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.

Addison Berry Lullabot

Addison has been involved with Drupal since 2006 and is the current Documentation Team Lead for the project. In March 2009 she was awarded a Knight Foundation grant to improve Drupal documentation. She travels around the world, speaking at events from local high schools to major conferences like OSCON, working to improve Drupal and Open Source software. She is also involved with organizing the Writing Open Source conference to get open source projects together to share ideas about how to improve documentation. In addition to her focus on coordinating documentation efforts she helps maintain Drupal.org and is a permanent member of the Drupal Association General Assembly. She's provided core patches, maintains several contributed modules, and has been involved with the Drupal Dojo and the Google Highly Open Participation (GHOP) mentoring programs. Addi currently lives in Maryland with her partner, Colleen, and four contrary cats. When not obsessively working on Drupal in one way or another, she loves to get dirty in the garden or spend time cooking up a batch of homebrewed beer.
Alex Hunter @cubedweller

Alex Hunter was previously the Head of Online Marketing for the Virgin Group. Before joining Virgin Management, Alex was based in California at Virgin America, where he used the web to build a grassroots marketing campaign to garner public support for Virgin America's certification process on a tight schedule and even tighter budget. The campaign was covered by Time magazine, CNN, and CNBC, amongst others. He also oversaw the front-end development of Virgin America's website which has since won several accolades including ad:tech and Webby Award honors. Currently based in London, Alex's work regularly takes him across the globe.
Aza Raskin Mozilla

Aza gave his first talk on user interface at age 10 and got hooked. At 17, he was talking and consulting internationally; at 19, he coauthored a physics textbook because he was too young to buy alcohol; at 21, he started drinking alcohol and co-founded Humanized. Two years later, Aza founded Songza.com, a minimalist music search engine that had over a million song plays during it's first week of operation. After Humanized was sucked into Mozilla, Aza became Head of User Experience for Mozilla Labs. In another life, Aza has done Dark Matter research at both Tokyo University and the University of Chicago, from where he graduated with honors in math and physics. When not working (ha!) Aza enjoys playing music and punning.
Britt Selvitelle Twitter Inc

Britt Selvitelle is the User Experience and Front End Engineering Lead at Twitter, Inc. Born in Dorchester, England, in 1981, Britt has lived most of his life in the Washington, DC area and Kentucky, and he now resides in beautiful San Francisco, CA. Brought on by Obvious in early 2007, Britt worked as one of three engineers at the inception of Twitter, working primarily on scaling the back-end architecture. He now focuses on innovating how people experience Twitter, from the finer details of Twitter.com on the web to the simplicity of SMS.
Bruce Lawson Opera

Bruce evangelises Open Web Standards for Opera. He's a member of the Web Standards Project's Accessibility Task Force and the W3C Mobile Best Practices Working Group. Previously, he was technical lead for the Solicitors Regulation Authority site. He's been a tarot card reader in Istanbul, a volunteer pharmacist in Calcutta, a Bollywood movie extra in Mumbai and English tutor to a Princess' daughter in Thailand. Nowadays, he blogs at www.brucelawson.co.uk, is training for his blue belt in kickboxing and drinks too much Guinness.
Cat Lee Facebook

Cat Lee leads Facebook’s efforts around localizing Facebook Connect and developing scalable solutions for developers around the world. Cat also leads fbFund, a social incubator focused on investing in and mentoring startups. Prior to Facebook, Cat worked for Lockheed Martin in corporate strategy and as a software engineer building tools for classified programs and missiles. Cat holds a bachelor's degree in Computer Science from Stanford University and a master's degree in business administration from University of Michigan Ross School of Business.
Chris Abad Spymaster

Chris Abad is the CEO at iList, creators of the overnight-sensation Twitter game, Spymaster. What started as a fun exploration of Twitter's application platform for Chris and his team, has since taken over Twitter and become an addiction for thousands passionate users. At iList, Chris is responsible for overall strategy and direction of the company, as well as product concept and innovation. iList is headquartered in San Francisco, CA, where Chris and the rest of his team resides.
Chris Thorpe The Guardian

Chris Thorpe is the Developer Advocate for the Open Platform at The Guardian. His background as a research scientist and his early involvement in Open Access publishing, makes him fascinated and passionate about what happens when data, content, platforms, identity and pretty much anything opens up. He spends his time at The Guardian working on the best ways to integrate The Guardian's content, data and APIs with other people's technology and businesses as part of the drive towards building the distribution and engagement channels of a mutualised newspaper.
Chris Lea Virb

Chris Lea works for (mt) Media Temple, currently as a lead systems architect for the social network Virb. For the last ten years or so he's been deeply involved with web-centric engineering, with emphasis on scalability, performance, system and network security, and programming methods. Publicly he's co-authored four books on PHP, edited several books about Javascript, and spoken at events such as FOWD, SXSWi, and WordCamp. He likes his neighborhood in Venice Beach, guitars, Linux, and sometimes OS X. However, he's rather confused about why some people choose to shoot with Nikon kits when there are perfectly good Canon ones available for sale all over the place. He recently restarted his personal blog at Chrislea.com.
Dave McClure Founders Fund

Dave McClure has been geeking out in Silicon Valley for almost twenty years as a software developer, entrepreneur, startup advisor, angel investor, blogger, & internet marketing nerd. Dave currently runs a seed-stage investment program for Founders Fund. His passion is helping startups with marketing, product strategy, and startup metrics, and he is an advisor or investor for several companies including: Canopy Financial, Eventvue, KissMetrics, Mashery, Mint, RichRelevance, 750 Industries, Simply Hired, SlideShare, TeachStreet, Twilio. Dave is the founder of Startup2Startup, a monthly dinner series for Silicon Valley startup entrepreneurs & investors. He has been a conference organizer for many tech & startup events including STARTonomics, Graphing Social Patterns, and Web 2.0 Expo (SF). He has been a guest lecturer on social network platforms & applications at Stanford University. Dave is a board member for microfinance accelerator Unitus, advisor to microfinance lender Kiva.org, and co-founder of the Silicon Valley Microfinance Network.
David Prager Revision3

David Prager is the Co-Founder and Chief Evangelist for the Internet television network, Revision3. An industry veteran in the rapidly growing medium of Internet video-on-demand programming, Prager has been heavily involved in programming, production, distribution, promotion, sales, along with building and executing a working business model for Revision3 at the company's inception. He is also a frequent guest on programs within the medium, such as TWiT (This Week in Tech) of which he was an inaugural host. Prior to Revision3, Prager worked for ZDTV, TechTV, and Comcast/G4 Media in different capacities, and has accumulated several hundred hours of daily live production experience, in addition to field production and his already seasoned track record in technology writing. Prager received his degrees in Communications and Media Studies from Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas, and has been heavily involved in computers and technology since becoming SysOp of his own computer BBS in 1989.
Dustin Diaz Twitter Inc

Dustin Diaz is a Lead Frontend Engineer at Twitter having previous experience at Google on platforms such as Gmail and Adwords, as well as Yahoo in the Small Business department. Diaz is also a co-author of JavaScript Design Patterns, the Founder of CSS Naked Day, and lastly during the weekends he is an accomplished Photographer.
Ed Anuff Six Apart

Ed Anuff is the EVP and General Manager for Platform Products and Services at Six Apart, where he oversees a skilled team that builds influential digital brands. Prior to joining Six Apart, he was the Founding CEO of Widgetbox, where he raised two rounds of funding from Sequoia Capital and Hummer Winblad. Previously, Ed was the Founding CEO and Chairman of Epicentric, which he helped grow to $40 million in annual revenues when it was acquired by Vignette in 2002; other executive experience includes stints at Wired Digital and Motion Works. Ed is a graduate of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and has contributed to publications such as Wired and the Web Services Journal, and authored the best selling Java Sourcebook. He is a proficient software architect.
Francisco Tolmasky 280 North

Francisco is a co-founder of 280 North and the creator of the Objective-J programming language. 280 North is bringing desktop-class applications to the browser with their new open source framework, Cappuccino. They recently launched 280 Slides, the first application built on Cappuccino. Before 280 North, Francisco was an early member of the iPhone team at Apple, working on Mobile Safari and Maps.
Gary Vaynerchuk Wine Library TV

Gary Vaynerchuk has captured attention with his pioneering, multi-faceted approach to personal branding and business. After primarily utilizing traditional advertising techniques to build his family’s local wine business into a national industry leader, Gary rapidly leveraged social media tools such as Twitter and Facebook to promote Wine Library TV, his video blog about wine. As his viewership swelled to over 80,000 a day, doors opened to a book deal, several national TV appearances, and a flurry of speaking engagements around the world. Gary’s dual identity as both business guru and wine guy has made him the “Social Media Sommelier.” Garys book, Crush It!: Turn Your Passion into Profit in a Digital World is available to pre order.
Joel Moss Codaset

Joel discovered the internet and web development about 14 years ago, and has been hooked ever since. He started playing around with Perl and PHP, and ended up building a collection of free web based tools. What originally started as a hobby, turned into a healthy business right at the height of the dot com boom. Joel then entered the domain name industry while at it's peak, launching a full featured web hosting service soon after; which he subsequently sold in 2007. Since then, he has become some what prominent in the open source community, contributing the core of the popular CakePHP framework, and writing several popular plugins. Currently based in Manchester, he blogs regularly at developingwithstyle.com and runs Codaset.com; a software project management service for open source and private projects, and develops PHP and Ruby applications for large and medium sized companies.
Keir Whitaker Carsonified

Keir started his career as an IT support technician in an East London NHS organisation and progressed to the position of Web Services Manager for a large NHS Trust. After leaving the NHS in 2004 he worked as a freelance web developer in both PHP and ASP.Net. More recently he has been delving into the world of Python and Django. Keir joined Carsonified in February 2008, lives in Bath, subscribes to far too many magazines and enjoys the occasional mojito. You can follow him on Twitter.
Kevin Rose digg

Kevin Rose is the founder and chief architect of digg. He oversees all aspects of the management and development of the Web site. Kevin started digg in September 2004 as a personal project. His initial idea was to conduct a social experiment in how masses of users could control and promote news and other content on the Web, without external editorial control. After a very short time, he realized the power of his idea, as digg was becoming a resource for breaking news stories and developed a strong user following. Kevin is also a co-founder of the Internet Television Network Revision3 where as a member of the board he provides strategic direction to the company.
Lynne d Johnson FastCompany.com

Lynne d Johnson is senior editor and community director FastCompany.com, a leading website and community for people passionate about business ideas that also offers the complete content of Fast Company magazine. She also writes Digital Media Diva, a technology blog following web, media, and consumer trends for FastCompany.com. Also a consultant, Johnson works with media properties on digital content, branding, and social media development and strategy. Prior to Fast Company, she served as the general manager, new media for VIBE, SPIN, and VIBE Vixen where she managed marketing, editorial, production, business development, and sales operations for the magazine's web sites and mobile properties. An adjunct professor in the Audrey Cohen School for Human Services at the Metropolitan College of New York, Lynne also wrote the foreward for the recent publication, Tactical Transparency: How Leaders Can Leverage Social Media to Maximize Value and Build Their Brand by Shel Holtz and John C. Havens. She holds a BA in journalism and an MBA in media management.
Matt Lee Red Gate

Matt is a talented ASP.NET developer working for Red Gate in Cambridge. He likes to see things done 'right', that’s why he loves any opportunity to use ASP.NET MVC, like HelloApp.
Mike Malone Six Apart

Mike Malone is a software engineer at Six Apart, where he's working on new ways to power online conversation and build interactive communities. Mike is an advocate for open source and open standards technologies. He contributes regularly to Django, an open source Python Web framework that encourages rapid development without sacrificing quality. Mike is active in the OAuth and Activity Streams standards efforts, and is a member of the Open Web Foundation, an organization whose goal is to develop best practices for creating community-driven specifications. Before joining Six Apart, Mike helped build the microblogging web site Pownce, where he learned a lot about the technical and social difficulties of scaling an online community. He's currently focused on building tools and technologies that will address some of these difficulties, which he hopes will create a more open social web ecosystem.
Mike McDerment FreshBooks

Mike is the co-founder and CEO of FreshBooks, planet earth’s leading online invoicing app for service oriented professionals, freelancers and teams. Back in 2003, Mike built FreshBooks for his design firm and scratched his own itch. Since launching in May 2004 FreshBooks has touched over 600,000 lives and Mike and his team dedicate themselves to being a great service for people who love their work, and want to focus on it – instead of focusing on their paperwork.
Osama Bedier PayPal

Osama Bedier is Vice President of PayPal Platform and Emerging Technology, with overall responsibility for the newly developed platform division. Osama joined PayPal/EBay in 2002. During his almost 7 years of tenure, Osama has held multiple engineering and product development management responsibilities including Next Generation eBay re-Architecture, International Product development where he expanded PayPal’s payment systems outside the US and Merchant Services where he was responsible for building the products for PayPal to offer services “off-eBay”. Most recently, Osama held the role of Vice President of Product Development for all consumer and merchant facing products.

Prior to PayPal, Osama served as director of technology for DG Systems Inc./Starguide Satellite Systems. As director of technology, his team built and managed an innovative nationwide internet “Cable TV” service with user targeted advertising. Osama was also senior manager for eCommerce at Gateway, Inc., where he played a significant role in re-architecting and developing one of the largest ecommerce sites of that time. In addition, he served as Web architect and team manager at AT&T Wireless. Osama received a bachelor’s degree in computer science from University of California.
Philip Strain Ecliptic

Philip Strain is a co-founder of Ecliptic, a user experience consultancy based in Belfast that focuses on development and usability/accessibility. Before starting Ecliptic, Philip worked for the Royal Mail Group's accessibility team, working with suppliers to ensure that Royal Mail's web sites are usable for all. The role also involved working closely with the diversity team,helping to form the group's web accessibility strategy. Philip has also worked as part of Google's User Experience Research team, where he conducted a number of studies with visually impaired participants, contributing to improving Google's overall accessibility. In addition, Philip has just completed a PhD in Web Accessibility and has published over 12 papers in the field of accessibility.
Relly Annett-Baker Freelance

Relly Annett-Baker lives in Brighton with her husband, Paul Annett, and their two-year-old son. As a result she thrives on the sea air and can be guaranteed to stand on Lego at least once a day. As well as being a copywriter, she is employed as live-in domestic staff by two cats who often supervise her typing and make editorial suggestions such as 'I think it's dinner time'. When not being purred into submission she writes copy and content for clients, magazine articles for titles as diverse as .net magazine and Scrapbook Inspirations and is currently writing a children's novel.
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.
Sanj Matharu Vodafone

coming soon
Scott Guthrie Microsoft

Scott Guthrie is corporate vice president of Microsoft's .NET Developer Platform, where he runs the development teams responsible for delivering Microsoft Visual Studio developer tools and Microsoft .NET Framework technologies for building client and Web applications.

A founding member of the .NET project, Guthrie has played a key role in the design and development of Visual Studio and the .NET Framework since 1999. Guthrie is also responsible for Microsoft's Web server platform and development tools teams. He has also more recently driven the development of Silverlight – a cross browser, cross platform plug-in for delivering next generation media experiences and rich internet applications for the Web.

Today, Guthrie directly manages the development teams that build the Common Language Runtime (CLR), ASP.NET, Silverlight, Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), IIS, Commerce Server and the Visual Studio Tools for Web, Client and Silverlight development.
Simon Wardley Freelance

As a geneticist with a love of mathematics and a fascination in economics, Simon has always found himself dealing with complex systems, whether it’s in behavioural patterns, environmental risks of chemical pollution, developing novel computer systems or managing companies. These days Simon works as the Software Services Manager for Canonical, helping define future cloud computing strategies for Ubuntu. He is a passionate advocate and researcher in the fields of open source, commoditisation, innovation and cybernetics . He is also fond of ducks. As he says “they’re fowl but not through choice”.
Speaker coming soon ...

To be confirmed ...
Yehuda Katz Merb + Ruby on Rails

Yehuda Katz is a member of the Ruby on Rails and jQuery Core Teams, and spends close to every waking moment hacking on open source. During the daylight hours, he's employed by Engine Yard, where his team works full time on Rails. During the evening hours, he's, well, generally also hacking. He spends weekends traveling, speaking at conferences, user groups and companies looking to learn more about any of the technologies he loves. And, when not doing any of those things, you can find him at a bookstore or theater debating sci-fi, technology and dinner plans with his wife.