Stephanie has more than 13 years of experience in the industry. She started her career with iVillage and has taken prominent sales, marketing and business development roles with Internet powerhouses including Barnes & Noble.com, Register.com, SpaFinder, Foxtons and Commerce360. She is an expert in online marketing and social media, an industry speaker for trade show and panel discussions, and has been quoted in major publications such as Crain’s Business News, Realtor Magazine, Revenue and ClickZ. She also runs Affiliate Karma, an agency of outsourced program managers. Her blog is: www.internetgeekgirl.com.

Brian Aker is the Director of Technology for MySQL. At MySQL he helps set direction for technology and looks for opportunies to harness and shape the MySQL database for efforts in Web, OEM, and Telephony. In his copious amounts of free time he works on Apache and Perl modules, and hacks on the Asterisk Telephony System (hence never has a working home phone number). In the past, he has been involved with projects for the Army Engineer Corps, The Virtual Hospital, Splunk, and Slashdot. He lives in Seattle with his dog Rosalynd.

Since the late 90s, Katrina has led information architecture, user research, and content strategy efforts on projects ranging from online magazines to Flash demos to applications for enrolling new health care members. Her work includes projects for InformationWeek, Sun Microsystems, Charles Schwab, Blue Shield of California, Architecture for Humanity, the United Methodist Church, Gap Inc., LeapFrog SchoolHouse, and Adobe. In 2003 she was hired to build and lead a new user experience team at Hot Studio, an award-winning design firm based in San Francisco. Today she leads Hot’s group of about ten user experience architects.

Before her foray into the Internet, Katrina worked as a freelance writer and editor for several newspapers and magazines in Hawaii and California, and as an associate producer for an award-winning national PBS television series. She holds a master’s degree in journalism and documentary filmmaking from the University of California, Berkeley.

John has worked in systems operations for over ten years in biotech, government and online media. He started out tuning parallel clusters running vehicle crash simulations for the U.S. government, and then moved on to the Internet in 1997. He built the backing infrastructures at Salon.com, InfoWorld.com, Friendster.com and Flickr.com, where he currently manages the Operations Engineering group.

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.

Ori Amiga is the Principal Group Program Manager of the Live Developer Platform team responsible for driving the developer platform efforts across the Live Platform Services (LPS) group including Microsoft’s new Live Mesh offering. He joined Microsoft in 1999 as a Program Manager in the Enterprise Server division. In 2002 he transferred to the Mobile and Embedded Devices division, and drove the development platform offering for Windows Mobile. In 2004 he continued his efforts driving the mobile platform as the Group Program Manager for the Visual Studio for Devices team in the Developer Division. Most recently, Ori was the Group Program Manager for the Visual Studio Tools Platform team, managing tactical and strategic planning and execution of the product team driving the Visual Studio 2005 release. In his spare time, Ori is an avid traveler, enjoys motoring, gaming, and tennis.

Marc Andreessen is one of the most successful entrepreneurs (called a Silicon Valley “whiz kid” ), startup coach, blogger, investor, and a multi-millionaire software engineer best known as co-author of Mosaic, the first widely-used web browser, and co-founder of Netscape Communications Corporation. He was the chair of Opsware, a software company he founded originally as Loudcloud, when it was acquired by Hewlett-Packard. He is also a cofounder of Ning, a company which provides a platform for social-networking websites.

Edwin Aoki is a Technology Fellow at AOL. Holding a joint degree in Computer Science and Sociology from Harvard College, Edwin believes strongly in the ability of technology to bring people closer together and to make our lives easier. He’s worked at Apple Computer, Go Corporation, and Intuit before joining Netscape Communications in 1996.

Daniel K. Appelquist is a senior technology strategist at Vodafone Group, where he works on Web and Internet projects and industry activities. He helped to create dotMobi and the W3C Mobile Web Initiative, where he chairs the Mobile Web Best Practices working group. He is also the founder of Mobile Monday London and the Mobile 2.0 conferences, and has spoken on the mobile Web at numerous conferences and events, including Web 2.0 Summit, South by Southwest Interactive, Future of Web Apps, Ajax World and Le Web 3.

http://www.jupiterresearch.com/bin/item.pl/company:analyst/jup/id=4135/

Rob Bagby is a Developer Evangelist for Microsoft. Rob works with customers, as well as delivers presentations at numerous regional and national conferences, to illustrate how to take advantage of Microsoft’s developer technologies to deliver performant and secure applications faster. Rob bases his discussions on over 10 years of consulting experience, along with a Masters Degree in International Business from Thunderbird. You can read Rob’s blog here.

Mitchell Baker, Chairman, Mozilla Foundation

As the leader of the Mozilla Project, Mitchell Baker is responsible for organizing and motivating a massive, worldwide collective of employees and volunteers who are breathing new life into the Internet with the Firefox Web browser and other Mozilla products.

Baker was born and raised in Berkeley, California, receiving her BA in Asian Studies from UC Berkeley and her JD from the Boalt Hall School of Law. Her law career included working for Sun Microsystems and Netscape. She has also sat on the board of the Open Source Applications Foundation.

Baker has been the general manager of the Mozilla project since 1999, helping shape the license under which Netscape’s source code was released. In 2003, she became president and founder of the Mozilla Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to openness and innovation on the Internet. In 2005, Baker led the creation of Mozilla Corp., a wholly owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation. Baker served as as CEO of the corporation until January 2008, when Mozilla’s rapid growth encouraged her to shift her focus back to the scope and mission of the project. As Chairman of the Mozilla Foundation, Baker continues her commitment to an open, innovative Web and the infinite possibilities it presents.

TIME Magazine profiled Baker under “Scientists and Thinkers” in its 2005 TIME 100. She has also appeared on “The Charlie Rose Show” and “CNN Global Office” to discuss open source software and the Firefox phenomenon.

Aristotle “Ari” Balogh is currently Chief Technology Officer at Yahoo!. He is responsible for company-wide product development which includes optimizing resources, speeding innovation, and ensuring the quality of Yahoo!’s products and services. He is focused on establishing a common architecture and building blocks to drive development aligned with corporate strategy and on improving the overall effectiveness of Yahoo!’s engineering efforts. All of Yahoo!’s engineering functions, including technical operations, infrastructure, and internal IT support groups, report into Balogh.

Prior to Yahoo!, Balogh was Executive Vice President, Chief Technology Officer and Head of Global Product Design for VeriSign, Inc., where he led all internal and external technology functions. During his nearly ten years at VeriSign, he held numerous technology leadership positions that focused on aligning technical execution with business priorities; driving product strategy; and improving the speed of innovation and quality across the entire lifecycle of service creation and delivery. In 2007, he was recognized by Infoworld Magazine as one of the top 25 CTOs in the industry. Prior to joining Verisign, Balogh held leadership positions at SRA Corporation and Roadnet Technologies.

Balogh holds an M.S.E. in Electrical and Computer Engineering and a B.S. in Electrical and Computer Science from John Hopkins University.

Cam Balzer is an online marketing strategy expert with a proven track record of driving results and delivering innovation in the search engine marketing arena. Cam’s expertise is based on more than a decade of experience across all online marketing channels. Cam is currently vice president of emerging media for DoubleClick Performics, the performance marketing division of DoubleClick.

At DoubleClick Performics, Cam evaluates and researches the evolution of consumers’ interactions with the online channel and the opportunities created for marketers. He is responsible for identifying and cultivating new trends in online marketing, creating new approaches and metrics in search, affiliate and emerging performance marketing channels.

As an industry thought-leader, Cam is a frequent speaker on search and online marketing strategy at conferences including Search Engine Strategies (SES), Search Insider Summit (SIS), Search Marketing Expo (SMX), OMMA, eTail, eComXpo and the National Retail Federation. He maintains a blog on internet strategy and other “strategic citings” at www.web-cite.com.

Alex Bard is the President & CEO at goowy media, where he is responsible for the corporate vision, product strategy, and marketing/business development initiatives. Currently, he also works inside AOL’s product group helping guide the vision and strategy for AOL’s Widget initiatives. Previously, Alex was part of the founding team of two other Internet communication companies including eAssist Global Solutions and eShare Technologies. Alex holds a BA in Finance from the State University of New York at Stony Brook.

Kevin Barenblat is co-founder and CEO of [context], a social marketing technology and services company that partners with brands such as Electronic Arts, Microsoft, Samsung, and Paramount Pictures for custom viral application design and development, social marketing strategy, social ad media buys, and ad optimization. Prior to founding [context] Kevin held product marketing, business development, and strategic advising positions at WideRay, Verizon Wireless, Adventureseek, and The Boston Consulting Group. Kevin has a B.S. degree in Industrial Engineering from Stanford University and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

John Battelle is an entrepreneur, journalist, professor, and author. Currently founder and chairman of Federated Media Publishing, he is also a founder and executive producer of conferences in the media, technology, communications, and entertainment industries and “band manager” with BoingBoing.net. Previously, Battelle was founder, chairman, and CEO of Standard Media International (SMI), publisher of The Industry Standard and TheStandard.com. Prior to founding The Standard, Battelle was a co-founding editor of Wired magazine and Wired Ventures. He is the author of The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture” (Portfolio, 2005).

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.

In his role as Chief Scientist, Ben is leading the charge to build Zumobi for every phone you have…or will have! Ben brings a decade’s experience building innovative mobile user interfaces to Zumobi. Ben, who holds three degrees from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and New York University, is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Maryland, College Park. He also is past Director at the University’s Human Computer Interaction Lab at the Institute for Advanced Computer Studies. Ben’s research and patents concentrate in the areas of mobile computing, human-computer interaction, computer vision, robotics, information visualization, digital libraries and electronic voting. Ben has published more than 100 articles in conferences, journals and magazines and recently authored a book entitled, “The Craft of Information Visualization.” His most exciting current university project is the International Children’s Digital Library (www.childrenslibrary.org).

Gavin designs social software for the Nature Publishing Group. He has worked in web product development since the mid-90s. Large scale web applications covering identity management, on-demand media and social software have been the main focus of his work. Gavin lives in London with his wife and son. He writes on nascent for Nature and on take one onion. His personal website is gavinbell.com.

Gary Benitt is currently a Senior Technical Director at AOL. Prior to AOL’s acquisition of Goowy Media, Gary was Goowy’s COO, responsible for the day to day operations of the company, with a focus on the business and technology aspects of the business. Previously Gary co-founded eAssist Global Solutions where he held the positions of VP of Client Operations and Support and VP of Technology. In these roles, Gary managed client implementations and development of eAssist’s award winning contact center products, respectively.

Gary was responsible for launching the first version of the product in an ASP environment in under four months and then releasing the productized software model. Gary holds B.S. degrees in Finance and Information Systems from NYU’s Stern School of Business.

Artur Bergman, hacker and technologist at-large, is the director of engineering at Wikia. He provides the technical backbone necessary for Wikia’s mission to compile and index the world’s knowledge. He is also an enthusiastic apologist for federated identity and a board member of the OpenID Foundation. In past lives, he’s built high volume financial trading systems, re-implemented Perl 5’s threading system, wrote djabberd, managed LiveJournal’s engineering team, and served as operations architect at Six Apart. His current interests extend to encompass semantic search, large scale infrastructure, open source development, federated instant messaging, neurotransmitters, and the future of cyborgs.

In his 25 year career running and counseling companies, Robert has served as CEO and President and provided strategic management, banking and legal services to a variety of ventures with a focus in the broadcasting, marketing, advertising and software industries. Robert speaks and writes often on the need for greater accountability in marketing and the means of maximizing returns from online advertising.

Beriker is the CEO of Efficient Frontier, one of the industry’s first pay-per-click search engine marketing solutions, Beriker is an expert in search marketing and is often called upon to speak at industry events. In the past year, Beriker has presented at the Search Engine Strategies Conference and Expo, as well as Commission Junction University, the premier pay-for-performance industry event for publishers and advertisers.

Before joining Efficient Frontier, Beriker held Vice President, Senior Vice President and General Manager positions at ValueClick, one of the world’s largest providers of online marketing services through its ValueClick Media, Mediaplex, Commission Junction, and Pricerunner brands. At ValueClick, Beriker led the company’s search marketing initiatives, including its pay-per-click search platform, Search123, and its full-service search engine marketing services offering, Commission Junction Search. Beriker was the founder and CEO of Search123 until the company was acquired by ValueClick in May 2003.

Scott Berkun is an author, public speaker and consultant. He wrote the bestsellers Making things happen (formerly titled The art of project management) and The Myths of Innovation for O’Reilly, teaches creative thinking at the University of Washington, and writes on management, creative thinking and design at www.scottberkun.com.

Josh, a vice president at Forrester, is one of Forrester’s most senior and most frequently quoted research analysts.

Josh joined Forrester in 1995. In 1996, he created the Technographics segmentation, a classification of consumers according to how they approach technology. Forrester has used this segmentation as the basis of its consumer research offering, also called Technographics, since 1997.

Josh is best known for his analysis of television. In an interview for 60 Minutes, Mike Wallace identified Josh as “the top TV industry analyst at Forrester Research, the authority on where TV is going.” He led Forrester’s analysis of technology change created by devices like digital video recorders, HDTV, and online video. Josh advises senior figures in the media and electronics industry and chaired Forrester’s 2002 Television Summit, an event that was covered live on CNBC.

In 2007, Josh began work on a book, Groundswell, which describes how people with social technologies like blogs, wikis, MySpace, and YouTube will threaten institutions of all kinds, and how companies can succeed in the face of this change. Josh’s coauthor for Groundswell is the primary Forrester analyst researching social media, Charlene Li. Groundswell will be published in 2008.

Lauren Bigelow, General Manger & SVP Marketing of WeeWorld Inc., has more than 20 years of experience leading pioneering interactive media companies that push online content, self-expression and marketing to the next level. From mobile and Web-based models, to virtual worlds and social networking communities, Lauren has a proven track record in emerging technology and currently leads WeeWorld’s North American growth strategy, as well as product management and marketing worldwide. Lauren has held executive positions at emerging technology companies such as Lycos, AltaVista, Mobot ( mobile picture recognition) , and SkyGo ( mobile advertising now part of Enpocket). Honored as one of the “Top 25 Most Wired Women in Boston,” Lauren regularly provides insight at industry events.

Biography coming soon.

René Bonvanie brings nearly 25 years of executive management and marketing experience in the enterprise software industry to Serena. At Serena, Mr. Bonvanie’s responsibilities include developing business and marketing strategies to consolidate Serena’s position as the leader in application lifecycle management (ALM) and capitalize on future trends in application development, such as Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), Web services, and Software-as-a-Service. He also leads Serena’s efforts to develop partner relationships and go-to-market activities for new products and services. Before joining Serena, Mr. Bonvanie served as SVP and GM of AppExchange and Developer Relations at salesforce.com. Prior to that, Mr. Bonvanie served as senior vice president of global marketing at SAP, chief marketing officer at Business Objects, senior vice president of worldwide marketing at VERITAS Software Corporation, vice president of product marketing at Oracle Corporation, and senior sales and marketing positions at Ingres. Mr. Bonvanie holds a bachelor’s degree in Economics from Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, Netherlands. He lives with his wife Marie and three sons in Foster City, CA.

The /Messengers is not a band, although it sounds like one. It’s just is the name I dreamed up for my consulting business back in 2007.

I am best known these days for my writing (and the thinking behind it, I hope) at /Message, hence the /Messengers. I am obsessed with social tools, and their impact on business, media, and society. I coined the term “social tools” in 1999, the same year I started blogging, and I haven’t looked back since.

My work is principally oriented toward the theory and practice of social web application design and development, as well as related product strategy (like the activities formerly known as marketing).

I am often asked to bring in other consultants or organizations, which I do gladly and eagerly. So, I consider myself the front man of a constantly shifting collaborative network, a band of doers and thinkers, designers and developers. Sometimes it’s a solo act, sometimes a duo, and when needed a combo. I am having a lot of fun.

A seven-time Hugo and one-time Nebula Award loser, Kent Brewster is pretty sure that the Internet is his generation’s revenge for not being allowed to go to the Moon. When not building prototypes for Yahoo, he blogs at Brewster’s Field Guide to Web 2.666.

Mr. Brooks is an attorney with more than 30 years of legal and business experience, primarily in high-tech industries. In addition to years of private law practice in California and Washington, D.C., he has been a senior executive in companies that raised more than $100 million in venture capital investment and has acted as lead counsel or the senior executive in more than 100 closed M&A transactions. Mr. Brooks served as the senior legal advisor for MicroAge, Computerland, and USWeb, co-founded Centegy Corp, and also served as COO of Unicess Networks and SVP Business Development of Wine.com (formerly Virtual Vineyards). He is a graduate of the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service and the University of Maryland School of Law.

Russell is one of the leading experts on mobile marketing, having overseen nearly 3,000 campaigns since 2000. MobHappy, his blog about mobile technology and mobile marketing, is one of the most popular on the web focusing on this area. Before specializing in mobile, he spent over 15 years working in marketing, including advising leading brands such as Coca-Cola, Diageo, Texaco and Mars. In 2000, he was recruited to be Director of Marketing of mobile marketing start up, ZagMe, one of the leading pioneers in mobile advertising. Russell learned about AdMob soon after the launch and joined as the first employee, with the remit of launching AdMob into the EMEA market.

Russell is currently Vice-Chair of the Board of The Mobile Marketing Association for EMEA, is a regular speaker on mobile at conferences throughout the world and has published many articles, as well as a white paper on location based marketing.

Nathan Buggia is the lead program manager for the Live Search Webmaster Center, Microsoft’s suite of tools designed to help search marketing professionals get better results from Live Search. Buggia has overall responsibility for all the Webmaster Center tools as well as external and internal evangelism for search engine optimization.

Previously, Buggia spent six years in Microsoft’s Server and Tools division, most recently as business manager for the Solution Accelerator Group. The division builds end-to-end solutions for IT and enterprise customers in Security, Management, Systems Architecture and Interoperability.

Nathan has been working in various aspects of web technology since his first web dev job in 1997, doing PERL and CGI. Since then he has worked in Java, C++/CGI, ASP.Net, Systems Administration, Systems Architecture, and Bio-informatics.

Elisa Camahort is a co-founder and COO of BlogHer, managing its events, marketing and corporate operations. A marketing executive with 17 years of experience in Silicon Valley, Elisa left her life in high tech product management to go online and join the social media world, and to help companies go there too.

She co-founded BlogHer as a labor of love in 2005 with Jory Des Jardins and Lisa Stone, and in two short years BlogHer has grown to be the number-one guide to and source for blogs by women. BlogHer serves its mission of creating opportunities for education, exposure, community and economic empowerment with its web community, sold-out conferences and advertising network that now features nearly 1,000 network members.

Elisa Camahort was at the vanguard of professional and business blogging and currently writes nine blogs. She blogs at various times about marketing, health issues, green and eco-conscious living, being a vegan, and reality TV talent shows like American Idol and Project Runway! She’s a frequent public speaker in the areas of business blogging and online community, and has been published frequently, including her monthly column for the Silicon Valley Metro, Silicon Veggie.

David Campbell is a Microsoft Technical Fellow working in the Data Storage Platform division where he is responsible for driving technical strategy and architecture of Microsoft SQL Server and other storage products. He also helps drive architectural alignment across Microsoft’s Server and Tools division. Dave’s current projects and interests include extreme scale data processing and programmatic data services.

Campbell joined Microsoft in 1994 as a developer and architect on the SQL Server Storage Engine team that was principally responsible for rewriting the core engine of SQL Server for SQL Server Version 7.0. He has held a variety of roles within the SQL Server division, including product level architect, and General Manager of product development.

Prior to Microsoft, Campbell worked at Digital Equipment Corporation on the DEC Rdb and DEC DBMS product development teams.

Campbell holds several patents in the data management, schema and software quality realms. He is a frequent speaker at industry and research conferences on a wide variety of data management and software development topics.

Dave lives in Sammamish, WA with his wife Marcia and two teenage sons.

David founded WebPartz Inc. which was acquired by iUpload in March of 2003. Prior to forming WebPartz, he spent 11 years at Microsoft where he had held various positions including Manager of Internet Strategy, Marketing Manager Knowledge Management, Content Management, and eCommerce products. In each of these roles he worked closely with large corporations rolling out the Microsoft platform and developing a business strategy. His last role was as Internet Strategy Manager where he oversaw sections of microsoft.com and Microsoft Canada’s Intranet.

Dan Catt, Senior Engineer for Flickr, has been interested in maps since the mid nineties, when he worked on a number of Kiosks and CD-ROMS for the National Parks of England and Wales. Mapping was put on the back burner for being too expensive in the UK, until Google launched their UK maps data early in 2005. Geobloggers.com was created with the aim of letting people share walks and experiences by placing Flickr photos onto the map using geotagging. Daniel created the first geotagged photo in March of 2005, by the end of the year there were over 100,000 geotagged images. He has worked with both pre and post official API Google Maps, Virtual Earth and pre beta Yahoo Maps, and can generally be found pushing the virtues of geoRSS as a way to share geo-data. Most recently, Dan helped create Flickr’s Places.

As the Director of Community at Flickr, Heather Champ oversees member activities for one of the world’s largest and most popular photo sharing communities. She joined the Flickr team in May 2005 and has seen the community grow to more than 23 million members who have shared more than 2 billion photos.

Heather is very much enamored with personal publishing on the Web, having launched her first home page in 1994 while working at the School of Architecture, Princeton University. She is an award-winning Web designer with more than ten years of experience maintaining her own site, hchamp.com, as well as the Mirror Project. Prior to joining Yahoo!, Heather also co-founded JPG Magazine with her husband Derek Powazek.

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.

Christopher D. Chapman (also known as m3mnoch) is an Entrepreneur, Technologist and utter Video Game Snob.

Founder of a Facebook application company, working to rapidly develop viral applications on the Ruby on Rails platform. Previously a Product Manager at Veoh.com and a Developer at Powerset

Rogelio (Ro) Choy is vice president of Business Development for RockYou. He is responsible for recruiting and managing partner relations. Before joining the RockYou executive team, Ro managed eBay’s online parts business as a Director at eBay Motors and also was responsible for managing Market Development at eBay, including operation of eBay’s U.S. wireless efforts. Prior to eBay, Ro co-founded Cima Systems, a leading VOIP software provider for auto dealers. Ro earned his MBA from Stanford University School of Business.

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. A popular speaker and moderator, Jeff participates in dozens of industry events throughout the year. These events range from local Silicon Valley panel discussions to international conferences, where he shares his passion for building Internet startups, angel and VC investing, innovation and entrepreneurship. Jeff has also produced a number of technology conferences and is a founding co-chair of the SDForum Search Special Interest Group. Jeff’s blog, Software Only, was one of the early venture capital blogs, started in 2004, where he primarily covered social media, search, online communities and investing. After a few years of active posting, Jeff switched to micro-blogging, and a less time consuming production, using Twitter and Pownce.

Prior to founding SoftTech VC, Jeff spent more than 16 years in the enterprise software world as an entrepreneur, senior executive and venture capitalist. Throughout his career, he was exposed to global markets leading development teams in Europe and on Wall Street, designing products sold internationally and investing in software infrastructure startups across the U.S. and Europe.

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. When he is not busy working, Jeff likes to spend time with his family and friends, cook, collect wine and wander around Outland on his hunter. He also skies, hikes, dives and plays golf so poorly it is not even funny.

Tom Coates works for Yahoo! Brickhouse where he develops new concepts in social software, future media and the web of data. His most recent project is Fire Eagle – a new location-brokerage system designed to make it possible for everything on the network to become location-aware.

He’s worked for many of the UK’s most prominent companies including Time Out, UpMyStreet and the BBC where he ran a small near-term R&D team exploring media navigation, annotation and distribution.

A regular speaker at conferences, Tom also writes extensively at plasticbag.org and runs the experimental online community barbelith.com.

Biography coming soon.

Blaine Cook is the Architect at Twitter. He is currently building and maintaining Twitter’s Jabber-based real-time backend infrastructure that tracks and distributes millions of updates every day to users on the Web, instant messaging, and SMS.

Lauren Cooney joined the Information Management CTO Office in January 2007, focusing on strategy and community evangelism around Web 2.0 and open source technologies and products. Prior to that, Cooney worked on Apache Geronimo as the IBM lead for building community and programs. Before coming to IBM in 2005, she ran dev2dev and led developer marketing and community at BEA Systems Inc., where she started the BEA dev2dev User Group Program, Technical Evangelist program, spearheaded the O’Reilly/dev2dev partnership and led several other successful community and technical initiatives.

Claude Courbois is Associate Vice President for Data Product Research and Development at the NASDAQ OMX Group. He is responsible for developing innovative market data products designed to increase profits for investors and market participants. An online collection of the data tools is available at the NASDAQ DataStore, which can be accessed at www.data.nasdaq.com.

Mr. Courbois has been with NASDAQ OMX since 2000, and previously held positions as Director of Financial and Market Analysis for the company’s Data Products division and as Economist in its Economic Research department.

Before arriving at NASDAQ OMX, he worked at the International Food Policy Research Institute as a research analyst specializing in the development of food production and markets in developing countries. Mr. Courbois has a PhD in economics from North Carolina State University and is a CFA charterholder.

Alistair is a principal at analyst firm Bitcurrent, and a frequent contributor to the GigaOm family of sites. Prior to Bitcurrent, Alistair co-founded Coradiant, 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.

Robert Currie has more than 15 years of experience leading early-stage tech companies in Silicon Valley including TiVo-acquired Strangeberry, a company whose technology enables TiVo to provide unique content to its set-top boxes.

Rob’s experience covers a range of markets including consumer products, enterprise and digital-media production. Prior to his role at Strangeberry, Rob co-founded wireless mobile software company Airgomo where he led product development for emerging 2.5G mobile technologies. He previously served as Marimba’s vice president of engineering and Digidesign/Avid’s vice president of software engineering, each from early stage through IPO.

Rob holds a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering and computer science from the University of California, Berkeley and a MBA from the University of Chicago. He is also a member of the board of the Stanford Jazz Workshop and Funambol Inc., an open-source mobile software company.

Matt Cutts joined Google as a software engineer in January 2000 and currently heads up the Webspam team and wrote SafeSearch, which is Google’s family filter. In addition to his experience at Google, Cutts held a top-secret clearance while working for the Department of Defense, and also worked at a game engine company. He claims that Google is the most fun by far.

Marc Davis is Social Media Guru at Yahoo! Inc. His work focuses on creating the technology and applications that will enable daily media consumers to become daily media producers. His research encompasses the theory, design, and development of digital media systems that leverage contextual metadata and the power of community to enable people around the world to produce, share, and remix media.

Marc Davis earned his B.A. in the College of Letters at Wesleyan University, his M.A. in Literary Theory and Philosophy at the University of Konstanz in Germany, and his Ph.D. in Media Arts and Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Laboratory. From 1993 to 1998 at Interval Research Corporation, he led research and development teams in creating patented automatic media production technology. In 1997, he was an invited contributor to the 50th Anniversary Edition of the Communications of the ACM, for which he wrote a vision piece about the next 50 years of media technology. From 1999 to 2002, Marc Davis was Chairman and Chief Technology Officer of Amova, Inc., a developer of media automation and personalization technology. From 2002 to 2005 at the UC Berkeley School of Information, Prof. Davis directed Garage Cinema Research whose projects included: Mobile Media Metadata; the Social Uses of Personal Media; Media Streams Metadata Exchange; Active Capture; and Adaptive Media. At UC Berkeley, Prof. Davis was also a Co-Founder of the interdisciplinary UC Berkeley Center for New Media (CNM). In 2005, Prof. Davis worked with Yahoo! Inc. and UC Berkeley to launch Yahoo! Research Berkeley, a research partnership to explore and invent social media and mobile media technology and applications that will enable people to create, describe, find, share, and remix media on the web. In 2006, Marc Davis joined Yahoo! Inc. as “Social Media Guru” to formulate strategy and take action to invent and realize the future of social media and mobile media.

Michiel de Boer, PhD, is director of product development at Zecco.com, the online trading and investment community. He has extensive experience with new business development and entrepreneurial processes at both established and start-up firms. During the first digital wave in the 1990s, he conducted his doctoral research at the Erasmus University, Rotterdam into the impact of multimedia on the publishing industry. During the turbulent times of digitalization impacting the photo imaging industry, he was managing director at the Technotape Group, a multi-national supplier to this industry. In between, he has acted as consultant with Gemini Consulting as well as independently to a wide variety of industries and companies dealing with strategic change.

At TripIt, Andy’s job is to keep the site running as smoothly as a perfect vacation. A dedicated do-it-yourself (DIY) travel planner, Andy packs his vacations full of sightseeing, eating and just hanging out: “For me, traveling is all about doing it like the locals and getting a flavor of what daily life is like in a given place.”

Andy came to TripIt with more than 13 years of software development and operations experience. Prior to joining TripIt, Andy was director of Suites Engineering at Opsware, Inc. (formerly Loudcloud) and was responsible for the engineering strategy for product suite integration. Before Opsware, Andy was chief technology officer for the real estate portal CityRealty.com and founder and chief engineer for the Internet consulting firm Mediabridge Infosystems. Andy has a B.S. in Electrical Engineering and an M.S. in Computer Science from Columbia University.

As group manager for the Automated Service Agent group at Microsoft, Clinton Dickey leads the team is responsible for shaping and delivering the ASA product and its business. In this capacity, Dickey works closely with customers and partners to help define the product to help resolve customer care issues and enhance their customer service experience.

Dickey joined Microsoft in 2001 working in various roles within the Communications Sector, including playing a role in the acquisition of Colloquis in October, 2006.

Prior to joining Microsoft, Dickey was a product manager for the first digital simultaneous voice and data modem at Prometheus. Previously, he worked for Inter-Tel, Inc., where he was a product manager for the first digital VoIP gateway.

Dickey holds an M.B.A. from Portland State University and a bachelor’s degree in computer science from the University of Oregon.

In his spare time you may find Dickey fueling his love of video games with his three sons and wife of 15 years.

Brian J. Dillard joined Pathfinder Associates in August 2007. His title: RIA Evangelist. After 12 years of focusing on the view layer of large consumer webapps, his role at Pathfinder Associates is one of research, development and ongoing commentary. He prototypes new rich UI features; contributes to open-source and client projects; and otherwise helps build Pathfinder’s competency in the Ajax world. A frequent contributor to the Agile Ajax blog, he is also the project lead on Really Simple History, a JavaScript library for Ajax bookmark and back-button management. Prior to his current assignment, Brian spent significant chunks of time at Orbitz, United Airlines, Reflect.com and Townsend Analytics, Ltd. He holds a bachelor’s degree in English and journalism from Michigan State University. Brian is passionate about JavaScript but also makes room in his heart for cycling, comic books, science fiction, tattoos and other pastimes befitting a computer nerd.

Matt Domo is the General Manager for Amazon SimpleDB at Amazon Web Services where he sets the business and technical product strategy for Amazon SimpleDB. Matt also helps drive product and technical alignment with the other the utility computing components of the Amazon Web Services platform.

Matt joined Amazon in 2005 as Director of Enterprise Commerce Services where he lead the engineering efforts for Enterprise multi-channel technology solutions. Prior to Amazon, Matt worked at Microsoft Corporation in senior engineering positions on the SQL Server, bCentral, and Speech Server product development teams.

Bob Duffy is a former VP of Technical Services for Onsite Broadband and Phatpipe having established their online ecommerce strategies in the dot com era. Bob joined Intel in 2005 managing the online small business strategies. In 2006 Bob established a community marketing strategy for Intel and launched Open Port, Intel’s first end user community in August of 2007. Bob is now the Social Media Operations Managers at Intel working to evangalize new strategies and guidelines for further adoption of social media at Intel

Paul was part of the executive team at MongoMusic, which was acquired by Microsoft in 2000. Paul held group management positions at MSN Entertainment over product management, quality management, operations, and business management. Paul left Microsoft as the Group Product Manager of MSN Entertainment. Before MongoMusic and Microsoft, Paul was a developer at Hewlett Packard. Paul hails from San Luis Obispo, and graduated from California Polytechnic University.

Sam Ee is a graduate of the University of Louisville with a degree in Computer Science and Engineering Mathematics. Before becoming a full time graphics designer Sam specialized in .NET C# programming. He began his career at MIVA as an intern nearly ten years ago, designing and programming cursors and icons. Over the years he has accelerated in his career and from developing fast prototypes of websites to test their marketability to creating screensavers for screensavers.com, a MIVA Direct property. Today Sam Ee is the art manager and principle designer for MIVA Direct.

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.

Rooly has more than nine years of executive experience in Internet marketing and advertising, with a focus on product development. Previously, he served on the board of Metacafe, and held positions as a GM at SmartShopper and as VP of Products & Marketing at Hotbar.com. Rooly holds a Bachelor of Architecture degree from the Pratt Institute in New York City.

Kellan Elliott-McCrea works on Flickr hacking on technological solutions to social problems.

Colin combines machine learning and semantic analysis into a deadly one-two punch against information entropy and noisy data. The results of his efforts appear as millions of facts in Freebase. Prior to joining Metaweb, Colin helped users organize their world through his work on the IRIS semantic desktop project at SRI.

Scott Fegette is the Technical Product Manager for Dreamweaver at Adobe. Before joining the Dreamweaver team, he was both a Flash Video evangelist and an engineering manager on the Macromedia web team responsible for building the site infrastructure, services and architecture that delivers Adobe.com to this day.

Before joining Macromedia in 2000, Scott spent 6 years building his skills at web design and development from it’s very beginning as the director of online services for former Santa Barbara-based software developers MetaCreations- contributing both global site design and server-side framework code, and managing a team of 8 designers and developers to support the site.

Aside from speaking worldwide on web development and standards, video production and online communities, Scott’s also a professional musician and independent photographer/videographer in his off-hours.

Konrad co-founded Quantcast to improve the reach and effectiveness of online advertising through open data and scalable computing. He has 12 years of experience in high volume transactional analytics and measurement, pattern recognition and fraud detection. Previously, Konrad co-founded Searchspace (now Fortent) the leading provider of terrorist financing detection and anti-money laundering software to the world’s financial services industry. Earlier, Konrad was a Research Fellow in the Intelligent Systems Laboratory at University College London, from which he holds a BSc in Computer Science.

Scott Fleckenstein has been developing web application professionally for seven years, most recently constructing getsatisfaction.com from the ground up.

Brian Fling has been a leader in the field of mobile experience for over five years. He has worked with several Fortune 500 companies to help design and develop their mobile experiences. Brian is a frequent speaker and author on the issues on mobile design, the mobile web and mobile user experience. He authored the dotMobi Mobile Web Developers Guide (dev.mobi), the first free publication to cover mobile web design and development from start to finish. Brian also runs one of the largest online communities focused on mobile design (mobiledesign.org).

Lyle Fong is the CEO & Co-Founder of Lithium Technologies, a leading on-demand provider of enterprise communities, including discussion forums, social networking, and blogs. Lithium powers some of the largest communities in the world for some of the largest companies in the world, including Dell, AT&T, Sony, Symantec and others.

Prior to starting Lithium Technologies, Lyle co-founded GX Media, where he was the CTO. He drove the development of Gamers.com, which was rated the #1 independent gaming portal by Nielsen NetRatings. Lyle was instrumental in raising a total of $15M in funding led by CMGI, negotiating multi-million dollar technology licensing deals with Dell, Sony, AltaVista, and Ziff-Davis, and spearheading the spin-off of Lithium Technologies. Lyle was also the driving force behind the creation of technologies for professional gaming, including a global rankings system, tournament engine, and a real-time match reporting and spectating system. These technologies were the key success factors behind the AMD PGL, the most successful and highly acclaimed professional gaming league to date with over 100 million media impressions, and also numerous tournaments for Sega.

Before Lithium Technologies and GX Media, Lyle launched two other startups – a specialized computer services business which has since expanded into one of the largest ISPs in China and a software consulting business, NetStreams.

Lyle studied at UC Berkeley, majoring in Computer Science, where he received the Hewlett-Packard Scholarship Award and National Youth Leadership Award. Lyle is also the recipient of the 2008 Anheuser-Busch University of Arizona Entrepreneur-in-Residence Award.

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.

Dawn Foster is the Director of Developer Relations at Jive Software, a collaboration software company in Portland, OR. She has more than 12 years of experience in technology and software with expertise in open source software, web 2.0, blogging, and community building. Dawn is the author of Fast Wonder: An Open Culture Blog (fastwonderblog.com), organizer for Portland BarCamp / Ignite Portland activities, and is a member of the Portland Open Source Software Entrepreneurs (POSSE). Previously, Dawn worked at Compiere, Intel, and a Midwestern manufacturing company in positions ranging from Unix system administrator to market researcher to open source strategist.

Vanessa Fox, Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Ignition, is a noted technology blogger who has been cited in publications such as USA Today and the London Times. She’s been building websites since 1995 and has been involved with product strategy in a number of industries including telecom, retail, and wireless. A Google alumnus, she created Google’s Webmaster Central, designed to help site owners improve their web sites and gain more visitors from search. Vanessa writes for a variety of publications, particularly as Features Editor for SearchEngineLand.com, hosts a weekly show on webmasterradio.fm, and consults with clients on building online communities and on internet marketing. Read her observerations on the web 2.0 world at vanessafoxnude.com.

David Friedberg currently serves as the CEO of WeatherBill, having founded the company in 2006. Prior to founding WeatherBill, David was with Google, where he joined as one of the founding members of the company’s Corprate Development team. David managed a number of strategic projects for Google, including identifying and leading several of Google’s largest acquisitions. David also served as a Business Product Manager for AdWords – Google’s primary revenue source. Prior to Google, David spent several years working in private equity and investment banking. He has invested in and advised dozens of companies in the technology industry. Earlier, David worked at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where he led several projects as a mathematical programmer. David received his BA in Astrophysics from UC Berkeley.

Liz Gannes is Editor of NewTeeVee, launched in December 2006 as a dedicated outlet for the online video industry coverage. She is also a staff writer at GigaOM.com.

Liz has built NewTeeVee to be the must-read chronicle of the web video revolution, developing a community of readers for events such as the NewTeeVee Pier Screenings and now NewTeeVee Live. She speaks often about video at conferences such as Web 2.0, the Web Video Summit, and Streaming Media West. Prior to GigaOM, she wrote for the Red Herring.

Jim Gargan, Vice President, Business Line Executive, Modular Systems, leads marketing and product strategy and execution for the IBM’s multi-billion-dollar x86 business —the fastest growing x86 business in the world. Jim also serves as executive sponsor of “Express Seller,” an IBM initiative to advance productivity and profitability of Business Partners.

Jim brings extensive experience in branding, strategy, product marketing and operations to his current role as brand leader. Earlier in his IBM career, he was instrumental in creating and launching IBM’s x86 systems, particularly as chief marketing strategist for X-Architecture, the blueprint for IBM innovation and differentiation in the otherwise commoditized x86 market. He has more recently served as Vice President, Operations, System x, where he led an analysis and transformation of the System x supply chain. Experience outside of IBM has given Jim a broad and unique industry perspective. He served three years as Senior Vice President, Worldwide Marketing and Chief Marketing Officer at Stratus, where he was responsible for all aspects of business development, product marketing, and corporate communications. Jim also spent 15 years at Digital Equipment Corporation, lastly as director of strategic alliances for commercial desktops.

Jim has an MBA from the Southern New Hampshire University Graduate School of Business, and he earned his B.S. in Business Administration from the University of New Hampshire.

Jeff Garon brings more than 25 years of senior financial, strategic and operating expertise to Etelos. Most recently, Jeff was Managing Director of Investment Banking responsible for West Coast activities at Kaufman Bros., L.P. (KBRO). Prior to KBRO he served as VP/CFO of Tripath Technology, Inc.; as CFO/VP of Finance and Administration and Secretary of Silicon Storage Technology, Inc.; as President of the Garon Financial Group, Inc., a Silicon Valley venture capital and venture consulting firm; and as VP/CFO of Monster Cable Products, Inc. Prior, he held various senior positions with Visual Edge Technology, Inc., Oracle Corporation, Ashton-Tate Corporation and Teledyne Microelectronics. He is a graduate of California State University, Northridge and has an MBA from Loyola Marymount University.

Kevin is the technical lead for the Google App Engine project. He joined Google in 2004 and spent a number of years in Google’s systems infrastructure group working on the cluster management systems that underly Google’s products and services. Kevin is also the creator of Google Suggest, a product which provides interactive search suggestions as users type.

Prior to joining Google, Kevin worked with the Advanced Internet Technology group at IBM, where he focused on developer tools.

Kevin holds a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree in comp