Jay Adelson is CEO of Digg, guiding all aspects of the company’s development, growth and management. Under his leadership, Digg has grown to 26 million visitors per month, and is now considered one of the top socially focused Web sites.

Adelson is also chairman of the board of the Internet Television Network Revision3, where he provides strategic direction to the company.

Prior to Digg, Adelson founded Equinix, Inc (Nasdaq: EQIX), a leader in the data center and Internet infrastructure space. Equinix operates Internet data centers where more than 200 network service providers and hundreds of enterprises and content companies, including nine of the top ten Web properties, locate their Internet operations.

Adelson was also a co-founder of Digital Equipment Corporation’s highly regarded Palo Alto Internet Exchange (PAIX) and a founding employee of Netcom On-Line Communications, Inc., one of the nation’s first Internet Service Providers.

A well-recognized expert on technology and the Internet, Adelson has spoken at a variety of industry events and investor conferences, including Future of Online Advertising, Tech Crunch 40, Supernova, Web 2.0 Summit, Tech Policy Summit,, ISPCON, the Colocation & Hosting Summit, Next Generation Networks (NGN), NANOG, and Gilder’s Telecosm. In May 2008, Adelson was recognized in Time Magazine’s Time 100 – The Most Influential People in the World.

Dion Almaer is the co-founder of Ajaxian.com, the leading source of the Ajax community. Dion is part of the Google Developer Programs group, which enables him to work with developer facing technology. Dion has been writing rich web applications from the beginning, and is a columnist on Enterprise Java topics at openxource.com, onjava.com, TheServerSide.com, and of course his blog at almaer.com/blog. He enjoys writing, and speaking at events such as JavaOne, JavaPolis, TheServerSide Symposium, and the No Fluff Just Stuff symposium tour. He also participates on the Java Community Process expert groups, and the open source community as a whole.

Ken Anderson is at Intel Research where he conducts ethnographic resarch of human culturese and social practices to inform corporate strategy and technology development. His specialties are in globalization, identity, and urban studies. His work focuses on mobilities, time, transnationals in and between urban environments.

David has over 14 years experience in the communications industry with the majority of his time spent in digital marketing and experience design. An active thought leader in the industry, David authors the popular Logic + Emotion blog currently ranked in the top 25 of the “Power 150” as listed by Advertising Age. David’s writing and visual thinking has been cited by respected sources such as by Forrester, Crain’s and landed him in BusinessWeek on several occasions including their “Best of 2006”. David leads an interdisciplinary group of designers, writers and content strategists for the Chicago office of Critical Mass, a marketing agency focused on creating extraordinary experiences. Aside from his presence on the Web, David is known as an evangelist for customer-centric strategies and acts as an advocate for the creation of meaningful interactions. In his spare time he contributes articles to various professional publications and spends as much quality time with his family as possible.

Douglas Atkin, has been an investor, founder and senior executive in the financial technology industry for over 20 years. Doug was CEO of Instinet where he led the company’s successful IPO; Majestic Research—a leading data-based independent research firm; and a Co-founder of Efficient Frontiers, a consulting firm specializing in trading technology, regulation and market-structure. Doug is now the Managing Partner of the Financial Technology Investors Fund. Doug was selected one of the Top New Yorkers by New York magazine for his leading role in redefining the financial marketplace and Institutional Investor twice profiled Doug as one of the top 20 individuals making the greatest impact on e-finance. In addition, he sits on the Board of WR Hambrecht, Majestic Research, Peracon and the Lauri Strauss Leukemia Foundation.

I’m the author of The Making of Second Life (HarperCollins), online games editor at GigaOM.com, and write about Second Life on my own blog, New World Notes (nwn.blogs.com).

As Vice President, Internet Growth Group at Best Buy Co., Inc., a global retailer of technology and entertainment products and services, Michele Azar currently leads newly formed growth businesses in emerging channels: Open API, Community, and Mobile Web. Throughout her 11 year career at Best Buy, she has held P&L responsibility for Computer Peripherals and Hardware business units and played key leadership roles in 3 large scale transformations. In 2007, Azar moved to the web division to lead Enterprise 2.0 Strategy and rollout of new growth opportunities beyond existing channels. Azar keynotes across the globe on how Best Buy empowers employees to innovate, serve customers, and capture new growth. Company as Wiki: Modern Times to Open Times talk features true stories of what happens when the Net Generation goes to work at Best Buy. In 2003 Azar led the development of the small business segment from lab concept to nationwide scale of professional product solutions and service offerings including Geek Squad for small businesses. Earlier in her career, Azar had P&L responsibility for businesses at Target Corp-Dept Store Div. and The Gap, Inc.

In June 2006, Azar earned a MBA degree in the Executive MBA Program at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. She has a bachelor’s degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. http://www.kellogg.northwestern.edu/kwo/win06/indepth/azar.htm

An information junkie fascinated by trends in information delivery and helping companies and users achieve successful information delivery and search strategies including collaboration with social software and other web 2.0 applications, Daniela is part of the Client Solutions group within the Dow Jones Enterprise Media Group based in San Francisco. She works with large corporations in deploying information strategies through various parts of the enterprise and has worked with many Fortune 500 clients in the High Tech, Consumer Products, Consulting, Telecommunications, Pharmaceutical and Financial industries as well as many B2C customers.

As a co-founder of the DataPortability Project, she has worked on evangelizing data portability principles for users, vendors and developers.

Currently Business Development Manager for Synaptica a Vocabulary and Metadata Management Solution at Dow Jones, she has a Masters in Library and Information Science.

Alex Barnett joined Bungee Labs with more than 15 years experience working in the web development industry. Prior to Bungee Labs, Alex spent five years at Microsoft Corp, most recently as the Community Program Manager for the Data Programmability team in Redmond, WA. Alex joined Microsoft in 2002 in the United Kingdom as Online Customer Experience Manager. Alex moved to the United States in 2005 to become the International Program Manager for MSDN and TechNet, where he was responsible for driving the globalization strategy. Prior to Microsoft, Alex worked for seven years at Bluewave, an online marketing, web design and development agency, as Sales and Marketing Director and COO. After the successful sale of Bluewave to Maersk Data/IBM, Alex joined Microsoft. Prior to Bluewave, Alex was a professional cricketer for Middlesex and Lancashire. Alex blogs at http://alexbarnett.net/blog.

Andrew Baron is the creator and founder of the popular daily video show, Rocketboom. After receiving a BA in Philosophy from Bates College, Baron graduated with an MFA in Design and Technology in 2003 from Parsons in New York City, where he went on to teach graduate and undergraduate courses. He was teaching at Parsons and MIT when the notion of Rocketboom came to him in 2004. Although he has little interest in television (and has not owned a TV set during the past decade), Baron has always been inspired by the implications of the democratization of media.

For more information see:

Rocketboom: http://www.rocketboom.com

Friendfeed: http://www.friendfeed.com/andrewbaron

Drew Bartkiewicz, Vice President of Technology and New Media Markets, The Hartford

Drew has 18 years in the Software and Social Marketing field with companies such as BroadVision, Salesforce.com, and United Technologies.

Drew has written and lectured extensively on Internet and technology business trends over the past decade. He was a participating author in the Brookings Institution book on technology and economics, Unseen Wealth (published in 2001). He is currently a member the American National Standards Institute’s Committee on Assessing Technology and Privacy Risks within the US Economy and has also worked extensively with Europe’s OECD.

During the Web 1.0 and Personalization decade of the Internet, Drew worked extensively with the following organizations’ e-commerce initiatives: GE Capital, Home Depot, UBS, Barclays, Walmart, Bank of America, Blue Cross, Nike, Maidenform, Time Warner, Fox, MTV, Telecom Italia, Primedia, GE Supply, Citigroup, Bear Stearns, and Credit Suisse.

Drew is a graduate of the United States Military Academy at West Point and has an MBA from the Yale School of Management. He is fluent in four languages having lived and worked in Europe for nine years. He is currently working on the book, Social Graphing for a Better World, due in 2009.

Lane Becker is co-founder and president of Satisfaction Unlimited, a web startup developing tools to foster new methods of communication and collaboration between companies and their customers.

Previously, Lane was co-founder of Adaptive Path, a user experience strategy, research, and design consultancy, known for, among other things, coining the technology terms “blog” and “ajax.” While with Adaptive Path, Lane ran the consulting business and, as the creator of the New Ventures program, developed strategic partnerships with early-stage startup companies to provide them with long-term support for their product ideation, design, and launch strategies.

An internationally recognized ethnographer, Genevieve Bell has developed product shaping insights into consumers world-wide and is bringing a research driven, end-user focus to Intel. Her influence has been recognized with the award of Intel’s highest honor: an individual Intel Achievement Award. She is a Senior Principal Engineer and the Director of User Experience within Intel’s Digital Home Group and manages an inter-disciplinary team of social scientists, designers and human factors engineers. She and her team strive to stay ahead of Intel’s technology roadmap, using insights gained for in-depth ethnographic and design research to help drive innovations in and around Intel platforms, creating technology that responds to human needs, desires and aspirations. Bell is particularly interested in issues of cultural difference as they are expressed around technology adoption and use; she has conducted fieldwork around the world and is currently working on a book based on her recent ethnographic research in Asia. Her work has been widely published and cited and she is active in the fields of anthropology, computer-human interaction and ubiquitous computing. Raised in Australia, Bell received the bulk of her education in the United States. Prior to joining Intel in 1998, Bell taught anthropology and Native American Studies at Stanford University in California. Bell received her BA/MA in anthropology from Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania in 1991. She earned a PhD in cultural anthropology from Stanford University in 1998.

Marc Benioff is chairman and CEO of salesforce.com. He founded the company in 1999 with a vision to create an on-demand information management service that would replace traditional enterprise software technology. Benioff is regarded as the leader of what he has termed “The End of Software,” the now-proven belief that multi-tenant, on-demand applications democratize information by delivering immediate benefits at reduced risks and costs.

Under Benioff’s direction, salesforce.com has grown from a groundbreaking idea into a publicly traded company that is the market and technology leader in on-demand business services. For its revolutionary approach, salesforce.com has been lauded as one of BusinessWeek’s Top 100 Most Innovative Companies, named No. 7 on The Wired 40, and selected for the past two years as a Top Ten Disrupter by Forbes. The product has won the Software & Information Industry Association Codie Award for Best CRM for the past six years, and the Codie Award for Best On-Demand Platform in 2007, as well as multiple “Editor’s Choice” designations from PC Magazine. Benioff has been widely recognized for pioneering innovation with honors such as the 2007 Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year, the SDForum Visionary Award, Alumni Entrepreneur of the Year by the University of Southern California (USC) Marshall School of Business, and being ranked No. 7 on the Top 100 Most Influential People in IT survey by eWEEK. He was appointed by President George W. Bush as the co-chairman of the President’s Information Technology Advisory Committee and served from 2003-2005, overseeing the publishing of critical reports on health care information technology, cybersecurity, and computational sciences.

Throughout his career, Benioff has also been committed to using information technology to produce positive social change. In 2000, he launched the Salesforce.com Foundation—now a multimillion-dollar global organization—establishing the “1/1/1 model,” whereby the company contributes one percent of profits, one percent of equity, and one percent of employee hours back to the communities it serves. In 2006, Benioff authored The Business of Changing the World, in which 20 great leaders reveal how businesses can go beyond writing a check and leverage the full scope of their resources to make a difference. Compassionate Capitalism, also authored by Benioff, is the first-ever best-practices guide for corporate philanthropy that illustrates the success of the integrated model. Acknowledging his commitment to building partnerships between business and society to improve the state of the world, the members of the World Economic Forum named Benioff as one of its Young Global Leaders, and in 2007 the Committee Encouraging Corporate Philanthropy presented Benioff with the coveted Excellence in Corporate Philanthropy Award.

Prior to launching salesforce.com, Benioff, a quarter century veteran of the software industry, spent 13 years at Oracle Corporation from 1986-1999. In 1984, he worked as an assembly language programmer in Apple Computer’s Macintosh Division. He founded entertainment software company Liberty Software in 1979 when he was 15 years old. Benioff received a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration from the University of Southern California in 1986.

Henry Blodget is the CEO of Silicon Alley Insider, Inc., an online business media company based in New York. Prior to founding SAI in May, 2007, Henry was CEO of Cherry Hill Research, an Internet research and consulting firm.

From 1994-2001, Henry was an investment banker at Prudential Securities and an equity analyst at Oppenheimer & Co. and Merrill Lynch. As a Managing Director at Merrill, he ran the firm’s global Internet research practice and was the top-ranked Internet analyst on Wall Street.

Blodget’s first book, The Wall Street Self-Defense Manual: A Consumer’s Guide to Intelligent Investing, was published in January 2007.

With over 15 years as an Experience Designer, Conor is responsible for the creative discipline in Organic’s New York office for clients such as Bank of America, Related Companies, Ethan Allen, and Equinox Fitness.

Conor joined Organic from Razorfish, where he was a Creative Director since 2001 in London and New York, working with brands including Conde Nast, Taj Hotels, Ford Motor Company, HBO, and Nielsen Media, and on the redesign of the New York Times website. Sure there were others, but he wasn’t that impressed with them. A native of Ireland, he has been trapped in NYC since his escape from London where he worked in the music industry for the Universal Music Group. Thus he enjoys a Guinness and plays a mean air guitar. If you need him during off hours, then he’ll be on his bike in a 3 heart rate zone thinking about how to get big digital experiences down small Internet cables.

Nathan Buggia is the Lead Program Manager for the Live Search Webmaster Center, Microsoft’s suite of tools for Search Marketing professionals who want to obtain better results from Live Search. His responsibilities include owning the product for all of the Webmaster Tools and acting as the internal advocate for Search Marketing within Live Search.

Prior to working on Search, Buggia spent five years in the Server and Tools Building Solutions division as the Business Manager for the Core Infrastructure Solutions group. In this role, he built end to end solutions for IT and enterprise customers.

Before joining Microsoft, Buggia was a freelance worker in the IT industry, where he built websites professionally for ten years. He graduated from Wheaton College in Boston with a degree in Computer Science. In his spare time, Buggia enjoys mountain biking and snowboarding.

After several years in corporate America, Mike started Tree House in 2004 because of an apparent lack of “partnering” between client and vendor. His background includes a unique mix of traditional technology management and strategic planning for creative business units. He blends this history with a business philosophy centered on technological excellence and long-term, close client relationships.

Tony has over a decade of new media experience, contributing as a designer, developer, product manager, or producer at everything from failed startups to Fortune 500 companies. As VP of Digital Content and Programming at Vh1, he leads the diverse team of TV and Film Producers, Digital Programmers, Writers and Editors that are responsible for the content strategy of vh1.com and the recently launched scandalist.com. He also occasionally blogs about American Idol. When Tony isn’t working, he enjoys playing World of Warcraft.

www.vh1.com www.scandalist.com www.twitter.com/scandalist www.twitter.com/ipc2000

Dave Carroll is Technical Evangelist for salesforce.com’s Force.com platform. A technologist at heart, Dave’s enthusiasm for programming and technology inspires the developer community to think creatively about using various technologies with the company’s Force.com platform. Dave was instrumental in launching and validating the company’s first Web services API. In addition to speaking about the platform at numerous events and conferences, Dave has also led and participated in the creation of many of the developer tools for the platform. With a range of development experience from Pascal and C to Java, .Net, JavaScript and Actionscript , Dave brings a practical developer perspective to both external developer communication and internal production feedback. Dave has helped evangelize the power and innovation possible with on-demand computing growing salesforce.com’s Developer Network from its inception to more than 60,000 members.

Previously, Carroll demonstrated his early understanding of the value of on-demand software as a service serving as Chief Technology Officer at Advanced HR, Inc., a Saratoga-based on-demand software company providing Compensation Benchmarking for pre-IPO companies. Before that, Carroll was a senior technical analyst and technologist for PSW-3, a financial services company and spent many years as a software consultant. Carroll has spent over 15 years developing software on a variety of platforms.

Amy is the Tech/Marketing Convergence Manager at Tree House Interactive Agency. In this role she combines her years of front-end web development with a mind for marketing and user experience to create client solutions. Though she wears many hats, her top interest areas are ideation, user experience, finding new opportunities for value on the internet, and a fascination with connecting the dots between general market trends and internet technologies. She holds an MBA from Cornell University and a BS from Rochester Institute of Technology.

Wendy is a developer, author, speaker, and trainer. She co-edited Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 (WCAG 1.0) – the basis for web accessibility policy in Australia, Canada, the European Union, Japan, Korea, and the United States.

Wendy worked for the World Wide Web Consortium’s Web Accessibility Initiative from 1999 to 2006. Her quest to make the world more accessible began in 1992 as a statistics tutor to a student who is blind. Since 1995, she has been making technology accessible using the principles of universal design. Having slept, breathed, and eaten content guidelines for over a decade, it’s no wonder that Wendy shares three initials with WCAG and was introduced as “Web Content” by accident at a conference.

Paul H.P. Christen is the chief technology officer for Eluma, a Tewksbury, Mass.-based software company that is focused on solving the problem of information overload. Paul has more than twenty years of networking experience. Prior to Eluma, Paul served as the Chief Architect for Mirror Image Internet, where he set the overall technical direction for their Internet products. Previously, he was the Director of Operations for a large New England ISP where he was responsible for network planning and deployment, as well as selecting and implementing new technologies.

Kendall Collins, senior vice president of Force.com marketing at salesforce.com, has been developing enterprise customer strategies for over twelve years, primarily through enterprise applications and technology focused on customer relationship management (CRM), software-as-a-service and platform-as-a-service. In his current role at salesforce.com, Collins is responsible for Force.com marketing including positioning and messaging, strategic events, industry relations, Web marketing, demand generation, and marketing communications.

Previously, Collins held various management positions in product management, marketing, operations, and sales, leading teams at Siebel Systems, Oracle Corporation, A.T. Kearney, and Procter & Gamble.

He holds degrees in finance and Asian studies from the University of Virginia.

Alistair is a principal at analyst firm Bitcurrent, and a frequent contributor to the GigaOm family of sites. Prior to Bitcurrent, Alistair co-foundedCoradiant, a leader in online user monitoring, as well as research firm Networkshop. He has held product management positions with 3Com Corporation, Primary Access, and Eicon Technology.

Alistair has coordinated and spoken at a wide range of industry events, including Interop, Structure, Web2Expo and Unconference. He is the author of numerous articles on Internet performance and security, and co-author of Managing Bandwidth: Deploying QOS in Enterprise Applications from Prentice-Hall.

Liz Danzico is equal parts information architect, usability analyst, and editor. With nearly ten years of experience as a user experience professional, she makes information useful, usable, and delightful for websites of all shapes and sizes. Liz has organized information for sites across a variety of industries, including retail, publishing, media and entertainment, nonprofit, and financial services. Today, Liz spends her days in Brooklyn where she organizes information of all shapes and sizes. She is forthcoming Chair of the new MFA in Interaction Design Program, starting in Fall 2009 at the School of Visual Arts in New York. She does independent consulting in New York and is user experience consultant for Happy Cog, editor for Rosenfeld Media, a publisher of user experience books, editor-in-chief for A Brief Message, 200 words or less about design, board member of AIGA/New York, and advisory board member of the Information Architecture Institute and SXSW Interactive Festival.

Liz has been editor-in-chief for Boxes and Arrows and has held the position of director of experience strategy for AIGA, where she was responsible for the national web presence and all online and New Riders publications. Before that, she led the information architecture teams at Barnes & Noble.com and Razorfish New York.

She occasionally keeps track of things at Bobulate.com.

His background is in Information Architect. His work on Microsoft’s intranet MSW won recognition from the Nielsen Norman Group as one of the years best intranets for 2007.

Brendan is responsible for architecture and the technical direction of Mozilla. He is charged with authorizing module owners, owning architectural issues of the source base and writing the roadmap that outlines the direction of the Mozilla project. Brendan created JavaScript, did the work through Navigator 4.0, and helped carry it through international standardization. Before Netscape, he wrote operating system and network code for SGI; and at MicroUnity, wrote micro-kernel and DSP code, and did the first MIPS R4K port of gcc, the GNU C compiler.

Kellan works as a Hackr on Flickr’s pioneering approaches to engineering the social. He co-authored the OAuth 1.0 Core specification as the first step towards organizing a mass data jail break, and radical decentralization.

Christopher Fahey is a founding partner and the interaction design practice lead at Behavior (http://www.behaviordesign.com), an award- winning New York web design consultancy focused on building compelling and elegant user experiences for business and culture. He also blogs about design, technology, culture, and whatever else he’s interested in at http://www.graphpaper.com.

At Behavior, Chris has led the user experience design strategies for clients and projects in many industries, including HBO, BusinessWeek, The Smithsonian Institution, McGraw-Hill, JPMorgan Chase, XM Satellite Radio, The National Geographic Channel, AARP, the AIGA, and The Onion. In his 14+ years as a professional interaction designer and manager, Chris’s projects have covered everything from business-critical web applications to sci-fi adventure games and artificial intelligence chatbots.

Chris is an active speaker on user experience design, and will teach at the School of Visual Arts’ new interaction design MFA program in 2009. He has also taught at the Fashion Institute of Technology, Brooklyn College, and the City College of New York. His internet artwork has been featured in the Whitney and the New Museum.

Shana Fisher is the Senior Vice President of Mergers & Acquisitions and Strategy at IAC. Ms. Fisher oversees all aspects of strategy and certain specific areas of M&A activity. She also oversees IAC’s effects with Instant Action, the company’s soon-to-be launched online gaming site. From December 2003 to January 2005 Ms. Fisher served as IAC’s Senior Vice President, Strategic Planning, and prior to that as the Senior Vice President of Business Operations for IAC.

Previously, Ms. Fisher served as Vice President and Director, Media and Technology Mergers and Acquisitions and Corporate Finance for Allen & Company, LLC. In this capacity she led principle investments and advised publicly traded technology firms, private telecommunications firms and media companies. Prior to Allen & Company, LLC., Ms. Fisher was a program manager for the Microsoft Corporation and prior to that she was a software developer for I | O 360 Consulting.

Ms. Fisher received her B.A. from Hampshire College with a triple major in Sculpture, Philosophy and Linguistics and attended the Master of Arts and Sciences program at New York University.

Jefferson Fletcher is a Senior Product Manager working on Internet Explorer at Microsoft. Since joining Microsoft in 1996, Jefferson has spent the bulk of his career in engineering and helped to deliver end-user features in multiple versions of Windows and Internet Explorer. A Seattle native, he left life as a poor Poli Sci major at the University of Washington 12 years ago because earning some extra cash as a software tester sounded like a good idea. (He has yet to find his way back…)

Novelist, radio commentator, editor. Working on feature about technology and publishing for Harper’s Magazine.

Charles Forman is founder of iminlikewithyou, a platform for social entertainment. iminlikewithyou produces realtime, multiplayer, addicting, social games and activities. At iminlikewithyou, the focus really isn’t on the game itself; it’s on the social interactions around the games. iminlikewithyou borrows from the Korean item-based business model: the games and activities are completely free to play – however, action-based items may be purchased for competitive advantage within the games.

Brady Forrest is Chair for O’Reilly’s Where 2.0 and Emerging Technology conferences. Additionally, he co-Chairs Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, Berlin and NYC. Brady writes for O’Reilly Radar tracking changes in technology. He previously worked at Microsoft on Live Search (he came to Microsoft when it acquired MongoMusic). Brady lives in Seattle, where he builds cars for Burning Man and runs Ignite. You can track his web travels at Truffle Honey.

Jason Fried is the co-founder and President of 37signals, a privately-held Chicago-based company committed to building the best web-based tools possible with the least number of features necessary. 37signals’ products do less than the competition – intentionally. Jason believes there’s real value and beauty in the basics. Elegance, respect for people’s desire to simply get stuff done, and honest ease of use are the hallmarks of 37signals products. 37signals products, used by over 2,000,000 world wide, include Basecamp, Backpack, Highrise, Campfire, Ta-da List, and Writeboard. Their latest book, Getting Real, has been called the Bible of Web 2.0. Ruby on Rails, another 37signals creation, is the underlying technology driving thousands web apps.

Lorien is a lawyer and entrepreneur who has successfully started and exited from two Internet technology companies. In 1994, at the age of 24, Lorien abandoned a career in law to join his brother Matt at Interlog Internet Services Inc. Interlog never required outside VC investment as cash flow from operations completely financed the company. The company was later acquired in an all cash transaction.

After taking time off, Lorien then spent a year as the first employee and General Manager of Micron Electronics’ web hosting division. Through a series of acquisitions he built the company’s managed hosting services businesses into one of the largest players in the market. Then in April 2000, with venture capital backing from Micron, Lorien co-founded with Matt BOAW Networks Inc, one of the first Canadian companies to capitalize on the shift from co-location to managed hosting services. In 2001, AT&T Canada, looking to enter the managed hosting market, acquired the company, again in an all cash transaction.

In 2003, Lorien moved to New York and joined UK based MessageLabs Inc., a rapidly expanding email security provider, as Global VP of Business Development. Over the next two years Lorien established MessageLabs presence in the US and built out the company’s indirect sales channel. In 2005 Lorien left MessageLabs to establish his next technology venture, pingg which he co-founded with his brother Matt in 2006.

Lorien has also served on the boards of a number of organizations and private companies including the Royal Bank of Canada’s VC Tech Fund and Fusion Capital. Lorien has a LLB from Toronto’s Osgoode Hall Law School and is a member in good standing with the Ontario Bar.

Short Bio Lukasz Gadowski: Lukasz (born 1977 in Prudnik, Poland) studied computer science and business in Paderborn, the University of Mannheim, the Leipzig Graduate School of Management (HHL)and the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, USA. He received his degree in business management from the HHL in 2003. Lukasz started launching companies 1999 in his second semester (OPM Consulting GmbH, bCode GbR), without particular success. Following these early ventures, he started gaining more experience through internships (Mundwerk AG, Procter & Gamble, Infineon) and work as an independent consultant (Cosmic Art, Siemens Business Service, and more). Lukasz founded Spreadshirt in 2002 while still in school. Started without external financing, the company currently has about 300 employees, with main offices in Leipzig and offices throughout Europe and the USA. Lukasz is a passionate entrepreneur and a well known private investor and business angel, focusing on investments in seed and early-stage Internet companies. His portfolio includes amiando.de, autoki.com, imedo.de, dawanda,com, StudiVZ (sold to Holtzbrinck), Hitflip.de, Rapleaf.com, brands4friends.de, epulse.pl, Smava.de. He blogs at lakattack.com as well as at gruenderszene.de (German).

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Eileen Gittins has been at the intersection of the Internet, consumer and enterprise software, search, and digital photography throughout the course of her 20+ year career. A passionate advocate for enabling technologies that offer new ways to do valuable things, Ms. Gittins is now pioneering democratizing and reinventing publishing for the rest of us with Blurb.

Ms. Gittins has served as CEO of several pre-IPO venture-backed companies in Silicon Valley, including Personify—an ecommerce data mining and analytics company, and Verb – a context-based search engine company. Personify and Verb were acquired by Accrue and Attenza respectively. At Qbiquity, a viral marketing platform company, Ms. Gittins served as Board Chairman and interim CEO; Ms. Gittins was instrumental in negotiating the merger of Qbiquity into Collabrys. As CEO, she has raised over $60MM in venture capital throughout her career.

Earlier in her career, Ms. Gittins was VP and General Manager of Wall Data’s Salsa Products) Division (consumer database software), co-founder and VP Marketing and Sales at Pivotal Corp, an Eastman Kodak spin-out (workflow management software), and held various business development, sales and marketing management positions within Kodak’s Business Imaging Systems group in London, San Francisco, Seattle and Rochester, New York.

Ms. Gittins has extensive experience in enterprise software applications including data mining/analytics, CRM, online marketing, search, databases and data integration, imaging systems, and workflow management in addition to consumer applications in the desktop database field and digital photography. She is also an experienced public speaker and panelist, and has been the subject of feature articles in publications as varied as the Wall Street Journal, Newsweek and Fortune Magazine.

Co-founder of RedMonk, the first open source analyst company. Work with firms like Adobe, IBM, Microsoft, and Sun, helping them to understand how the IT world is changing and how they should respond.

I live and work in London with my wife and son. I travel too much. I could live in a mud hut and only eat raw vegetables and still have the carbon footprint of a small town.

Irene Greif heads the Collaborative User Experience Group (CUE), a team of Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) researchers located in Cambridge, MA. The group has historically worked most closely with Lotus product teams on collaboration software. Irene also directs the Lotus Product Design Group (PDG) at Lotus and has developed a strategic design practice that spans both CUE and PDG.

Irene is a former faculty member of Computer Science at University of Washington and of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT. She headed a research group in the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science which developed shared calendar, coauthoring, and real-time collaboration systems. She is a fellow of both the Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and Association of Computing Machinery (ACM.) Irene was inducted into the Women In Technology International (WITI) Hall of Fame in 2000.

Irene joined Lotus in 1987 and formed Lotus Research in 1992. Product innovations from her group include Version Manager for 1-2-3, InterNotes Web Publisher (precursor to Domino); the first Palm Pilot conduit for Notes mail; the Sametime strategy for integrating awareness, conversation, and shared objects; and most recently, the design vision for Reinventing Email.

Irene received her S.B. in Mathematics, her S.M. and her PhD. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, all from MIT.

Jason Grigsby is co-founder and web strategist for Cloud Four (http://www.cloudfour.com). Jason has been online since the 5th grade. at one point he could whistle at the exact pitch of a 1200 baud modem so that it would stop squelching when the phone rang. It was either develop this skill or his mother would ungraciously unplug the computer.

Jason built his first web page in 1995. He has spent the last 11 years building web sites professionally before being bitten by the mobile bug prompting him to throw caution to the wind and start a new company focused on mobile and web development. He blogs both at http://cloudfour.com/blog and his personal site http://userfirstweb.com/.

Kristina Halvorson is the founder and president of Brain Traffic, a content strategy, information architecture, and web writing agency.

Since 1997, Kristina has led content strategy and web writing projects for over 100 web sites and several Fortune 500 companies. She is a passionate advocate for content strategy, the “hidden discipline” that lives between information architecture, web writing, and the build process.

In 2006-2007, Kristina served as president of the Minnesota Interactive Marketing Association (MIMA), one of the country’s leading IMAs with nearly 1,000 active members. In 2002, she co-founded the annual MIMA Summit, which is today widely regarded as the premier regional interactive conference in the nation.

Paul Hammond is a web developer, product manager and father. He has been building websites for as long as he can remember, and now leads a team of hardworking supernerds at Flickr. Before that he was part of the Yahoo Brickhouse team, and previously led technical project management at BBC Radio and Music interactive.

Paul regularly speaks on subjects from Javascript and APIs to the future of broadcasting, at events including South By Southwest, O’Reilly Emerging Technology, and Web Directions North. He lives in San Francisco, and keeps an irregularly updated technical weblog at paulhammond.org

David Heinemeier Hansson is the creator of Ruby on Rails and a partner at 37signals.

Cal Henderson has been a web applications developer for far too long and should really start looking for a serious job. Originally from London, he currently works at Yahoo! Inc. as the architect and development lead for Flickr. He formed part of the original Flickr team at Ludicorp in Vancouver, Canada. Before Flickr, he was the technical director of Special Web Projects at Emap, a UK media company. Outside of Flickr, he contributes to several open source projects and writes occasional articles about web application development and security.

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Jason Hoffman is the CTO and founder of Joyent and previously founded TextDrive Inc and Strongspace LLC. Jason has a BS and MS from UCLA, a PhD from UCSD and has backgrounds in cancer biology, bioinformatics, grid computing and collaborative applications.

Arianna Huffington is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post, a nationally syndicated columnist, and author of eleven books. She is also co-host of “Left, Right & Center,” public radio’s popular political roundtable program.

In May 2005, she launched The Huffington Post, a news and blog site that has quickly become one of the most widely-read, linked to, and frequently-cited media brands on the Internet.

In 2006, she was named to the Time 100, Time Magazine’s list of the world’s 100 most influential people.

Originally from Greece, she moved to England when she was 16 and graduated from Cambridge University with an M.A. in economics. At 21, she became president of the famed debating society, the Cambridge Union.

Alex Iskold is a Founder/CEO of AdaptiveBlue, a company focused on pragmatic semantic technologies. Alex is also a feature writer for one of the top technology blogs – Read/WriteWeb. He frequently speaks at technology conferences about semantic web, widgets, social networks and other modern technologies.

Jonas Jacobi is co-founder and chief executive officer of Kaazing Corporation. Before co-founding Kaazing Jonas worked as VP of Product Management responsible for the product management and marketing strategy for Brane Corporation, a startup company in Silicon Valley. A native of Sweden, Mr. Jacobi has worked in the software industry for more than sixteen years. Prior to his appointment as vice president for Brane, he worked 8 years for Oracle as a Java EE and open source Evangelist, and product manager responsible for the product management of JavaServer Faces, Oracle ADF Faces, and Oracle ADF Faces Rich Client in the Oracle JDeveloper team. As CEO of Kaazing Corporation, Jonas sets the company’s business and product strategy and oversees all aspects of Kaazing’s operations and mission to become the world-wide leader in real-time software. Mr. Jacobi is a frequent speaker at international conferences and has written numerous articles for leading IT magazines such as Java Developer’s Journal, JavaPro, AjaxWorld, and Oracle Magazine. Jonas is co-author of the recently published book Pro JSF and Ajax: Building Rich Internet Components, (Apress).

JEFF JARVIS blogs about media and news at Buzzmachine.com. He is associate professor and director of the interactive journalism program at the City University of New York’s new Graduate School of Journalism. He is consulting editor of Daylife, a news startup. He writes a new media column for The Guardian. He consults for media companies. Until 2005, he was president and creative director of Advance.net, the online arm of Advance Publications. Prior to that, Jarvis was creator and founding editor of Entertainment Weekly; Sunday editor and associate publisher of the New York Daily News; TV critic for TV Guide and People; a columnist on the San Francisco Examiner; assistant city editor and reporter for the Chicago Tribune; reporter for Chicago Today. He says he is at work on a book.

Server Chick (Oh snap) Sandy majored in Computer Science at Stanford and after graduation, went on to work for Xilinx in San Jose for a couple of years. She climbs and plays ultimate frisbee a couple times a week, and loves a good nap.

Steven Johnson is the best-selling author of five books on the intersection of science, technology and personal experience, including the New York Times Notable Book The Ghost Map and Everything Bad Is Good For You, one of the most talked about books of 2005. He is also the co-creator of three influential web sites: FEED, Plastic.com, and most recently, the hyperlocal community site outside.in.Steven is a contributing editor for Wired magazine and a Distinguished Writer In Residence at the New York University Department of Journalism. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and three sons, and blogs at stevenberlinjohnson.com.

“Oliver Jung is a serial entrepreneur and private venture capital investor. He specializes in private equity investments in seed and early-stage Internet and mobile companies including investments in Adconion Media Group, e-Puls.pl, Imagekind.com, Xing.com, Smava.de, StudiVZ Ltd. (sold to Holtzbrinck), Webnews.de, Netmoms.de, Nimbuzz.com, Private Sale GmbH, Adscale.de, be2.com, seatwave.com, and Lokalisten GmbH. Mr. Jung studied Computer Science at the University of Karlsruhe. He subsequently founded entory AG, an IT and internet consulting company, which was sold to the German Stock Exchange (Deutsche Börse) in 2001. Subsequent to the sale of entory AG, Mr. Jung served on the Board of Deutsche Börse Systems. He is also a founder and chairman of exxeta GmbH, an internet and IT consulting company operating throughout Germany and in Switzerland.”

Fax: +41-55-4201448, Mob: +41-79-4056489 Oliver.Jung@adinvest.ch

Brian Jurutka, Vice President, comScore, Inc. As Director of Marketing Solutions at comScore Networks, Mr. Jurutka is responsible for helping clients better understand the online activity of US consumers to inform marketing, product development and competitive intelligence efforts.

Previously, Mr. Jurutka was with Capital One’s Direct Banking organization where he helped expand Capital One’s online marketing in addition to overseeing various strategic partnerships. Prior to Capital One Savings, he served in Capital One’s credit card group, managing multi-channel credit card acquisition and account management campaigns. Mr. Jurutka holds an M.B.A from Brenau University and a B.S. from the United States Naval Academy in aerospace engineering.

Avinash Kaushik is the author of the recently published book Web Analytics: An Hour A Day (http://www.snipurl.com/wahour). He is also the Analytics Evangelist for Google.

As a thought leader Avinash puts a common sense framework around the often frenetic world of web research and analytics, and combines that with this philosophy that investing in talented Analysts is the key to long term success. He is also a staunch advocate of listening to the consumer, and is committed to helping organizations unlock the value of web data.

He is a frequent speaker at industry conferences in the US and Europe, such as eMetrics, Ad-Tech, iCitizen, and SES.

You’ll find Avinash’s web analytics blog, Occam’s Razor at http://www.kaushik.net/avinash

Lois Kelly, author of the award-winning business book “Beyond Buzz,” is a partner in Beeline Labs, helping organizations to operationalize marketing 2.0. Clients include Intuit, Sun Microsystems, Dunkin’ Donuts, University of Massachusetts, Fast.

Currently the Director of Business Development for AdaptiveBlue – a semantic, contextual browsing company – Fraser has spent his entire career commercializing emerging technologies.

Previously to joining AdaptiveBlue, Fraser was a member of Trivaris, a Commercialization Capital firm specializing in bringing new technology to market. Through their work with DARPA, the US and Canadian Governments, and leading research Universities, Trivaris has become a respected leader in the commercialization of new technology.

Fraser has spoken at the DowJones VentureOne Summit and other tech conferences across North America.

AdaptiveBlue is the leading contextual browsing company. Utilizing Semantics and Personalization the company is introducing a new way to experience the web, enabling users to shortcut search.

David is a serial entrepreneur with a focus on online product development and Internet advertising and marketing. Prior to co-founding Clickable, David co-founded SmartRay Network, a mobile advertising delivery pioneer. SmartRay’s ad-enabled alerting agents and data-feed management platform was acquired by LifeMinders . Previously, David helped lead corporate development at THINK New Ideas, a publicly traded e-business and interactive advertising firm. He helped grow THINK to more than 500 employees through seven acquisitions in 24 months. Prior to THINK, Kidder founded Net-X, a web authoring and Internet advertising services company, acquired by Target Vision. Kidder is a graduate of the Rochester Institute of Technology and was a recipient of ID Magazine’s International Design Award. He is also the creator and co-author of New York Times bestseller, The Intellectual Devotional, published by Rodale Press.

Karin Klein currently serves as a Vice President at Softbank Capital where she puts over a decade of venture capital and operating experience to work by sourcing new investment opportunities for the fund and working closely with portfolio companies to help them build their businesses. Karin oversees the firm’s review of new investments and provides post-investment assistance to portfolio companies and their management teams, with a particular focus on business development.

Prior to Softbank, Karin worked with Michael Milken at two of his investment funds – MC Group and Knowledge Universe – where she conducted strategic reviews of new investments in the media, education and technology sectors and worked closely with management teams to develop and implement operating and growth plans.

Karin first developed her passion for start-up life when she co-founded an educational training program for children.

Karin graduated on the Director’s List with an M.B.A. from The Wharton School, and she has undergraduate degrees from the University of Pennsylvania – a B.S. from The Wharton School and a B.A. from the Annenberg School of Communications. She graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa.

Pete is the Product Manager on the Google App Engine Team. He joined Google in 2006, and has also spent time working on Google’s advertising products.

Pete holds a masters in theoretical computer science from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, and degrees in Mathematics and Computer Science from Case Western Reserve University.

As a digital strategist I combine my background in Information Architecture, Usability, User Advocacy, interaction design, marketing and software development which I feel helps me best understand how to solve problems that reach across many capabilities. Understanding what people want and need is the most important first step.

Designing a user experience involves assembling the elements in such a way as to facilitate user interaction with functionality.

My mission is to create engaging emotional experiences.

Michael is founder/CEO at Buddy Media, a New York City-based startup that develops and markets applications on leading social networks, and currently has more than 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. Michael led GolfServ from a start-up to a multi-million dollar profitable golf media company, delivering millions of golfers golf content and e-commerce services through its flagship GOLF.com site. He also negotiated and executed successful partnerships on behalf of GolfServ with Time Warner, NBC Sports, MSNBC.com, Yahoo!, AOL, FoxSports.com, Microsoft, New York Times Co., the PGA Tour, USA TODAY, Knight Ridder, Chicago Tribune, and more than 200 other companies.

Before GolfServ, Michael founded University Wire, an network of more than 700 student-run newspapers purchased by CBS in 2005. U-Wire provides the most in-depth coverage of campus news and student issues and is distributed widely through major college newspapers and Internet portals. Michael sold U-Wire to Student Advantage, the nation’s leading student membership organization in May 1997. As a member of the Student Advantage management team, Michael helped grow Student Advantage from a handful of employees into the premier media and marketing company in the college market with 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.

Pete LePage is a Senior Product Manager working on Internet Explorer at Microsoft. Pete started using and developing on the web in the mid-90’s creating his first website on GeoCities. Since then, Pete has moved on to bigger and better things. For the last two years, he’s been working with the IE. Before his role in Product Management, Pete was a tester on Visual Studio’s web design components.

With over six years at Microsoft, LePage has been designing websites since his early days in high school, evolving from the <font> tags and GeoCities to properly styled CSS, managed hosting websites. Prior to joining the product management team, LePage was a tester on Microsoft’s Visual Web Developer where he steered much of the web design experience.

In addition to his career at Microsoft, LePage is an avid film photographer and teaches and studies at the prestigious Photographic Center Northwest in Seattle. He has recently completed his Thesis in Fine Art Photography.

LePage keeps a regular blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/petel.

Barry Libert is the Chairman of Mzinga (Swahili for “beehive”), a leading provider of business social media solutions to drive growth, innovation and learning. As the founder and CEO of one of Mzinga’s predecessor companies, Shared Insights, Libert was one of the first in the industry to recognize and promote the value of communities and Web 2.0 technologies in enabling enterprises to communicate and collaborate to make better decisions based on the experience of peers, experts and leading industry vendors. Libert’s previous experience includes positions with Arthur Andersen, John Hancock and McKinsey & Company. The co-author of “We Are Smarter Than Me,” he has written extensively on the value of information and relationships; his articles have appeared in Newsweek, Smart Money, Barron’s, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. He has also appeared on CNN, CNBC and NPR. He received a bachelor’s degree from Tufts University and an M.B.A. from Columbia Business School.

Tristan Louis is an Internet veteran, having worked in the Internet industry since 1993. Throughout the years, Mr. Louis has been known as the founder of Internet.com, a co-founder of Earthweb’s developer.com, the interim CTO for Boo.com, and has held many other roles at start-ups during the first dotcom boom.

A journalist by trade, Mr. Louis has written extensively about the Internet, first in industry publications like Internet World, Business 2.0, the Silicon Alley Reporter, and on his popular weblog, TNL.net. Many of the pieces he’s written on his blog have led to interviews in mainstream media both in print (Business Week, the New York Times, the Financial Times, etc…) and broadcast (the BBC, NPR, CBC, etc…) and to speaking engagements around the world.

A pioneer in Internet development, Mr. Louis has been involved in several important developments in the industry:

• He established some of the models for industry-specific advertising with Internet.com
• He was among the first people in the industry to work on roll-up plays, through close to 100 acquisitions during his tenure at Internet.com and Earthweb.
• An active believer in the rights held in the American Constitution, he worked as a member of a coalition to help secure free speech rights on the Internet.
• He worked within the Word Wide Web Consortium to establish standards to merge television and the web in the mid-1990s.
• In 2000, He worked within the RSS community to help amend some of the specifications to support date elements in every items and provide a theoretical framework to distribute data files over an RSS channel, allowing for the development of what is now known as podcasting.

Born in France but living in the United States, Mr. Louis believes that globalization is now a fact of life and that companies or governments which believe it can be stopped or averted are fooling themselves. He has led development teams on multi-national projects involving development and project management across Europe, Asia, and the Americas.

For over a year, the true identity of Fake Steve Jobs was the Internet’s best-kept secret. The business world and Silicon Valley were buzzing with speculation and rumour, even parlour games: who, exactly, was behind “The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs,” the scathingly hilarious, deceptively insightful, and wildly popular blog “written” by Apple’s genius CEO?

In grand style, The New York Times finally outed Fake Steve Jobs: it’s Daniel Lyons, who was then a popular tech columnist at Forbes who has since moved up to Newsweek. At his blog, fakesteve.blogspot.com, Lyons has captured the Zeitgeist, from perhaps the one place it is clearest—the point of view of Steve Jobs. In the tradition of Jonathan Swift and The Onion, he uses a pitch-perfect satirical style to deliver trenchant social commentary, reflecting on everything from the Cult of Steve and the rise of Apple (“Dude, I invented the friggin’ iPhone. Have you heard of it?”) to the ubiquitous influence of the tech industry on our everyday lives.

In his new book, Options: The Secret Life of Steve Jobs, Lyons writes an epic takedown of Silicon Valley, Hollywood and Washington, D.C., as viewed by a central character, Steve Jobs, who exists, to his immense self-satisfaction, at the crossroads of all three worlds. “Just as Tom Wolfe skewered Wall Street in the ‘80s, Fake Steve Jobs lights a mini-Bonfire in Silicon Valley with Options,” Entertainment Weekly writes in an A- review. “The narrator of this dead-tree account is so textured and real that even his most idle thoughts amuse.”

Daniel Lyons is a columnist at Newsweek. His articles have also appeared in The New York Times Magazine, GQ, and The Boston Globe, and he is the author of two previous novels, The Last Good Man and Dog Days. Lyons also taught at the University of Michigan and the University of Toledo.

With a diverse background as both a technical executive and an internationally known leader in open source software, Geir comes to us from Joost, where he led software development and had responsibility for platform architecture, implementation and delivery. Prior to Joost, he held positions as Director of Middleware Architecture and Open Source Technology at Intel, and Vice President of Products and Strategy at Gluecode, an open source application server startup that was acquired by IBM. He was VP, Engineering and Chief Architect of Adeptra, an innovating communications service provider, and as CTO, guided technology FitLinxx during it’s rapid growth years. Geir began his commercial career as an architectural and product lead at Bloomberg Financial Markets where he developed the company’s real-time, multi-platform financial data delivery and presentation system. He is also a member of the board of advisors for WSO2, an open source SOA middleware vendor.

In addition to his commercial software experience, Geir is a Director of the Apache Software Foundation, currently represents the ASF on the Executive Committee of the Java Community Process, the organization that governs the evolution of the Java platform, and helped found major open source projects, including Apache Geronimo and Apache Harmony, and has been recognized for his work in the Java ecosystem through a Google-O’Reilly Open Source Award.

Romi Mahajan is Chief Marketing Officer of Ascentium Corporation. Before joining Ascentium, he spent 7+ years at Microsoft where his last role was as Director of Technical Audience and Platform Marketing. Romi is widely published in the areas of technology, politics, economics, and sociology.

Mikel is co-Founder of Mapufacture, and specializes in Open Geospatial and Wiki technologies. He’s been active in the standardization of GeoRSS and in the OpenStreetMap collaborative mapping project, and several open source projects. He’s developed two of the first Wikis in use at the UN. Previously, Mikel worked as senior developer of My Yahoo! and researched evolutionary models of ecosystems for an MSc at the University of Sussex.