Future Insights Live Speaker Class of 2012
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Aaron Bedra
Aaron is a senior engineer at Groupon where he helps teams design and code security focused software. Aaron works as a technical lead, speaker, and author. Aaron is a frequent contributor to the Clojure language and is the author of “Rails Security Audit”, a co-author of “Programming Clojure 2nd Edition”, and a co-author of the upcoming "Practical Software Security" book.
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Aarron Walter
Aarron Walter is the lead user experience designer for MailChimp, where he socializes with primates and ponders ways to make interfaces more human. Aarron is the author of Designing for Emotion, the purple stripe in the rainbow of knowledge from A Book Apart. He lives with his wife and son in Athens, Georgia, and is a wannabe barista. He tweets about design under the moniker @aarron on Twitter.
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Adam Wiggins
Adam is a hacker, entrepreneur, and founder and CTO of Heroku. He specializes in developer experience, systematic design, and no-holds-barred execution.
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Alan Lepofsky
Alan Lepofsky - VP and Principal Analyst, Constellation Research. With almost two decades of experience in the software industry, Alan helps clients and vendors understand how to build, purchase and deploy collaboration solutions. Alan focuses on how collaboration tools can help businesses enhance their business processes by improving communication and transparency of information.
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Amanda Silver
Amanda Silver has been with Microsoft since 2001. She’s been on the Visual Studio team throughout her tenure working on various things from programming language design, high performance compilers and runtimes, to developing games for the Xbox and extensions for Office. She spent several years designing VB.NET through the golden age of Generics, LINQ, and Integrated XML. Most recently, she's been focused on ensuring that Microsoft is home to the world’s fastest and most standards compliant JavaScript engine.
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Amandeep Khurana
Amandeep is a Solutions Architect at Cloudera. Prior to Cloudera, he was at Amazon Web Services, where he was a developer on the Elastic MapReduce team. Before working for Amazon, Amandeep attended University of California, Santa Cruz, where he attained his MS in Computer Science, and also worked part time at Cisco Systems where he was responsible for building a data integration framework using Hadoop and HBase.
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App It Out Panel
Have you recently developed a web or mobile app you're proud of? Now's the time to show it off. Three finalists will be selected to pitch their apps LIVE on stage at Future Insights Live 2013 in front of 1,000 fellow developers and designers! Winners are selected by an esteemed panel of judges, including some of the top developers, entrepreneurs and investors in the world. The 2013 App It Out champion takes home a title belt, a bottle of bubbly, and an all-expenses trip (plus speaking gig) to an upcoming Future Insights conference! Simply head to our blog for details on how to enter.
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Aral Balkan
Aral Balkan is a user experience designer and developer working to improve the world through design that informs, empowers, amuses, and delights.
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Ben Alman
Ben Alman currently works at Bocoup, where he is responsible for the development of intermediate and advanced JavaScript and jQuery training curricula, as well as the creation and maintenance of JavaScript-based tools and utilities. In addition to his training and client work at Bocoup, Ben writes articles and gives presentations advocating JavaScript and jQuery best practices. Ben has created and maintains a number of very popular open source JavaScript projects and jQuery plugins and is a frequent contributor to the open source jQuery, jQuery Mobile and Modernizr projects. As an avid photographer and funk bass player, Ben loves spending time taking photos and jamming in the greater Boston area.
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Ben Coe
Ben holds an MSc specializing in Natural Language Processing from the University of Guelph. He put this to good use, co-founding the cloud-based search and productivity application Attachments.me. He's a wannabe professional rock-climber, an amateur musician, and a bagel aficionado.
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Ben Milne
Ben Milne, CEO and Co-Founder of Dwolla, started his first company, Elemental Designs, at the age of 18. Ben began leveraging the internet to drop ship custom made speakers. His adventures lead him all over the world, establishing operations in Southern Asia and California. An original $1,200 investment would turn into a multi-million dollar company by the age of 22. After heavy research in 2008, Ben and partner, Shane Neuerburg, approached a Midwestern bank with an idea to establish a new payment network that would upend the financial services industries. They called it Dwolla. Ben would sell Elemental Designs to focus on the new project. In 2009, the privately funded Dwolla launched in Iowa and California, boasting the nation’s cheapest payment platform of only 25 cents per transaction. In 2010, Dwolla introduced the first technology to empower seamless payments leveraging users’ social networks, officially pioneering social payments. In 2011, Dwolla launched the world’s first geo-location based mobile payments. Ben also has extensive community experience in speaking, mentoring, and leadership programs.
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Boris Chan
Boris Chan is a Principal at Xtreme Labs, leading product development and innovation efforts. His work with startups and big brands has been featured in major publications like the Wall Street Journal, New York Times and TechCrunch. He is known around Canada as a respected mobile expert, and was also nominated as Developer of the Year by the Canadian New Media Awards and speaks on mobile, social and passion at events like TEDxYouth@Toronto, ATOMiC and FITC Mobile.
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Brad Abrams
Brad Abrams is a product manager for the Cloud Platform team at Google. He has over 15 years building developer platforms including Google Plugin for Eclipse and before joining Google, helping create the Common Language Runtime and the .NET Framework. He is author of several books from Addison Wesley including “Framework Design Guidelines”.
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Brian LeRoux
Brian LeRoux is a contributor to the popular PhoneGap open source framework and is the creator of XUI and Lawnchair. Suffice to say, Brian believes that the future of the Web is mobile and will depend on web standards, open source and hackers, like you.
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Brian Prince
Brian H. Prince is a Principal Cloud Evangelist for Microsoft, based in the US. He gets super excited whenever he talks about technology, especially cloud computing, patterns, and practices. His job is to help customers strategically leverage technology, and help them bring their architecture to a super level. Further, he is a co-founder of the non-profit organization CodeMash (www.codemash.org). He speaks at various international technology conferences. Brian is the co-author of “Azure in Action”, published by Manning Press.
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Brian Wong
Founder and CEO of @kiip. Former Digg'er. Nomad by choice. Explorer.
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Bryan Haggerty
Bryan Haggerty specializes in mobile design at Twitter, creating experiences for iPhone, iPad, Android, and Mobile Web. He also has a background in mobile research and previously designed and launched LinkedIn's first mobile products.
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Bulat Shakirzyanov
Bulat Shakirzyanov, a.k.a. avalanche123, is a software alchemist at Twilio who holds a black belt in test-fu. He is a member of the Doctrine Project core team, Symfony2 fan and contributor, geek and talks about himself in third person.
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Carl Smith
Owner and founder of nGen Works, Carl Smith runs an unconventional distributed team that works with businesses to redefine their identities and ideals. Carl has made a name for himself in client services by creating a new framework for how we get things done, and by enabling us to realign our creative communities. When he’s not conducting riveting business experiments with his nGeneers or consulting for global trendsetters, he’s busy sculpting a new face for the world of work.
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Chad Pytel
Chad Pytel is founder and CEO of thoughtbot, a leading Ruby on Rails development firm and the creators of popular plugins like paperclip, factory_girl, shoulda, and well as their own products Airbrake, Trajectory, Copycopter and Radish Chad is the author of Rails AntiPatterns and Pro Active Record, and is currently at work on Backbone.js on Rails He has spoken at numerous conferences around the world. He lives in Newton, MA with his wife and two children.
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Chris Byers
Chris is the CEO of Formstack and runs the day to day operations of the company. He has been a fan/user of Formstack since 2006, assisted in the first round of funding, and joined the team in 2010. His most recent past experiences include co-founding and running an international non-profit while based in London, England & Krakow, Poland. While living in Europe he and his wife, Dana, once packed up the kids and went on a 40 day journey to 10 countries which included South Africa. Chris also served as a Vice President of Investor Relations and Financing for a regional health care company.
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Chris Coyier
Chris runs the web design blog and community site CSS-Tricks and is also responsible for the awesome CodePen. He co-authored the book and blog Digging Into WordPress. He likes banjos, artichokes, and serial sci-fi television shows.
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Chris Eppstein
Chris Eppstein is a Software Architect at Caring.com, with over 12 years of experience building web sites and web applications. He is the creator of the Compass stylesheet framework, and a Sass core team member and has many other contributions in the Ruby open source community. Chris graduated from the world-renowned California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in 2000 with a degree in Software Engineering.
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Dan Cederholm
Dan Cederholm is a Web designer, author, husband, and father living in Salem, Massachusetts. He’s the founder of SimpleBits, a tiny design studio and the co-founder of Dribbble. A recognized expert in the field of standards-based Web design, Dan has worked with Google, MTV, Yahoo, ESPN, Fast Company, Blogger, Odeo, and others. He embraces flexible, adaptable design using Web standards throughout his design work, writing, and speaking. Dan is the author of two bestselling books: Bulletproof Web Design: Improving flexibility and protecting against worst-case scenarios with XHTML and CSS, Second Edition, and Web Standards Solutions: The Markup and Style Handbook. Dan runs the popular blog, also called SimpleBits, where he writes articles and commentary on the Web, technology, and life. He also plays a mean ukulele and occasionally wears a baseball cap.
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Dan James
Dan James is a co-founder and the CEO of the web development agency silverorange. Started in 1999, silverorange has worked with well known companies such as Digg, Mozilla, ESPN, Bebo, and Ning as well as lesser known (but just as awesome) companies like Horton Brasses and Veseys Seeds. An incessant entrepreneur, Dan continues to try new things. He and the team at silverorange launched ClusterShot.com, an open stock photography market in 2008. Recently, in his boldest and scariest move yet, he and his wife have taken over his family’s resort on the North shore of Prince Edward Island.
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Dave DeSandro
David DeSandro is a front-end developer with a flair for creative programming. He works at nclud in Washington DC, creating engaging, innovative interfaces. Exploring the uncharted waters of new web technologies, he thrives on pushing the boundaries of web design.
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Devrim Yasar
Devrim is the co-founder and CEO of Koding. Devrim was born geek, his first lines of code at 12 in qbasic, his first 3d animation with the first version of 3D Studio on 386DX. He started an outsourcing company sales office in Amsterdam with a few development offices in Ukraine, served as Assistant VP of IT at the 9th biggest bank in The Netherlands, raised a $1.5M for a mobile payment startup based in Istanbul, moved to the U.S. and became the CTO of a NY-based social network start-up, Buzzd / Localresponse. His last project is in the clouds, Koding, which aims to give a free development environment to every developer in the world, inside their browsers.
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Edward Boatman
Edward is a designer and creative thinker who can always find beauty and inspiration in the world around him. Edward is one of the founders of The Noun Project, a growing open sourced visual library of the symbols and icons that form the world’s visual language. Trained in design and architecture, he has always been fascinated by hieroglyphics and modern day symbols, and their ability as a visual communication tool to transcend cultural differences.
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Elmer Thomas
Elmer Thomas is a Developer Evangelist at SendGrid. He works with developers at hackdays and conferences to further simplify the process of integrating with SendGrid’s APIs and to discover what new email challenges need to be conquered. When not on the road, he works on making life for developers using SendGrid frictionless.
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Farhan Thawar
Named one of “Toronto’s Top 25 Most Powerful People In 2010”, Farhan is a well-known and respected figure in the city’s tech community. Before joining the Xtreme team, Farhan held the positions of Chief Software Architect at Acheivers, (formally I Love Rewards), the Head of Search & MSN Platform for Microsoft Canada and Technical Lead at Trilogy Software. In addition to being a programming and engineering guru for Xtreme Labs, Farhan also uses his wealth of industry and mobile expertise to mentor aspiring mobile and tech startups. Farhan has a degree in Computer Science from the University of Waterloo and an MBA in Financial Engineering from Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto.
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Gabe Rivera
Gabe Rivera founded and leads Techmeme. He enjoys cooking, napping, and encouraging people to fight each other online. He's not a jerk, but plays one on Twitter. He lives in San Francisco.
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George Ortiz
George Ortiz is a part-time developer and full-time entrepreneur from the silicon slopes of Salt Lake City, Utah. He is currently the Co-Founder and CTO of Explorer.io, a startup centered around delivering social engagement layers to outdoor retailers. George has also recently founded PressTrends, an analytics platform for WordPress. He continues to speak and advise startups throughout the west.
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Giorgio Sardo
Giorgio Sardo is a Director of the Windows Evangelism group at Microsoft Corp. Winner of the Imagine Cup worldwide championship, nominated as Best Consultant of the Year from the British Computer Society, Giorgio moved in early 2009 to the Microsoft headquarters in Redmond to focus on the future of the Web. Giorgio is a popular speaker worldwide and in the last 5 years he has presented at hundreds of conferences around the globe. He is the mind behind many beautiful HTML5 applications and games available at www.beautyoftheweb.com and in the Windows Store.
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Glan Thomas
Glan Thomas is a Senior Front-end Games Engineer at Tapulous / Disney Mobile. He specializes in creating magical mobile web experiences. Prior to moving to the Bay Area in 2010, he worked as a web developer at the BBC in London and ran his own web consultancy. Glan has a Master of Engineering degree from Warwick University, rides a Buell motorcycle and has a chocolate labrador named Buddy.
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Harish Sivaramakrishnan
Harish Sivaramakrishnan is a developer evangelist at Adobe Systems, based out of Bangalore, India. He has over a decade of experience working in web technologies including HTML, JavaScript, Adobe Flex and Adobe Flash. Prior to joining the evangelist position, he was a Computer Scientist working in the Adobe Flex SDK team at Macromedia and Adobe. He is extremely passionate about dynamic programming languages, user experience and interaction design. His job takes him across the world to meet extremely passionate developers and gives me him opportunity to present at several leading tech conferences.
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Hilary Mason
Hilary is the lead scientist at bit.ly, where she is finding sense in vast data sets. She is a former computer science professor with a background in machine learning and data mining, has published numerous academic papers, and regularly releases code on her personal site, www.hilarymason.com. She has discovered two new species, loves to bake cookies, and asks way too many questions.
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Jacob Kaplan-Moss
Jacob Kaplan-Moss is one of the lead developers and co-creator of Django. Jacob's an experienced software developer with a focus on web application architecture. He's a consultant at Revolution Systems, where he helps companies deploy and scale websites using Python and Django. Jacob previously worked for the Lawrence Journal-World (http://ljworld.com/), a locally-owned newspaper in Lawrence, Kansas, where he helped develop and eventually open source Django.
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James Pearce
James is a technologist, writer, developer & practitioner who has been working with the mobile web for over a decade. He is Head of Mobile Developer Relations at Facebook. Previously he was the the Director of Developer Relations at Sencha Inc. and has a background in mobile startups, telecoms infrastructure and management consultancy. He speaks extensively on the topic of mobile web development, and has written books for both Wiley and Wrox. James led the development of mobiForge, DeviceAtlas and ready.mobi, and is the creator of tinySrc, the WordPress Mobile Pack, WhitherApps, modernizr-server and confess.js.
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James Ward
James Ward is a Principal Developer Evangelist at Heroku. Today he focuses on teaching developers how to deploy Java, Play! and Scala apps to the cloud. James frequently presents at conferences around the world such as JavaOne, Devoxx, and many other Java get-togethers. Along with Bruce Eckel, James co-authored First Steps in Flex. He has also published numerous screencasts, blogs, and technical articles. Starting with Pascal and Assembly in the 80?s, James found his passion for writing code. Beginning in the 90?s he began doing web development with HTML, Perl/CGI, then Java. After building a Flex and Java based customer service portal in 2004 for Pillar Data Systems he became a Technical Evangelist for Flex at Adobe. You can find him tweeting as @_JamesWard, answering questions on StackOverflow.com and posting code at github.com/jamesward.
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Jason Cahill
Jason is a co-founder of You vs. the Internet, a mobile game studio inside of Microsoft Studios focused on casual, competitive, cross-screen multi-player games. Jason is also the developer responsible for the server architecture and engineering behind their games. You can find us online atwordament.com, where we blog about the game and the engineering behind it.
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Jason Calacanis
Jason Calacanis is an Internet entrepreneur and former blogger. He has founded many companies including Silicon Alley Reporter and Weblogs, Inc. He is the founder of Mahalo.com and has been its CEO since 2007. Calacanis returned to podcasting on May 1, 2009 with his new program This Week In Startups.
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Jason Nazar
Jason Nazar is the Co-Founder and CEO of Docstoc.com, the premier online website for small businesses that provides the best quality and largest selection of documents and resources to help start, grow and manage your small business and professional life.
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Josh Clark
Josh Clark is a designer, developer, and author specializing in mobile design strategy and user experience. He’s author of the O’Reilly books “Tapworthy: Designing Great iPhone Apps” and “Best iPhone Apps: The Guide for Discriminating Downloaders.” Josh’s outfit Global Moxie offers consulting services and workshops to help creative companies build tapworthy mobile apps and effective websites.
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Ju-kay Kwek
Ju-kay is the product management lead for Google's Cloud Big Data initiative. In this role, he focuses on creating enterprise-class services that enable businesses to harness Google's unparalleled data processing infrastructure and algorithms to tackle their growing Big Data needs. Prior to Google, Ju-kay led product management for SOA and Application Performance Management at Wily Technology and CA Technologies. Ju-kay holds degrees from Carnegie Mellon University. He also holds patents in the areas of data-centric interfaces and multimodal sales applications.
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Karen McGrane
If the internet is more awesome than it was in 1995, Karen would like to claim a very tiny piece of the credit. For more than 15 years Karen has helped create more usable digital products through the power of user experience design and content strategy. Today, as Managing Partner at Bond Art + Science, she develops web strategies and interaction designs for publishers, financial services firms, and healthcare companies. Prior to starting Bond, Karen built the user-centered design practice at Razorfish in her role as VP and National Lead for User Experience. Karen is also on the faculty of the MFA in Interaction Design program at SVA in New York, where she teaches Design Management, which aims to teach students how to run successful projects, teams, and businesses.
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Laura Kalbag
Laura Kalbag is a designer easily excited by web design and development. Among her list of ever-changing pet subjects are mobile web, semantic web, web fonts and WordPress, but she's really fascinated by anything in the areas of web, mobile and design. Laura has been a freelancer for the whole of her professional life. She revels in working with small and meaningful clients, creating websites, apps, icons, illustrations and the odd logo.
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Leonard Souza
Leonard Souza loves instigating epic battles between the left and right hemispheres of his brain. Upon studying both Computer Science and Fine Art, he has worked hard at mashing the two disciplines into fun and exciting solutions to complicated problems. Today, he happily works for UniversalMind/SpatialKey as a Senior Experience Engineer, where he is given many opportunities to play with art and technology. Over the years, Leonard has been fortunate enough to work with several outstanding companies such as Panasonic, DirectTV, Intel, MGM, FedEX and Boeing, as well as many startups. Leonard lives in Las Vegas, Nevada with his wife and two young boys.
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Michael Salamon
Michael Salamon is lead experience architect at EffectiveUI, an award-winning and recognized leader in the design and development of custom desktop, mobile and rich Internet applications. With more than 20 years experience, Michael’s work spans print, Web, mobile, interactive, motion, illustration and animation. With a thorough history in the printing industry, Michael made the move to the Web with the rest of the chunky-black-glasses crowd and helped define interaction methods still used today. His clients have ranged from huge multi-national companies to modest one-person shops, including: Qwest, Quark, Intuit, Cendant (CheapTickets), JCPenney, Home Depot, Cabela’s, Dish Network, Staz, Ci-Ci’s Pizza and Northrop Grumman. He is an adjunct professor for the College of Arts and Media at the University of Colorado Denver.
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Mike Kus
Dreaming Everyday About Design
Mike Kus is a super creative web designer living and working in the UK. Hugely passionate about the web but with a history in Graphic Design and Illustration for print, Mike has transferred these skills online to take a fresh approach to his web design.
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Molly Holzschlag
Molly is the Senior Open Web Tech Strategist at Knowbility.org - a non-profit organization dedicated to bringing technology access to children and adults with disabilities. Her primary focus there is in using and encouraging Open Web technologies for highly effective, user-friendly and universally accessible Web sites and applications. A member of the W3C for nearly a decade, Molly works in the CSS Working Group as a group liaison and developer advocate. Author of over 35 industry books, including co-author of the acclaimed "Zen of CSS Design" with Dave Shea, Molly continues her 25th year in IT and contributes to a variety of publications and advocacy groups surrounding technology as it relates to the human experience.
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Navneet Joneja
Navneet Joneja is a product manager on the Google Cloud team, focusing on Google Cloud Storage. Prior to joining Google in 2011, Navneet led cloud initiatives at Yahoo and Amazon. Navneet has an MBA from the Haas School of Business at the University of California – Berkeley, and bachelor’s degree in computer engineering from Delhi University, India.
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Neil Patel
Neil Patel is the co-founder of 2 Internet companies: Crazy Egg and KISSmetrics. Through his entrepreneurial career he has helped large corporations such as Amazon, AOL, GM, HP and Viacom make more money from the web. By the age of 21 not only was he named one of the top influencers on the web according to the Wall Street Journal, but he was also named one of the top entrepreneurs in the nation by Entrepreneur magazine. Neil has also received Congressional Recognition from the U.S. House of Representatives for his work in the nonprofit sector.
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Paul Boag
Paul Boag has been working on the web since 1993. He is a User Experience Consultant for Headscape Ltd, a web design agency that he founded back in 2002. Paul also produces and hosts the longest running and popular web design podcast at boagworld. He is a regular speaker at conferences and author of the Website Owners Manual.
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Peter S. Magnusson
Peter is an Engineering Director at Google where he leads the Google Cloud Platform team. Before joining Google, he wrote the Simics simulator and founded Virtutech, acquired by Intel in 2010. He is a graduate of the Stockholm School of Economics, the KTH Royal Institute of Technology, and is a 2012 ACM Fellow.
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RJ Owen
RJ Owen is Lead Experience Planner at EffectiveUI, focusing on customer insight work, including ethnographic research, design validation, co-creation exercises, and expert design. In this role, he runs a variety of research methods to gain qualitative insight into a user’s needs and desires, and validates designs by performing user testing. He brainstorms with clients to invent new designs, and works with the interaction design team to actually design the application. RJ also plans the engagement, produces CI deliverables, and presents them to clients. RJ started his career as a software developer and spent 10 years working in C++, Java, and Flex before moving to the design research and customer insight team at EffectiveUI. He truly loves good design and understanding what makes people tick. RJ holds an MBA and a bachelor’s in Physics and Computer Science. He is a frequent speaker at many industry events, including Web 2.0, SXSW, Adobe MAX, and AnDevCon.
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Rand Fishkin
Rand Fishkin is the CEO & Co-Founder of the web's most popular SEO Software provider; SEOmoz. He co-authored the Art of SEO from O'Reilly Media and was named on the 40 Under 40 List and 30 Best Young Tech Entrepreneurs Under 30. Rand has been written about in The Seattle Times, Newsweek and PC World among others and keynoted conferences on search around the world. He's particularly passionate about the SEOmoz blog, read by tens of thousands of search professionals each day. In his minuscule spare time, Rand enjoys the company of his amazing wife, whose serendipitous travel blog chronicles their journeys.
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Rasmus Lerdorf
Rasmus Lerdorf is known for having gotten the PHP project off the ground in 1995 and has contributed to a number of other open source projects over the years. He was an infrastructure architect at Yahoo! for more than 7 years and most recently has been advising startups including WePay, Etsy, and Room77. He was born in Greenland, grew up in Denmark and Canada and has a Systems Design engineering degree from the University of Waterloo. You can follow @rasmus on Twitter.
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Robin Christopherson
After a degree in Engineering at Cambridge and working as an IT instructor for the Royal National Institute for the Blind (RNIB), Robin was a founding member of AbilityNet in 1998. Robin now manages AbilityNet’s Web Consultancy services – heading a team that is globally acclaimed as experts in accessibility auditing, disabled user testing and designing attractive websites that are both accessible and easy to use by all. Despite being blind, Robin uses a computer very effectively by relying on speech output to access the full range of mainstream software including email and the internet. He has a first-hand appreciation of the importance of good web design practice to accessibility.
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Ross Bayer
Ross Bayer leads the Location and Events engineering teams and recently celebrated his third Faceversary. Ross checks in often and is a Stanford Viennese Ball enthusiast.
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Ryan Carson
Ryan loves web tech, coffee and movies. (Is it wrong to see The Matrix seven times at the cinema?) He's got a degree in Computer Science and is passionate about connecting and encouraging people - which is why he's passionate about running events for the web community. He loves his wife and can't believe he's a dad. I'm a Father, entrepreneur and lover of movies. Founder of @carsonified and @treehouse
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Samantha Warren
Designer of web things & visual problem solver. Owner of the cutest cross-eyed cat in the world. My middle name is Toy. Really.
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Sara Cannon
Sara Cannon has a passion for art, design, and typography. She designs and develops websites out of Birmingham, AL, is a WordPress core contributor working with the UI group, organizes WordCamp Birmingham, loves open source, her dogs, and a good beer. You can find her tee-heeing on twitter @saracannon or writing on her blog.
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Sarah B Nelson
Sarah B. Nelson is Founder and Principal at Tapir & Tine, a design leadership, strategy, and research consulting studio in San Francisco. Sarah believes in—and has learned the hard way about—the importance of clear communication, honest relationships, and servant leadership in the design of complex interactive systems. After 10 years leading web site projects, Sarah realized that a deep understanding of business, technology, and the people who interact with both would lead to better products and services. At the Institute of Design in Chicago, she developed theories for effective collaboration in innovation work based on research with the Neo-Futurists, an experimental theater group with the longest running show in Chicago. She tested her ideas on the ground, developing product strategies, digital experiences, and practice development frameworks for clients such as Nike, The Metropolitan Opera, United Airlines, Skype, Vanguard Funds, PayCycle, Zappos, Intel, and The Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. She has held creative leadership positions at POP in Seattle, Adaptive Path, and most recently was the Principal of User Experience at Hot Studio.
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Sean Coulter
Pugsley. Simpson. Coulter. Architects
Sean Coulter has been fascinated with the power the built environment has on people most of his life. As a result, Sean made an early decision to be an architect. He attended Louisiana Tech University where he received a Bachelor of Architecture degree in 1991. Soon after graduating from college, Sean began his practice in Las Vegas starting his architectural internship at Welles Pugsley Architects. Ultimately in 2006, Sean became a partner with the firm and the name of the firm was changed in 2008 to Pugsley. Simpson. Coulter. Architects. In 2011 he served as President of the American Institute of Architects (AIA) Nevada Chapter where he has been instumental in steering the architectural community to create an inspirational built environment. For the past 15 years, he has been an Adjunct Professor and Juror for the School of Architecture at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Here, he has focused his students on creating architectural designs that dramatically respond to the human condition via a phenomenological approach to the creation of ‘place’. In his spare time, Sean is an avid cyclist and has been known to participate in several 100 mile races during the year where he likes to break his clavicle...sometimes.
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Steve Fisher
Steve is an internationally renowned interactive designer, speaker and open source evangelist. He has done work for companies all over North America and travels the world talking about design, user experience and open source. Currently Steve is working as the UX Director for Yellow Pencil, serves as the national vice president of web for the Society of Graphic Designers of Canada and can be found hanging out with some of the core teams contributing to open source projects like Drupal. Steve likes running, fancy shirts and twitter. Find him at www.hellofisher.com or on Twitter: @hellofisher
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Tim Milliron
Tim is Director of Engineering at Twilio, where he leads the teams responsible for building Twilio's simple, powerful telecommunications API. He is passionate about building & designing great products, growing engineering teams that exceed expectations, and creating nimble, scalable engineering processes. Before Twilio, Tim spent 12 years at cloud-computing's polar opposite: Pixar, where high-performance desktop-computing is king, and where Tim led teams that did everything from film production to internal tools development.
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Tom Hughes-Croucher
Tom Hughes-Croucher is an independent consultant. Tom has worked for many leading companies. Most recently he worked for Joyent on the Node.js open source project. Previously he's worked with companies and organisations such as Yahoo! NASA, Tesco, Three telecom and UK Channel 4. Tom has also contributed to a number of Web standards for the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the British Standards Institute (BSI).
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Tony Hsieh
In 1999, at the age of 24, Tony Hsieh (pronounced Shay) sold LinkExchange, the company he co-founded, to Microsoft for $265 million. He then joined Zappos.com as an advisor and investor, and eventually became CEO, where he helped Zappos.com grow from almost no sales to over $1 billion in gross merchandise sales annually, while simultaneously making Fortune magazine's annual "Best Companies to Work For" list. In November 2009, Zappos.com was acquired by Amazon.com in a deal valued at $1.2 billion on the day of closing. Tony's first book, "Delivering Happiness," was published on June 7, 2010, and outlines his path from starting a worm farm to life at Zappos.com. Tony shows how a very different kind of corporate culture is a powerful model for achieving success and happiness. "Delivering Happiness," debuted at #1 on the New York Times Bestseller list and remained on the list for 27 consecutive weeks.
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Tyler Crowley
Tyler has been helping startups with their important pitches since the first TechCrunch40 events and continues today with the LAUNCH conference, where he works one-on-one with each company to create the most compelling pitch possible for press and partners. Tyler is also co-host of This Week In Startups with Jason Calacanis where he regularly shares insights on the art and science of pitching investors.
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Whurley
If you’ve heard of open source, open innovation, and augmented reality, then you’ve already met whurley. Whurley has earned rights to prestigious accolades such as the IBM Master Inventor, IBM Pervasive Computing, Apple Design and LinuxWorld Magazine’s Top Leader in Open Source Business awards by inventing today’s leading technology standards in excellence. With 11 patents (and counting) and as co-founder of iPhoneDevCamp, iPadDevCamp, iOSDevCamp and BarCampAustin, whurley continues to drive open source and innovation in his role at GM of Chaotic Moon Labs (http://chaoticmoon.com/labs/)
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Yavor Georgiev
Yavor Georgiev is a Program Manager at Microsoft working on the Windows Azure web services stack. He is responsible for web services support in Silverlight and jQuery clients, as well as support for writing Node.js services on Azure.
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Yosi Taguri
Yosi Taguri has been a developer since the age of 11 when computers had 8 bits and less than 64k of memory. He has a hobby of making people look a bit silly using apps and extremely enjoys the art of talking to people. He has gained fame for an app he co created called Pah. On the serious side he has a vast experience in building large scale solutions on different platforms and working with early stage companies to realise what can be done with cutting edge technologies. In the past 2.5 years he made the ios and android platforms his new mistress.
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Zach Holman
A Ruby developer with sound fundamentals, firm grasp on the industry, and innovative development approaches are all phrases inapplicable to Zach Holman. He works at GitHub, and hacks on sparkline generators, robot music DJs, and ethically frightening FaceTime + Chatroulette mashups. He blogs, he tweets, he evades his taxes.
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Zach Ware
Zach Ware leads development of Zappos.com’s new Downtown Las Vegas Campus including the former Las Vegas City Hall. Additionally as a part Zappos.com CEO Tony Hsieh's independent Downtown Project, he leads development of urban connectivity projects and tech community programs. He and his team are developing a number coworking community spaces designed to accelerate learning and collaboration for startups and creative workers. He is a partner at VegasTechFund, a $50m tech investment fund focused on founders and startups solving huge problems who are committed to building a vibrant, connected tech community in downtown Las Vegas. He, his team and a network of passionate urban community advocates are working to create a vibrant, connected urban core through intelligent, organic development of physical spaces and creative communities. Zach began his career at Zappos.com in 2010 as the Head of Product Management where he led the development roadmap of the Zappos.com site. Prior to joining Zappos.com, Zach led the Web and Retail Management Team at The Republic of Tea, overseeing online and consumer business operations. He studied Economics at Vanderbilt University.
