Industries, a company that builds social applications for Facebook and other social platforms. He is also co-founder of The Comotion Group, a viral marketing company that specializes in seeding and marketing viral videos online.

Dan helped teach the 2007 Stanford “Facebook” Class with Dave McClure and BJ Fogg.

Dan graduated with a BA in Economics from Stanford University in 2007. He recently dropped out of a Stanford Masters program in Management Science & Engineering to work full time building his company.

Zach Allia is the founder/developer of the Free Gifts application on Facebook. Free Gifts started as a simple play on the Facebook application “Gifts.” However, Zach turned Free Gifts into a really fun and engaging application, creating a very loyal following. Zach, originally from Boston, now lives in Palo Alto, CA and is a co-founder of the Social Gaming Network.

Jessica is Director of Platform and Business Development at Bebo. She leads the platform strategy and community at Bebo as well as multiple business development efforts. Prior to Bebo Jessica worked in business development at Hands-On Mobile. She holds a Bachelor’s in Business Administration from University of Michigan and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

Currently, Sean is the VP of Business Development & Product Management at mSpoke, Inc. Sean also regularly contributes to the influential Read/WriteWeb blog and hosts the weekly podcast Read/WriteTalk. Once an aspiring programmer, Sean has found his niche as a new technology evangelist. Currently, this manifests itself in his passion for helping publishers revitalize their online content with mSpoke’s adaptive personalization solutions. Prior to co-founding mSpoke, Sean was a research fellow at Carnegie Mellon University’s Software Industry Center and served on the Editorial Advisory Board and as a columnist for Information Week. He holds a B. S. in Computer Information Systems from Grove City College.

At the age of 22, Tyler is already well known as the lead developer of Slide’s Top Friends application, one of the most popular applications on Facebook and Bebo with millions of daily active users. He also developed several other Slide applications, including Fortune Cookie and Famous Quotes.

Tyler has been developing software professionally since the age of 18, when he founded a Mac software and consulting company named bleep. He dropped out of Texas A&M University, where he studied computer engineering, to satisfy his entrepreneurial spirit. When he’s not writing code, Tyler actively contributes to the open source community and his own blog, the Unethical Blogger. Plus, he has a killer virtual backhand with a Wii Tennis score of over 2300.

Jason Beckerman is Founder and CEO of Teach The People, a company dedicated to democratizing education by creating a people powered university marketplace. Jason is also the founder and CEO of Dank Apps, makers of the Facebook application The Lotto, recently funded by Bay Partners. The Lotto is a social contest that gives away up to $5000 daily. Jason has worked for various financial institutions and startups throughout his career including Merrill Lynch, Paytrust, Island ECN, Instinet, Albridge Solutions, Siebel, and Salesforce.com. In his time at Salesforce.com, Jason managed the release process for the largest on-demand CRM roll out in the history of SAAS. Jason holds a BS in Entrepreneurship and Information Systems from Quinnipiac University and a Masters in Organizational Leadership from Gonzaga University.

Jim Benedetto is the Vice President of Technology and one of the original architects of MySpace, the world’s most popular social networking and lifestyle portal on the Internet. In this position Benedetto oversees the daily technical operations, overall architecture and technological direction of MySpace and continues to help the site reach its full potential.

Since joining MySpace in November 2003 Benedetto’s expertise in distributed architectures, database technologies, storage and scalability helped MySpace grow to more than 115 million unique users per month, and more than 23 localized sites worldwide. Benedetto continues to be a key influential player in the ongoing success of MySpace.

Prior to MySpace, Jim was a highly recognized consultant in database design and architecture. He holds a Bachelors degree in Business Administration from the University of Southern California.

Patrick Chanezon is API Evangelist at Google since 2005. These days his main interests are the OpenSocial API and social software, Google APIs, REST, SOAP and Ajax, Java, Groovy, Javascript, PHP, Ruby and Python. Previously he’s bee working on portals, blogs and syndication feeds at Sun Microsystems, AOL and Netscape. He’s the co-founder of the ROME – Atom and RSS utilities in java open source project.

More on his blog at http://wordpress.chanezon.com/

Patrick is French, so he takes long vacations in the summer and likes to drink red wine with baguettes and stinky cheese while wearing a beret. Apart from programming and reading books his main interest in life is spending time with his wife and 3 kids.

Andrew Chen is a blogger and startup executive focused on advertising and social media. He writes the blog Futuristic Play (andrewchen.typepad.com) and was most recently an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Mohr Davidow Ventures (MDV), a Silicon Valley-based firm with $2B under management. At MDV, Andrew pursued initiatives in digital media and advertising, and was instrumental in MDV’s $20MM investment in Hi5.com, the leading social network for international audiences with 75 million registered users.

Prior to MDV, Andrew was director of product marketing at Revenue Science, where he co-founded the ad network business and was instrumental in growing the network to thousands of websites with over 5 billion ads served per month. He also led teams to handle the company’s initiatives around MySpace and Yahoo, two of Revenue Science’s most strategic partners. In addition, Andrew played key roles in winning the company’s initial brand advertising clients, which now include dozens of top-tier publishers including AOL, InterActiveCorp, ESPN, Washington Post, among others.

Prior to Revenue Science, Andrew worked at MDV’s Seattle office, conducting due diligence for investment opportunities in enterprise software, consumer internet, and life sciences. Andrew came to MDV after serving in software engineering roles at Cobalt Group, a lead generation and eCommerce platform for over 12,000 properties in the automotive vertical.

Andrew holds a B.S. in Applied Mathematics from the University of Washington.

Based in Palo Alto, California, Jean-Francois “Jeff” Clavier is the Founder and Managing Partner of SoftTech VC, one of the most active seed stage investors in Web 2.0 startups. Since 2004, Jeff has invested in more than 20 consumer Internet companies developing new concepts (such as social media) or revisiting “old” ideas with a new set of economics and technologies. In 2007, Jeff was recognized as one of the 13 “Web 2.0 King Makers” by Business 2.0, and is often noted for his investments in categories such as “passion-centric communities,” or for having already sold five of his companies in the past two years through successful M&As. Jeff’s 19 years of operational, entrepreneurial and venture capital experience enable him to add relevant perspective and value to the companies in which he invests.

Jeff’s initial investments were in the search, social media, online communities and application infrastructure sectors. Most recently, he added gaming and monetization to his investment focus, and he has been dabbling in Enterprise 2.0, system infrastructure and a few other emerging categories. Jeff invests primarily, but not exclusively, in Silicon Valley-based startups.

Prior to founding SoftTech VC, Jeff spent more than 16 years in the enterprise software world as an entrepreneur, senior executive and venture capitalist. In 2000, Jeff became President of RVC Capital, the firm managing the Reuters Greenhouse Fund with $600M invested in 82 companies, including Yahoo!, Verisign, Phone.com and Infoseek. He joined the venture arm of Reuters from the company’s product development division, where he was leading a 250+ staff in Paris, London and New York, and was responsible for the Risk Management and Desktop products. Jeff joined Reuters through the acquisition of Effix Systems, a Paris-based startup company he helped develop in 1989 while still in school.

Jeff was born, raised and educated in France, earning a MS in Computer Science and a research degree in Distributed Computing. He has been happily living in Silicon Valley since 2000 with his wife Bernadette and their two children.

Blake is a Founder, VP of Engineering and CMO at Mogad.com. Blake is also the creator of the superviral Zombies, Vampires, and Werewolves games on Facebook. Prior, he led the development of the Causes on Facebook application. Blake was also an early engineer on Plaxo’s client team and a founding engineer at BuildForge (acquired by IBM). He has a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from Rice University.

Chris Damsen is VP Business Development at Netvibes. During his six-year tenure as Senior Director of Business Development at Ask.com/IAC, Chris led its syndication division to more than $200M in annual revenue. He also established key relationships with more than 100 partners including AOL, Google, Lycos, BellSouth, CNET, Apple, EarthLink, and InfoSpace.

Eric Eldon is a reporter with VentureBeat, a news blog that covers startup companies and investing in Silicon Valley. He also is the co-founder of Writewith, a startup that provides software for news organizations.

Robert Fan is a co-founder of 750 Industries, a company that builds social applications for Facebook and other social platforms.

Rob began working on Facebook apps soon after platform launch and has been hacking away ever since. Rob was also one of the teaching assistants for the fall 2007 Stanford “Facebook” Class (CS377W), where he helped students develop and instrument viral applications & metrics.

Rob recently earned a Masters degree from Stanford University in Management Science and Engineering, with a focus in Entrepreneurship and Emerging Technologies.

Prior to coming west, Rob worked at Booz Allen Hamilton in Washington DC as a technical consultant. He received a BS in Electrical Engineering from The Johns Hopkins University.

Dan Farber is editor-in-chief of CNET News.com, part of CNET Networks. He has more than 25 years of experience as a journalist covering technology. Prior to joining CNET News.com, Dan served as vice president and editor-in-chief of ZDNet. He also led the editorial teams at PC Week and MacWeek. In addition, he was the founding editor at MacWorld and part of the editorial staffs of PC World and PC Magazine.

I’m a researcher, teacher, and innovator working mostly at Stanford. My training is in experimental psychology, especially the psychology of using computers.

Recently I taught a course at Stanford about Facebook apps, with Dave McClure, Dan Ackerman-Greenberg, and others.

Since 1993 I’ve been at Stanford University, investigating how computers can be designed to change attitudes and behaviors. I’ve written a book on this topic: Persuasive Technology: Using Computers to Change What We Think and Do. (book website: http://www.persuasivetech.com)

I’m writing a new book: The Psychology of Facebook.

I run a research lab at Stanford University: http://captology.stanford.edu

Outside of Stanford I’m passionate about finding ways to improve personal relationships. I believe the quality of our closest relationships determines how happy we are (yes, the recipe for happiness is that simple).

I’ve never made big decisions based on money—only on passion and potential for impact. This has always taken me in the right direction. Over the years I consistently find meaningful work I love (perhaps too much) and wonderful colleagues who join me on the journey.

For more about me, see http://www.bjfogg.com.

David Gentzel is VP Consumer Products at SocialMedia. He is also a top Facebook app developer and the creator of several apps with more than one million users, including Happy Hour and Food Fight. According to David, “I make viral apps.”

David is Director of Engineering at Google and currently leads the OpenSocial team there. Prior to joining Google in 2006, he successfully started two companies: Verity in 1988 and Eloquent in 1995. Eloquent was later acquired by Open Text in 2005. David has decades of experience working in the technology sector and holds an SB in physics from MIT.

Seth is the Co-Founder and 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!). In 1995, he created SiteSpecific, one of the first Internet advertising companies. He was Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Flatiron Partners from 1998-2000.

In 2002 Seth co-founded Majestic Research, a next generation Wall Street Research firm that provides leading hedge funds with proprietary data insights. In 2005 he created Root Markets, the first financial exchange for Internet mortgage leads.

He recently moved from New York City to Marin California with his wife and their two sons.

bio coming soon.

Allen Hurff is the Vice President of Engineering. He has been working at the world’s most popular social networking and lifestyle portal since it was a privately owned start-up. In his position, Allen oversees the engineering and the overall development direction of MySpace as it matures into a company with global reach.

Allen joined MySpace in March 2005 with only 12 developers still located in Santa Monica, California. Allen has grown the engineering and quality assurance organization to over 250 employees now located in Los Angeles, Seattle, San Francisco, Atlanta, London, and Australia.

Before MySpace, I has worked at TRW, Unisys, AltaVista, Shopping.com, Experian, and private consulting. Allen Hurff continues to be a key influential player in the ongoing success and growth of MySpace.

Murtaza Hussain is the co-founder and CEO of Peanut Labs, a leading provider of advanced market research services, integrated into 70+ online communities and platforms including MySpace, Facebook, and Google OpenSocial.

Murtaza has been heavily involved in social media, and is an expert in building online communities. He possesses a deep knowledge of Web 2.0 and ways to utilize social networks and the social graph to execute innovative business ideas and applications. Murtaza has appeared in Fortune, Forbes, TechCrunch, The Wall Street Journal, Red Herring, San Francisco Chronicle, and Business 2.0, among others.

Prior to Peanut Labs he was co-founder of XuQa.com, a leading online casual gaming community, which he built to 2M+ users and profitability. In 2001 Murtaza founded Gaming Ventura, an international entrepreneurship holding group, and has reviewed business plans for a range of companies and organizations.

Murtaza was pursuing a Bachelor of Arts in Anthropology at Williams College before dropping out to start his company.

John Hwang is the founder of TripMonger, a Internet startup focused on travel and social networking applications. Most recently, he developed a popular Facebook application called Speed Racing, a car gaming app that allows users to customize their cars and race their friends. He received his BSEE from the University of Texas at Austin and completed his MBA at UC Berkeley Haas School of Business.

Beth Kanter is a trainer, blogger, and consultant to nonprofits and individuals in effective use of social media. Her expertise is how to use new web tools (blogging, tagging, wikis, photo sharing, video blogging, screencasting, social networking sites, and virtual worlds, etc) to support nonprofit. She has worked on projects that include: training, curriculum development, research, and evaluation. She is an experienced coach to “digital immigrants” in the personal mastery of these tools.

She is a professional blogger and writes about the use of social media tools in the nonprofit sector for social change.

Amit Kapur is the Chief Operating Officer of MySpace. He manages global business operations for MySpace including business development and strategic partnerships across the website, Developer Platform, and MySpace Mobile.

Amit joined MySpace in 2005 as the company’s first business development hire. In this role, he led early growth projects including developing the company’s initial globalization strategy and leading deal negotiations across various partners. In 2006, Amit was promoted to Vice President of Business Development, driving key business partnerships for MySpace including the monetization deal with Google, the strategic product partnership with Skype, and the company’s first music licensing pact with Sony BMG.

Prior to MySpace, Amit worked in the strategy group at NBC-Universal. He studied Mechanical Engineering and Advanced Thermal Systems at Stanford University.

Ian Kennedy is product manager for MyBlogLog, a service Yahoo! acquired in January 2007. He has been with Yahoo! since 2005 and held roles in corporate development and the Yahoo! Publisher Network.

Prior to Yahoo!, Kennedy was director of Sales & Partner Development at Six Apart and was also at Factiva, a Dow Jones & Reuters joint venture where he held roles in product management, business development, and sales.

He is the founder of one of the Web’s longest running weekly city guide sites, Tokyo Q (www.tokyoq.com), an English language city guide for visitors and residents of Tokyo.

Kennedy earned a BA at UC Berkeley. He currently lives in the San Francisco area with his wife and two children. He blogs at http://everwas.com.

David has an extensive background in marketing and product management and has held key senior positions in successful technology companies. He currently serves as VP Marketing & Product Strategy for WorkLight, a company that specializes in securing Web 2.0 technologies (e.g. Facebook) for the enterprise. Recently, he served as Chief Marketing Officer of V-Secure Technologies (sold to Radware – NASDAQ:RDWR). Prior to that, he co-founded and served as Vice President of Marketing and Product Strategy at Business Layers (sold to Netegrity – NASDAQ:NETE). He has held a variety of business and technical positions in technology companies and organizations. David has a B.Sc. in Physics from Bar-Ilan University, an MBA in Marketing from the Recanati School of Business at Tel Aviv University, and has completed advanced studies in Electrical Engineering at Tel Aviv University.

Michael is founder/CEO at Buddy Media, a New York City-based startup that develops applications on leading social networks, currently with over 8 million users on Facebook. Buddy Media helps large media companies and brand marketers leverage the social networks, and current clients include People Magazine, Real Simple, InStyle, Priceline, Anheuser Busch and other leading brands.

Michael is a serial entrepreneur who has co-founded four successful internet-based media companies and has a passion for creating, managing and growing companies. Before Buddy Media Michael founded GolfServ, the parent company of GOLF.com, purchased by Time Warner’s Time Inc. division in January 2006 for $24 million.

Before GolfServ, Michael founded University Wire (U-Wire), an network of more than 700 student-run newspapers purchased by CBS in 2005. Michael sold U-Wire to Student Advantage, the nation’s leading student membership organization in May 1997. Michael helped grow Student Advantage to more than 300 employees and $80 million in annual revenue.

Michael graduated from Northwestern University with a BS and MS in Journalism in 1996. Michael lives in New York City with his wife, Kass, two sons, Myles and Cole, and daughter Vivian. In addition to investing in private companies and real estate, he enjoys writing for Lazerow.com, live music, golf, tennis, poker, fly-fishing, reading, writing and video editing.

Charlene primarily contributes to Forrester’s offerings for the Interactive Marketing professional. She is one of the driving forces behind Forrester’s Social Computing and Web 2.0 research, and examines how companies can use technologies like blogs, social networking, RSS, tagging, and widgets for marketing purposes. During her eight years at Forrester, Charlene has also led the marketing and media research team, and ran the San Francisco office. In her research, Charlene covers such marketing-related topics as consumer portals, search, and media site design. She also leverages her background in newspaper publishing and looks at online local media and online classifieds. In the past, she has also written about online advertising, online gaming, and media content strategies. She also contributes to her Groundswell blog and plans to publish a book by the same name in spring 2008.

Charlene was publisher of interactive media for Community Newspaper Company, a group of newspapers in Massachusetts, where she started its award-winning Town Online Web site. In addition, Charlene served on the board of directors for the Newspaper Association of America’s New Media Federation. Before working for Community Newspaper, Charlene was at the San Jose Mercury News, where she managed new product development. This included creating new advertising products and a consumer electronics show.

Charlene is one of Forrester’s most quoted analysts and has appeared in outlets like The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer, CNN, NPR, and BBC, as well as The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and BusinessWeek. She is also an accomplished and frequently requested public speaker, and has appeared at Web 2.0 Expo, Ad:Tech, Search Engine Strategies, and AlwaysOn. She has delivered keynote speeches at many events, including Forrester’s Consumer Forum and Television Forum. A former strategy consultant for Monitor Company, Charlene is a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard University and holds an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School.

Jeremy Liew is a General Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners, an early stage, tech focused Venture Capital Firm. At Lightspeed, Jeremy invests primarily in the internet and mobile sectors, with a particular interest in social media, gaming, commerce, and methods for increasing monetization. He joined Lightspeed in early 2006. He has led Lightspeed’s investments in Rock You, Flixster, Tippit, Mercantila and Streetfire.net.

Previously, Jeremy was with AOL, first as SVP of Corporate Development and Chief of Staff to the CEO, and then as General Manager of Netscape. Jeremy joined AOL from InterActiveCorp (originally USA Networks) where he was VP of Strategic Planning. While there, he was responsible for acquisitions, divestitures and investments in TV Networks, consumer internet companies and online travel companies.

Jeremy started working in the consumer internet industry as an early employee of CitySearch in 1996 where he held a variety of sales management, operational and business development roles. He was also a management consultant at McKinsey and Company.

Jeremy holds an MBA from Stanford and a BA/BSc from the Australian National University in Linguistics and Pure Mathematics. Jeremy is a frequent contributor to the Lightspeed blog at http://lsvp.wordpress.com.

Benjamin is the Director of Platform Product Marketing at Facebook, where he oversees product marketing, developer operations and partner solutions for Facebook Platform. Prior to Facebook, Benjamin was the General Manager of eCommerce at Google, where he founded and led Google Checkout and oversaw Google Product Search. At Google, he managed a cross functional team that included product, engineering, sales, marketing, operations, finance and legal. Benjamin holds a Ph.D. and master’s degree in computer science from Stanford University and a bachelor’s degree from the university of California at Berkeley.

Lee Lorenzen is a successful entrepreneur with more than 26 years of technology and investing experience. He is currently President, CEO of Altura Ventures. Prior to Altura Ventures he founded SHOP.COM and as CEO/Chairman led the company to becoming one of the largest shopping sites on the web. Lorenzen’s first start-up was Ventura Software where he co-wrote Ventura Publisher, later licensed to Xerox. Lorenzen founded Altura Software in 1990 and created the Mac2Win software which was used to port Mac applications to Windows. Altura has generated over $15M in revenue, and reached Softletter’s Top 100 list. Lorenzen also founded Fractal Design Corporation, which went public in 1995 before acquired by Corel; and he co-founded PGSoft which was sold to Novell. Lorenzen has also worked at Xerox and Digital Research. Lorenzen graduating valedictorian from SMU with a BS in Computer Science.

Roger Magoulas is Director of Research for O’Reilly Media.

Kevin Marks is a Developer Advocate for OpenSocial at Google, bringing external developers and Google engineers together to make a better web. Over the last 20 years he’s alternated between giant companies and founding startups – BBC, The UK MultiMedia Corporation, Apple QuickTime, Technorati and now Google. The common thread has been working out how people, computers and media can complement each other, and solving the engineering and social problems where they meet. He is one of the driving forces behind microformats.org and advisor to the Open Rights group. He wants you to remember that URLs are people too, and his URL is http://epeus.blogspot.com

Dave McClure has been geeking out in Silicon Valley for almost twenty years as a software developer, entrepreneur, startup advisor, angel investor, blogger, & internet marketing nerd. He is an advisor or investor for Mint, Mashery, Simply Hired, TeachStreet, Oortle, CrazyEgg, SlideShare, Eventvue, RichRelevance, HealthUnity, & Canopy Financial.

Dave is the conference chair for Graphing Social Patterns, and a co-chair for Web 2.0 Expo. He has been a guest lecturer at Stanford University for the nation’s first-ever course on building Facebook Apps. Dave is a board member for microfinance accelerator Unitus, advisor to microfinance lender Kiva.org, and a co-founder of the Silicon Valley Microfinance Network.

From 2005 to 2006, Dave launched and ran marketing for job search engine Simply Hired, and its evil twin Simply Fired. From 2001 to 2004, Dave worked at PayPal as Director of Marketing, where he founded and ran the PayPal Developer Network program. Prior to PayPal Dave was a database consultant and programmer for several companies including Microsoft and Intel. In 1994 he founded Aslan Computing, an internet and e-commerce firm later acquired by Servinet/Panurgy in 1998.

Before coming to Silicon Valley, Dave barely graduated from the Johns Hopkins University with a BS in Mathematical Sciences Engineering and a minor in frisbee, billiards, and foosball. His interests include microfinance and economic innovation, entrepreneurship and venture capital, ultimate frisbee, cartoons and animation, and an ever-growing collection of silly hats.

For more info see Dave’s blog: Master of 500 Hats

Chris Messina arrived in San Francisco four years ago to begin volunteering for the Mozilla Foundation, as a leader of the Spread Firefox community marketing project. During his time with Mozilla, he helped 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 web browser Flock and served as Director of Experience and Open Source Ambassador. 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.

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 is a key leader of worldwide community efforts such as Coworking and BarCamp.

Originally from London England, Ben Metcalfe worked at the BBC for six years before transplanting himself to San Francisco 18 months ago. During his time at the BBC Ben worked his way up the organization, originally working as a software engineer through to finally co-launching and running the BBC’s developer network http://backstage.bbc.co.uk. Before that Ben launched his first startup, a free email service, when he was 17. These days Ben can be found advising several companies and startups in a number of overlapping skill and experience areas. He draws on his experience as a software engineer, product manager, technical evangelist and strategist to work with companies in the areas of:

• Platform & API projects
• Social media and the social graph,
• Web2.0 projects in the enterprise,
• Grassroots media/blogging and online media in general
• Disruptive technologies
• Community-orientated strategy

Ben is passionate advocate for the opening up of data sources, feeds and APIs – be they in the private or public sector – which in turn lead him to become a founding member of the Data Portability Initiative.

Oren Michels brings more than 15 years of experience to his job as CEO of Mashery. Michels has a proven track record with experience across multiple industries. Previously, Michels was vice president of business development at Feedster, where he negotiated partnerships with AOL, Real Networks and Mitsui, and oversaw the company’s activities in China. Prior to Feedster, Michels was president of Colt HR, a leading provider of outsourced benefits administration software and services to the mid market. He also co-founded WiFinder, an international provider of directory services for wi-fi public access hotspots; served as president of winebid.com, where he managed the company’s growth and helped establish it as a leading online wine auction market; served as COO of two manufacturing companies; and as CEO of The Groundlings, an entertainment production company in Hollywood.

Michels began his career as a software designer for Hughes Aircraft and has been a consultant to companies in the management, financial, marketing and information technology industries. He holds a BS in Electrical Engineering from MIT and an MBA in finance and entrepreneurial studies from UCLA’s Anderson School.

Lou Moore is the Director of Engineering for hi5, a leading international social network and top ten website globally. Lou joined hi5 in 2005 as the company’s second engineer, and is currently leading the development of hi5’s new platform. In his product engineering work, Lou enjoys developing social Web applications that are both highly scalable and usable.

Prior to hi5, Lou was a software engineer at Scient, Walmart.com and Nextag.com. Originally from Wisconsin, he holds a BS in computer engineering from Northwestern University.

Jeff Nolan is responsible for business development, strategy, developing market awareness, and strategic relationships. Jeff was previously the CEO of pioneering mashup company Teqlo and prior to that led SAP’s Apollo strategy group. Jeff served as a general partner at SAP Ventures for almost a decade where he led investments in internet infrastructure technology, open source, and what has become web 2.0. With a lifelong interest in technology and its impact on business and society, the Bay Area native has a technical background and a natural curiosity about far too many areas to list. Jeff serves as Chairman of the Board for Students Rising Above, a San Francisco based organization that provides tuition assistance and mentoring for disadvantaged youths who despite all the odds want to pursue a college education.

Tim is a co-founder and partner at Hungry Machine, a Washington DC-based company. Hungry Machine builds products in the social media space, including Visual Bookshelf, Beer, and Restaurants.

Nick O’Neill is the creator of AllFacebook.com and the newly launched Social Times. A serial entrepreneur at heart, Nick has spent the past 8 years developing creative solutions for individuals on the web. Working from within agencies and startups, he has gained significant experience working with clients and overcoming extreme challenges. Being highly active in the web and entrepreneurial communities, locally and nationally, Nick helped to bring the first Tech Cocktail to Washington, D.C. With the opening of the Facebook platform, Nick saw a huge opportunity and has become fully dedicated to covering the social networking phenomenon and developing creative applications for clients looking to gain exposure. Since the launch of the platform Nick has been featured on NPR, Fast Company, Practical Ecommerce and multiple other national publications.

Note on the Social Times:

The Social Times mission is to empower passionate individuals to cover the topics that they are most passionate about while learning the ropes of new media. We are a breeding ground for new media professionals and entrepreneurs.

Jeremiah Owyang is currently Senior Analyst at Forrester Research focused on Social Computing. Before Forrester, Jeremiah’s was responsible for the corporate evangelism at PodTech.net, and previously was leading the strategy and development of corporate web programs at Hitachi Data Systems, Exodus Communications, Cable and Wireless, and World Savings (now Wachovia). Jeremiah Owyang holds a Bachelors in in Marketing from San Francisco State University.

Ben has 15 years of media marketing experience, including 10 years focused on Internet advertising sales and business development. Positions include Sales and Product Management roles at Doubleclick, Advertising Director at Condenet and Director of Advertising Sales at Travelzoo where Ben helped the company go from $15M to $70M in advertising revenue in three years and saw the company through a successful IPO on NASDAQ. Prior to joining Gigya, Ben headed up ad sales for Insider Pages, a Sequoia Capital funded start up which was acquired by IAC.

Weighing in at 150 lbs is Mark Pincus, frenetic visionary of Zynga. His DNA is one strand entrepreneur and one strand competitive gamer. Mark founded Tribe.net (www.tribe.net), one of the first social networks in 2003. Prior to Tribe, he was the founder and CEO of SupportSoft (Nasdaq: SPRT), the world’s leading provider of support automation software. Prior to SupportSoft, Mark co-founded Freeloader, the first consumer push information service.

Shervin Pishevar is president of Webs.com, one of the world’s largest web publishers with more than 14 million members. Mr. Pishevar is responsible for leading overall strategy, business development, alliances, mergers and acquisitions.

Mr. Pishevar founded his first company, WebOS in 1997 when he was 23 years old and raised more than $10 million. WebOS created the first distributed operating system of on-demand Windows-like web applications with APIs for developers.

Mr. Pishevar’s previous accomplishments include creating CNET’s Top 5 Web Application in 2000 (Hyperoffice), winning Computer Shopper’s Top 100 Technology Products of 2002 (Argentum), and he has raised millions in financing for companies that he co-founded or led. He is a holder of numerous patents, and is a published researcher with peer-reviewed articles published in JAMA and Neuroscience Letters.

Mr. Pishevar received his B.A (Interdisciplinary Studies) from the University of California at Berkeley, and completed more than a year of graduate course work in Health Economics at Berkeley School of Public Health.

You can visit Shervin’s Freewebs site at shervin.com. Feel free to leave a guestbook comment or become his friend.

Hooman is the founder & CEO of Clearspring Technologies, the leading provider of online widget syndication services. At Clearspring, he is actively involved in shaping product and marketing initiatives. He was recently named one of Tech’s Best Entrepreneurs in BusinessWeek and was nominated for Ernst & Young’s Entrepreneur of the Year. Hooman is a frequently requested speaker in the areas of social networks, syndication, and digital media. When he is not busy building a better web, you can find him writing his blog Widgify. Radfar graduated magna cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania with degrees in Economics and Computer Science. He holds an M.S. from Carnegie Mellon University where he researched Social Networking Theory.

Scott Rafer has been helping Internet publishers and users jump on What’s Right Now! since 1995. Today, that means delivering services for social publishing and discovery. Scott is CEO of Lookery, as well as co-founder of Mashery and chairman of Winksite. Lookery is an ad network and user-targeting service that is supporting the growth of social applications starting with Facebook. Mashery manages API and developer programs on behalf of web services providers including Facebook app providers. Winksite helps publishers large and small assemble active mobile communities around their brands based on the content they already syndicate. Just before all that, he was CEO of MyBlogLog until Yahoo! acquired the company in January 2007. Before MyBlogLog, Scott tried to build blog/RSS search companies in both 1998 and 2003. Before the first dotcom boom, Rafer led the Internet products group at Kodak Hollywood, worked in investment banking at Needham & Company, and graduated from the Management of Technology program at UPenn. Please check out http://blog.lookery.com for the latest.

David Recordon is Open Platforms Tech Lead for Six Apart, the largest independent blogging company in the world. Recordon has played a pivotal role in the development and popularization of key social media technologies such as OpenID. 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. During a year and a half at VeriSign, Recordon played an active role in refining and evangelizing OpenID, bringing it from an experimental technology to one that’s been endorsed by major companies ranging from AOL to Microsoft, and implemented for over 120 million identities on the web. Recordon’s history with open source software and open standards stretches back to the beginning of his career, when as a sophomore in high school he volunteered his time to lead an open source message board project with over forty members worldwide. This interest led to his co-founding of a message board hosting provider that still services tens of thousands of users around the world, and that he has since sold. 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.

Jeff has over 11 years experience managing multi-faceted programs in social media, e-commerce, product development, and partner marketing for Internet companies and services. He’s currently developing new customer acquisition and retention marketing programs for Friendster. Jeff joined Friendster in 2004 and was the first member of Friendster’s marketing team. He’s very active in the social media space and publicly speaks often regarding trends and thought leadership in Web 2.0.

Prior to joining Friendster, Jeff held an E-Commerce Manager position at Roxio/Napster, Inc. from 2000-2004. He worked on various online marketing programs for both brands and managed Roxio’s e-tail software business.

Before Roxio, he spent three years at Priceline.com and oversaw the launch of several marketing initiatives including affiliates, search engine strategies and partner incentive programs. Earlier in his career, Jeff was a member of the intellectual property team at Walker Digital, LLC (company that founded Priceline.com) and Promotions Director for WHUS Radio (UConn). Jeff holds a BA in Marketing/Communications from the University of Connecticut.

Rodney is the Editor & Publisher of FaceReviews.com, a website that provides ratings & reviews of Facebook applications, as well as news & strategy insights. He has been involved with the Facebook f8 platform since launch. He is also Founder/CEO of a new media strategy & consulting practice that provides business and technology consulting on how to leverage the Facebook social operating system. Rodney has helped many Fortune 100 clients and hundreds of small businesses. Rodney has over 20 years experience in the technology industry, and has authored books on New Media & Business Blogging. His websites have been featured in The Wall Street Journal and Business 2.0, and the acclaimed “For Dummies” series of books. He has held senior level management positions in Fortune 100 companies and startups in the areas of Engineering, Project Management and Business Development. He sits on the board of several technology companies. Rodney currently resides in Solana Beach, CA.

Keith Schacht is the founder of Chicago-based 42 Friends LLC, the company behind leading Facebook applications such as Growing Gifts and Hatching Eggs.

Prior to 42 Friends, Schacht co-founded and sold two technology companies. In 2005, BusinessWeek named him one of the top 20 entrepreneurs under 25. He has been featured in Fortune, Forbes, BusinessWeek, and Business 2.0 and served the world’s top consumer product companies including Nike, Proctor & Gamble, Motorola, BMW, Kraft, and many others. Schacht attended University of Illinois where he studied computer science and psychology.

Chris Schalk is a Developer Advocate and works to promote Google’s APIs and technologies. He is currently engaging the international Web development community with the new OpenSocial API. Before joining Google, Chris was a Principal Product Manager and technology evangelist at Oracle in the Java development tools group. Chris also recently co-authored the book: “JavaServer Faces, The Complete Reference” published through McGraw-Hill-Osborne. Chris was also one of the original members of the Open Ajax alliance and helped Oracle and later Google join the alliance. Chris has spoken on Web, Java and Ajax development at numerous Oracle, Java and Ajax conferences, as well as Google related events.

Jim joined Charles River Ventures as an Entrepreneur in Residence in 2007. His focus is on uncovering new investments in the consumer Internet, social networking and social media sectors, while working with the firm’s portfolio companies and evaluating opportunities for his own next start-up venture.

Jim is one of the early pioneers of the social networking phenomenon and was previously the head of business development and sales at the first social networking site, Friendster. There he created the concept of ‘engagement marketing’ within social networking sites, mobilizing the idea of enabling consumers to become brand advocates of engaging content and spreading the brands’ messages amongst their network of friends.

Prior to joining Friendster, Jim was a co-founder of Bebo and served as vice president of business development and sales. At Bebo Jim helped many great brands, including Disney and Coke, with their marketing efforts.

Jim is a seasoned speaker and is often called upon to talk on the subject of social networking and marketing. In recent times this has included events such as; Ad Tech in both San Francisco and London, Harvard Business School, Digital Hollywood and the IIA Annual Congress in Ireland. As one of the industry’s leading experts, Jim provides regular comment on engagement marketing and the future of social networking for wide range of publications including; the Economist, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Ad Week and e-consultancy, in addition to TV and radio.

Prior to his internet career, Jim practiced corporate and intellectual property law at a leading Silicon Valley law firm. He went on to serve as senior vice president of business development at NBC Internet, a $2 billion public company of NBC & GE before joining Bebo and Friendster. Scheinman is an attorney, entrepreneur and seasoned internet marketing executive. He has a BSc in Neuropsychology from Duke University and earned a JD at the University of California Davis School of Law.

Mike Sego is the developer of the popular (fluff)Friends application on Facebook, where users adopt and interact with virtual pets. (fluff)Friends has been recognized in Business 2.0 and numerous websites as one of the top applications. Mike is also a Software Engineer on the Gmail Frontend team at Google, and previously worked at Electronic Arts on The Sims Online. He received his B.S. and M.S. from Stanford in Computer Science, with a focus on Human Computer Interaction and Graphics.

Jia is the Chief Technology Officer and co-founder of RockYou, and has focused extensively on graphic design and usability throughout his professional web development career spanning over 10 years. Prior to RockYou, Jia has held management roles leading the user interface and technical solutions teams at Open Harbor, and managing the majority of engineering at Iconix. Jia started working on scalable consumer applications at shopping tools internet provider Bluedog, a Stanford based startup, and was part of the original team at Bell Laboratories which developed the VoiceXML format into the W3C standard. In addition, Jia’s experience has spanned enterprise sales and professional services functions, as he closed transactions and integrated with large multi-national corporation customers like Mitsubishi, Tyco, Flextronics, and DHL. Jia has a double major in Computer Science and Computer Engineering from Johns Hopkins University.

Joseph Smarr is Chief Platform Architect at Plaxo. He is currently leading Plaxo’s “Open Social Web” initiative to put users back in control of who they know when using socially-enabled sites by using open data-sharing standards. An active participant in the Web 2.0 community, Joseph has built web applications for many years, including Plaxo’s online address book, web widgets, and was architect and lead developer of the Plaxo 3.0 rich AJAX address book, calendar, and sync tool. Joseph has a BS and MS from Stanford University in Artificial Intelligence.

Justin Smith is the editor of InsideFacebook, the first Facebook-focused blog, covering the business of Facebook and the Facebook Platform for developers and marketers. Justin is also the Product Manager at Watercooler, a developer of sports and television entertainment Facebook applications. Millions of Facebook members have joined Watercooler’s applications since their launch. Justin has a degree in Computer Systems Engineering from Stanford University.

After graduating from Yale in 2001 in Political Science, Seth looked to understand the black box of big-business decision making and spent three years in Corporate Development at IBM leading various M&A transactions. Seth then left for Stanford Business School. After a summer internship at private equity group Warburg Pincus, he co-founded a startup with two friends. meebo, a website for instant messaging, grew rapidly and Seth chose to put Stanford on hold to pursue the venture. Seth, meebo’s CEO, led the initial capital raise of $3.5 million from Sequoia Capital. meebo continues to grow and serves 6 million people monthly, having raised an additional $9 million in funding from Draper Fisher Jurvetson. Seth enjoys tennis and rollerblading and is an avid private pilot.

Bret Taylor is one of the founders of FriendFeed, which makes it easy to keep track of the web pages, videos, music, and photos your friends and family discover around the Internet. 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.

Pam Webber has over 10 years of experience in marketing and strategy of consumer products and services. Prior to her position as Vice President of Marketing at Widgetbox, Pam spent seven years at eBay most recently as Director of Consumer Marketing for eBay’s subsidiary PayPal. At PayPal, Pam was charged with developing marketing strategy and programs for PayPal’s consumer businesses including eBay North America, PayPal Financial Products, and PayPal Mobile. Pam also worked for Borden, Inc. as a Corporate Strategy Associate in Columbus, Ohio and as an Investment Banking Analyst for Donaldson, Lufkin, and Jenrette in New York City. Pam holds a BA in Mathematics and Economics, magna cum laude, from the University of Pennsylvania and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

Troy joined VideoEgg as CMO in 2006 to build the company’s advertising offering and establish a leadership position in the online video advertising market.

Prior to VideoEgg, Troy was EVP, Chief Experience Officer at Organic, one of the world’s leading digital marketing agencies. In this capacity he provided strategic leadership to clients and teams across the Organic network. Troy joined the company as Managing Director in 1999. Over the years he was worked with dozens of leading brands including 20th Century Fox, DaimlerChrysler, Honda, CondeNast, Bell Canada, Janus and American Express.

Troy’s work in interactive media dates back to 1992, when he worked on the launch and management of Babylon, the first newspaper-owned online service in Canada. Troy later worked in marketing and sales at CTV, Canada’s largest television network. Prior to joining Organic, Troy was a Co-Founder and Managing Director of Vickers & Benson Direct, Interactive (now Arnold Worldwide), a pioneer in integration of online and direct marketing.

Troy has held board and advisory positions with several Internet and marketing firms. He is a graduate of the Queen’s University Business School.