This Year's Speakers

We’ve got some awesome speakers lined up for you this year at FOWA. Here's who we've got lined up so far. Don't forget to check back for updates to the speaker list.

Blaine Cook Osmosoft

Blaine Cook is a developer of fine internet software and evangelist for the open web. While at Twitter he created OAuth, experimented with federating social networks, and taught whales to fly. Before that, he cut his Ruby and Rails teeth building Odeo, and helped move non-profits online. Most recently, he has helped Yahoo! Brickhouse's Fire Eagle soar to new heights. A native of Vancouver, BC, he now lives north of Belfast, NI by way of San Francisco.
David Heinemeier Hansson 37signals

David Heinemeier Hansson is a partner in 37signals. The company behind Basecamp, Highrise, Backpack, Writeboard, and Ta-da List. They also run a popular weblog at Signal vs Noise. David is also the creator of the web-application framework Ruby on Rails. The infrastructure software that is used to build all their applications at 37signals.
Des Traynor Contrast

Eoghan and Des are half of the wep app development team, Contrast. They make opinionated apps for clients that get it. They've also launched popular apps of their own: Qwitter, Exceptional and TaskFive.
Emma Persky Trampoline Systems

Emma Persky is a software engineer at Trampoline Systems building enterprise scale expertise search systems based on email processing and Organisational Network Analysis. She studied computing at Imperial College London where she completed her dissertation in Computer Vision Based Gesture Recognition Systems. In her spare time she loves traveling, photography, attending barcamps, and taking an active role in the London geek community.
Eoghan McCabe Contrast

Eoghan and Des are half of the wep app development team, Contrast. They make opinionated apps for clients that get it. They've also launched popular apps of their own: Qwitter, Exceptional and TaskFive.
Matthew Ogle Last.fm

Matthew Ogle is head of web product at Last.fm. After joining the company in 2005, his first project was the merger of Audioscrobbler.com and Last.fm into a single site. Since then he's seen the service grow from seven to 70, an acquisition by CBS in 2007, and a lot of live music in between. Prior to London, Matt obtained a Master's in his native Canada by developing the Streetprint Engine, an open-source CMS for printed ephemera. He still has a secret fondness for paper.
Mike Butcher Techcrunch UK

TechCrunch UK & Ireland is edited by Mike Butcher. Mike has written for UK national newspapers including the The Financial Times, The Guardian, The Times and magazines including The New Statesman. He is a former editor of New Media Age magazine, the leading new media weekly in the UK, and The Industry Standard Europe and he has launched or re-launched several media web sites. In 2000 he was nominated as NetMedia’s European Internet Journalist of the Year. In 2004 he was voted ‘One of the 100 Innovators of the UK Internet Decade’ by GfK NOP, the fourth-largest custom research business in the world. In July 2008 Mike was put at No. 47 out of the Top 100 people in London’s creative industry the UK by The Independent newspaper and The Hospital Club. He has appeared on BBC News, Sky News, Channel 4 and Bloomberg, commenting on technology and new media. In August 2008 TechCrunch UK was named the best “Web 2.0 and business blog” in the UK, by the readers of Computer Weekly magazine.
Morgan McKeagney IQ Content

Morgan McKeagney is co-founder & Managing Director of iQ Content, a Dublin-based user experience and design consultancy that combines left and right-brain thinking to help clever organisations deliver profitable and lovable online experiences. Left-brained economist & copywriter by training, dilettante dabbler by nature, Morgan has learned the massive value of design and creativity the hard way: by being involved in too many successful projects that ticked all the usability boxes, but somehow still left the core project team feeling underwhelmed, emotionally unfulfilled. One Pauline conversion later, he now works hard to put design front-and-centre of everything that iQ Content does.
Robin Christopherson AbilityNet

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.
Ryan Carson Carsonified

Ryan is the founder of Carsonified and 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.
Simon Willison Freelance

Simon Willison is a freelance client- and server-side Web developer and the co-creator of the Django Web framework. Simon's interests include OpenID and decentralised systems, unobtrusive JavaScript, rapid application development and RESTful Web Service APIs. Before going freelance Simon worked on Yahoo!'s Technology Development team, and prior to that at the Lawrence Journal-World, an award winning local newspaper in Kansas. Simon maintains a popular Web development weblog at simonwillison.net.