Speakers
- Brian Fling
- Bob Harris
- Dave Shea
- Mike Hostetler
- Leslie Jensen-Inman
- Bill Cullifer
- Glenda Sims
- Ryan Sarver
- Jina Bolton
- Dion Almaer
- Aarron Walter
- Chris Mills
- Stephanie Troeth
- Nicole Sullivan
- Dan Saffer
- Brad Neuberg
- Mark Trammell
- Rachel Hinman
- Doug Schepers
- Juliette Melton
- Dan Connolly
- Pete LePage
- John Allsopp
- Jeffrey Brown
- Elliot Jay Stocks
- Ross Boucher
- Michael (TM) Smith
- Nate Koechley
- Manu Sporny
- Chris Wilson
- Ben Galbraith
- Scott Fegette
- Lars Erik Bolstad
- Derek Featherstone
- Dan Cederholm
- Eris Stassi
- Kevin Larson
- Christian Heilmann
Brian Fling
Brian Fling has been a leader in the web and mobile user experience. He has worked with several Fortune 500 companies to help create next generation interactive experiences. Brian is a frequent speaker and author on the issues on mobile design, the mobile web, mobile web applications and the mobile user experience.
Brian is very active member in the mobile community. He co-authored the dotMobi Mobile Web Developers Guide, the first free publication to cover mobile web design and development from start to finish, he co-created a series of iPhone web applications called Leaflets to showcase the concepts of “Mobile 2.0” just a few weeks after the iPhone launched. He also runs one of the largest online communities focused on mobile: Mobile Design.
In 2005 he co-founded the interactive agency Blue Flavor, where he helped companies both big and small develop their interactive strategies. In early 2008 Brian and his wife Cyndi left Blue Flavor to form Fling Media with a more exclusive focus on the iPhone, mobile design services, mobile web applications and next generation interactive products.
Presenting
Bob Harris
Bob’s first book, Prisoner of Trebekistan (Crown, 2006), a memoir of thirteen appearances on the TV show Jeopardy!, received raves from Entertainment Weekly, the Wall Street Journal, and numerous other publications. A film adaptation is in development at Paramount Vantage (There Will Be Blood, No Country for Old Men) with Mark Gordon (Saving Private Ryan, Criminal Minds) producing.
Bob’s second book, Who Hates Whom (Crown, 2007), a pocket guide to the world’s major wars, gained raves from the Boston Globe, the New York Observer, and in the New York Times Book Review, where neuropsychologist Steven Pinker (The Stuff of Thought) suggested that both Barack Obama and John McCain should read it. A TV adaptation is in development with Fremantle Media (American Idol, The Price Is Right).
Bob has also written full-time for CSI: Crime Scene Investigation and the hit Mexican series El Pantera, where Bob was hired as asesor de producción (consulting producer), helping to turn the action drama into one of Mexico’s top-rated programs.
On camera, Bob has been an occasional guest pundit on CNN; the on-air debunker of urban legends in the TLC cable series Mostly True Stories; and the narrator of a training video on Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
In radio, his daily humorous 60-second commentaries were syndicated to more than 100 stations during the 1990s, winning awards from the Los Angeles Press Club and the Associated Press. In print, Bob has contributed to National Lampoon, the Chicago Tribune, and many other periodicals, plus Star Wars, Buffy, and other comic books. And during the 1980s and early 1990s, Bob was a stand-up comic who performed at hundreds of colleges and nightclubs nationwide.
So far, Bob has travelled to more than 50 countries on six continents. He holds an honors degree in electrical engineering from Case Western Reserve University.
Bob lives in Los Angeles.
Presenting
Dave Shea
DAVE SHEA is the creator and cultivator of the highly influential website csszengarden.com, and co-author of The Zen of CSS Design (New Riders, 2005) with Molly Holzschlag.
By day he works on design projects of all types through Bright Creative, his one-man studio in Vancouver, Canada. He is fortunate to count among his clients New York University, Google, CNet, and Six Apart, among others. Recently he launched an icon family and worked on the North American arm of a popular international conference series, Web Directions. He speaks internationally at conferences and workshops. You might have bumped into him at Webinale, @Media, SXSW, Carson Workshops, FITC, or maybe even at Web Directions North.
Also by day, and sometimes by night, he’s been known to blog at mezzoblue.com. When he manages to tear himself away from a screen, Dave’s lately been enjoying (in no particular order): looking for the best Chinese restaurant in Vancouver, iPhone hacking, exploring Los Angeles, Nintendo’s Wii, and sampling beer made by west coast hippies. (Wait, two of those things involve screens…)
Presenting
Mike Hostetler
Mike Hostetler has a deep understanding of the technologies that make up the interactive web. Passionate about Open Source, Mike is a member of the jQuery Core Team, an active participate in the Drupal community, and leader of the QCubed Framework project.
After working in several industries ranging from the US Government to Japanese Telecom, Mike launched A Mountain Top, LLC in 2006 with the vision of using web technologies to create and facilitate human relationships.
Off hours, Mike loves spending time with his family and playing outdoors, preferably enjoying both at once.
Mike blogs at http://amountaintop.com.
Presenting
Leslie Jensen-Inman
Leslie Jensen-Inman is an Assistant Professor at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga where she teaches a mix of art, design, business, and technology. She is also president and principal designer at MORE, a graphic design, marketing, and public relations firm.
Leslie is an active member of The Web Standards Project Education Task Force (WaSP EduTF) and writes and develops courses and curriculum for the WaSP Curriculum Framework. Leslie is also a member of the World Organization of Webmasters (WOW) Partners in Business and Education Executive Committee. She is deeply committed to her profession and serves as board member on the Chattanooga Chapter of the American Institute of Graphic Arts, as well as, on the Education Committee for the Association for Visual Arts.
She has worked as the Graphic Designer for “The Invasion,” a Warner Bros. film starring Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig, as Creative Director for a small marketing and development firm, and as a Graphic Designer for design firms with in-house print and digital media facilities.
Leslie is an advocate for holistic creative solutions and her diverse background gives her a unique perspective on teaching career development, professional practices, and standards-based courses.
Presenting
Bill Cullifer
Bill Cullifer is founder of the World Organization of Webmasters (WOW), a non-profit professional association established in 1996, providing community, education and certification for Web professionals worldwide.
As the organization’s executive director, Cullifer participates in a variety of industry, government and educational advisory boards that assist WOW in developing and delivering professional standards and improving communication between all Web professionals and business and industry.
He acts as the organization’s chief evangelist to stimulate the continued growth and opportunities of the Web. He also provides daily podcast regarding a variety of Web professional topics.
Presenting
Glenda Sims
Glenda Sims is a Senior Systems Analyst at the University of Texas at Austin. As a member of UT Team Web, Glenda helps support the central web site for the University. She is the Web Accessibility Coordinator and Web Standards Evangelist for the campus.
She also serves as an accessibility consultant, judge and trainer for Knowbility, a non-profit whose mission is “to support the independence of children and adults with disabilities by promoting the use and improving the availability of accessibility information technology – barrier free IT”. In addition, she is co-manager of the Web Standards Project, a grassroots coalition fighting for standards which ensure simple, affordable access to web technologies for all.
Presenting
Ryan Sarver
As Director of Consumer Products at Skyhook Wireless Ryan leads consumer-oriented product initiatives including the consumer product Loki. Ryan is a champion of bringing location-aware technologies to developers and publishers and recently has focused his time around bring geolocation technologies to the web. He is the founder of the LocationAware Working Group and actively participates in the W3C Geolocation API Specification.
Presenting
Jina Bolton
Jina Bolton resides and works in San Francisco as an interaction designer at Crush + Lovely. Previously, she spent about two years working at Apple, Inc., where she first was the lead CSS architect for the Apple Online Store remodel, and then focused on visual interaction design. Jina is a co-author of The Art & Science of CSS; she has also written articles for publications including A List Apart, .net Magazine, SitePoint, and Vitamin. Jina has spoken at interactive and web design conferences around the world on topics including web design, CSS, and social networking.
Jina has consulted for organizations including the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative and Mass.gov. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Computer Arts and Graphic Design from Memphis College of Art, and is an active member of AIGA (San Francisco chapter). Jina is currently attending graduate school at Academy of Art University toward a Master of Fine Arts in Computer Arts New Media. She enjoys traveling, is learning Italian, and digs sushi and robots.
Presenting
Dion Almaer
Dion Almaer is the co-founder of Ajaxian.com, the leading source of the Ajax community. With Ben Galbraith, he now works at Mozilla, leading their new Developer Tools team. Until recently, Dion was part of the Google Developer Programs group, which enabled him to work with developer facing technology. Dion has been writing rich Web applications from the beginning, and is a columnist on Enterprise Java topics at openxource.com, onjava.com, TheServerSide.com, and of course his blog at almaer.com/blog. He enjoys writing and speaking. He also participates on the Java Community Process expert groups, and the open source community as a whole.
(Photo Courtesy Romain Guy licensed under a CC license.)
Presenting
Aarron Walter
Aarron Walter is the author of Building Findable Websites: Web Standards, SEO, and Beyond (New Riders, 2008) and the lead user experience designer for MailChimp.com. Since 1999 Aarron has been building websites professionally and has taught interactive art and design courses at colleges including Temple University, The University of Georgia, and The Art Institute of Atlanta—one of the few colleges teaching web standards since 2002.
Aarron is a member of The Web Standards Project and the lead of The WaSP Curriculum Framework project. He blogs, builds, and shares at aarronwalter.com.
Presenting
Chris Mills
Chris Mills is a developer relations manager for Opera — he edits and publishes articles on dev.opera.com and labs.opera.com, liaises with the community to raise awareness of Opera and collect feedback, and evangelises about Opera software wherever he can. He is also the organiser and editor of the Opera Web Standards Curriculum.
Outside of work, he is an extremely avid music fan, enjoying playing and listening to a wide variety of music, including metal, folk, punk, electronica, prog, and more. His main band at the moment is the mighty Conquest of Steel.
Presenting
Stephanie Troeth
Stephanie is a co-founder and the production lead of Book Oven, a collaborative platform for making books. Having spent a decade developing for the web, her professional path has winded through programming secure database-driven applications to user experience design. Over the years, she has been giving back to the web community through her work with grassroots movements such as The Web Standards Project.
When leap seconds permit, she writes, posts her immense backlog of photographs and records the occasional piano impromptu at unadorned.org.
Presenting
Nicole Sullivan
A highly experienced web engineer, Nicole has until recently been responsible for international evangelism in the performance research team, whose role is to quantify and improve the performance of all Yahoo! products worldwide. This was a multifunctional leadership role which was equal parts engineering, research, project management, and evangelism. requiring solid communication with people who have different levels of performance expertise.
As part of these efforts Nicole shares the lessons Yahoo! has learned in improving the performance of their many sites and applications.
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Dan Saffer
Dan Saffer, principal designer at Kicker Studio, has designed interactive products since 1995 that are currently used by millions every day. Dan has led projects for large organizations like Nokia and Time Warner to start-ups such as Ning and Foxmarks. An international speaker and author, his acclaimed book Designing for Interaction (New Riders) has been called “a bookshelf must-have for anyone thinking of creating new designs” and has been translated into several languages. His new book, Interactive Gestures: Designing Gestural Interfaces (O’Reilly) will be published in November 2008.
Dan is an internationally-recognized thought leader on design who has spoken at conferences and taught workshops on interaction design all over the world. Dan’s writings on design have appeared in BusinessWeek, Vitamin, and Boxes and Arrows. He has a Masters of Design in Interaction Design from Carnegie Mellon University.
Presenting
Brad Neuberg
Brad Neuberg is an Open Web developer advocate at Google, where he works as part of the Gears team. He is the creator of a number of libraries and frameworks for expanding the capabilities of web applications, and he is a member of the Dojo project, a popular open source JavaScript framework. He is currently focused on increasing the capability of web browsers to render vector graphics, such as SVG, through drop-in JavaScript shims. Brad also created Coworking, an international grassroots movement to establish a new kind of workspace for the self-employed.
Photo by Dennis Hamilton.
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Mark Trammell
Mark Trammell is User Experience Architect at Digg in San Francisco. His work on the Web spans more than a decade including coauthoring two books on Web standards and tenures with the United States Navy, the University of Florida, the Web Standards Project Educational Task Force, and PayPal. While leading a standards-based rebuilding of the University of Florida Web presence, he started an extensive user research program including tests throughout Florida and taught user-centered design. Mark now leads user research at Digg.
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Rachel Hinman
Rachel Hinman is a mobile experience design director for Adaptive Path. With over a decade of design industry experience, she is a strong believer in approaching mobile design and strategy from an empathic, human-centered perspective.
Prior to joining Adaptive Path, Rachel worked within Yahoo!’s mobile group, employing user-centered methods to inform the design and strategy of Yahoo!’s mobile products. Much of her work-to-date has focused on improving the experience of accessing internet content on a mobile device. She recently co-authored an HCI case study on mobile internet use “They call it ’surfing’ for a reason: Identifying mobile Internet needs through PC deprivation” with Mirjana Spasojevic and Pekka Isomursa of Nokia and presented the paper at CHI 2008. Rachel’s innate sensitivity to people and culture have proven powerful skills in the field, enabling her to successfully lead research studies on mobile phone usage in the US, Europe, and Asia.
She writes and speaks frequently on the topic of mobile research and design and was recently a featured author in Mobile Persuasion: 20 Perspectives on the Future of Behavioral Change, edited by BJ Fogg and Dean Eckles. Rachel received a Masters Degree in Design Planning from the Institute of Design in Chicago. Her clients and previous employers have included IDEO, Microsoft, Yahoo! Mobile, Nokia, General Motors, and Kaiser Permanente.
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Doug Schepers
Doug Schepers has been a Web applications developer for 9 years, specializing in SVG from the early days of the standard. He has spoken on SVG and Web applications at conferences around the world, including SVG Open, SD West, and Tri-XML, and at smaller BarCamps and SIGs. He currently works for W3C as the Team Contact for the SVG, WebApps, and CDF Working Groups, where his goal is to help create a unified and interoperable set of open Web technologies. He is an editor of the SVG, DOM3 Events, and Element Traversal W3C specifications, among others.
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Juliette Melton
Juliette Melton spends her days understanding user experiences at Lumos Labs in San Francisco and has been building and researching the web since 2001. She studied networked learning theory through the Technology, Innovation & Education program at the Harvard Graduate School of Education following a somewhat less useful degree in French literature.
Presenting
- Beyond usability: How to build a culture of customer empathy
- Workshop: Know Your Users: How to start tomorrow with guerrilla user testing
Dan Connolly
Dan Connolly is a research scientist at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) in the Decentralized Information Group (DIG) and a member of the technical staff of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). His research interest is investigating the value of formal descriptions of complex systems like the Web, especially in the consensus-building process.
Dan received bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Austin in 1990. He moved to the Dallas area to join Convex Computer Corporation as a software engineer in 1991. From there, he began collaborating across the Internet with Tim Berners-Lee on the World Wide Web project. He moved back to Austin to work at Atrium, a start-up software company, in 1993. He joined HAL Computer Systems in 1994.
In 1995, Dan moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts to join the W3C staff at MIT. From 1995 to 1997, during the intense struggle between Microsoft Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator, Dan chaired the working group that preserved HTML as an open standard.
Since 1997, Dan has worked for MIT from his home, first in Austin, Texas and later in the Kansas City area.
Presenting
Pete LePage
Pete LePage is a Senior Product Manager working on Internet Explorer at Microsoft. Pete started using and developing on the web in the mid-90’s creating his first website on GeoCities. Since then, Pete has moved on to bigger and better things. For the last two years, he’s been working with the IE. Before his role in Product Management, Pete was a tester on Visual Studio’s web design components.
With over six years at Microsoft, LePage has been designing websites since his early days in high school, evolving from the <font> tags and GeoCities to properly styled CSS, managed hosting websites. Prior to joining the product management team, LePage was a tester on Microsoft’s Visual Web Developer where he steered much of the web design experience.
In addition to his career at Microsoft, LePage is an avid film photographer and teaches and studies at the prestigious Photographic Center Northwest in Seattle. He has recently completed his Thesis in Fine Art Photography.
LePage keeps a regular blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/petel.
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John Allsopp
Successful software developer, long standing web development speaker, writer, evangelist and expert, John has spent the last 15 years working with and developing for the web. As the head developer of the leading cross platform CSS development tool Style Master, and developer and publisher of renowned training courses and learning resources on CSS and standards based development, John is widely recognized as a leader in these fields.
John is also the founder and organizer of the Web Directions Conferences for web professionals, held in Australia, Japan and North America, and one of the founders of Scroll Magazine.
As a presenter and educator, John speaks frequently at conferences around Australia and the world. His idiosyncratic blog Dog or Higher covers a broad range of subjects, particularly in technology and innovation, and is widely read and referenced.
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Jeffrey Brown
I am a teacher in Montgomery County Public Schools, MD where I teach advanced web tools, programming, and website development at Damascus High School in Damascus, MD
I write curriculum for web related classes in MCPS and teach adult education courses for teachers wanting to refresh their skills in the web. I am also a member of The Web Standards Project Education Task Force. Promoting best practices (aka Web Standards) has been a standard practice for some time now. I see that the work arena is beginning to accept standards and feel that the education programs in the world should be preparing students to be competitive in this field.
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Elliot Jay Stocks
Always aspiring to create something ‘a bit different’, Elliot’s work is frequently featured in online and offline publications, showcased on various ‘inspiration’ websites, and used as an example of how accessible web design can still look beautiful. His portfolio includes work for Automattic, The Beatles, Blue Flavor, Twiistup, EMI Records, and Carsonified.
On a semi-regular basis, he writes about design trends, issues, and techniques for industry-leading publications such as .Net and Computer Arts Projects, and is currently putting the finishing touches to his first book, which will be published in March ‘09. Elliot is a regular face at design conferences around the globe, taking to the stage as both a speaker and a workshop host. This works out rather nicely, as he’s quite fond of travel and enjoys working from the coffee shops of the world.
Presenting
Ross Boucher
Ross is a co-founder of 280 North, and one of the core contributors to Cappuccino. He graduated from the University of Southern California with a degree in Electrical Engineering in 2007. Afterwards, he worked at Apple as a developer on the iTunes Store, working on music recommendations and discovery. At 280 North, he develops front and back end features for 280 Slides, and manages the Cappuccino open source community.
Ross will be presenting the Cappuccino Bootcamp on February 3rd, and as part of the JavaScript Libraries and Frameworks supersession.
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Michael (TM) Smith
Michael (TM) Smith is co-chair of the W3C HTML Working Group (helping develop the next version of the Web’s core language, HTML5) as well as one-half of a tag team of W3C rowdies who do the grunt work for the Web Applications Working Group.
Mike’s been involved in design, development, testing, and deployment of Internet applications for more than 10 years — from carrier-grade e-mail delivery systems and server-side content-transformation technologies to Web browsers deployed across a range of devices.
Before joining the W3C, he worked on systems for mobile operators in Japan — at Openwave Systems (whose mobile browser has shipped on more than one billion handsets) and at Opera Software (whose mobile browser was the first “full” browser to ship preinstalled on handsets in Japan). At the W3C, he started as the Asia lead for the Mobile Web Initiative before shifting to his current focus on work related to core browser technologies.
Presenting
Nate Koechley
One of the first web developers at Yahoo!, Nate Koechley has been instrumental in creating and defining the practice of Web Development and Frontend Engineering. Through evolving roles as developer, manager, and evangelist on both the development and user experience and design sides of the company, Nate has championed modern standards-based web development, a commitment to accessibility, code and pattern library creation, and open-source and blogging initiatives. Through it all, Nate focuses on the intersection and coordination of design and development, helping teams understand “why” in addition to “how”.
Nate speaks worldwide about the intersections of Design and Technology, and blogs occasionally at http://nate.koechley.com/blog/.
Presenting
Manu Sporny
President/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc.
Born into a family of artists, Manu Sporny spent most of his early life learning about the creative process from his parents - a painter and a writer. Being surrounded by art and music during his formative years would continue to inspire his ambitions to ensure that artists of all walks of life can make a decent living practicing their craft.
He started his career as a serial entrepreneur performing research at Virginia Tech in the late 90s with a focus on information visualization, virtual reality and high-performance graphics technologies.
After graduating from Virginia Tech with a degree in Computer Science, he founded xRhino, a company specializing in software tools and middleware for the Sony PlayStation 2 video game platform. xRhino was the first company to port Debian Linux to the PlayStation 2 and create a MP3 music player based on an open-source Linux core instead of the proprietary Sony development tools. xRhino was successfully sold in late 2003 to Advanced Simulation Technology, Inc.
Sporny later founded and was appointed CEO of Digital Bazaar in 2004. His current efforts are focused on enabling legal distribution of digital content via peer-to-peer networks. Empowering anybody with a web browser to legally buy and sell digital music, film, and print content via the Web, using Internet standards instead of propreitary technology, is the end-goal of his current endeavor.
In addition to his duties at Digital Bazaar, Sporny is a member of the RDFa Task Force, Semantic Web Deployment Workgroup and an Invited Expert to the World Wide Web Consortium. These groups in the W3C are chartered to create semantic web technologies that will enable computers to utilize rich semantic information on websites and eventually learn about their Web-based environment. He is the primary editor of the hAudio Microformat, and the Audio, Video and Commerce RDF Vocabularies which allow one to embed semantic data about audio, video, and sellable items into web pages. He has authored several patents and sits on various technology company advisory boards.
He believes that the best way to ensure a better world for our children is to build organizations that dream big and then live their dreams. He also believes that web communities must have an enduring purpose, rely on open communication and transparency in action if they are to last. An avid cook, gear-head, believer in space colonization, and snowboarder - Manu hopes for a generous snowfall in Breckenridge for the post-Web Directions North 2008 festivities.
More information about Manu can be found on his Linked In profile:
Presenting
Chris Wilson
Chris Wilson is the Internet Explorer Platform Architect at Microsoft. He’s worked on web browsers since 1993, when he co-authored the first version of NCSA Mosaic for Windows. Since 1995, he’s worked on Microsoft’s web platform. In this 14-year-running saga, he’s inflicted good (first implementation of Cascading Style Sheets in IE) and bad (overlapping <B> and <I> tags) on the world, and figures his karma will be even by 2012 the way he’s going.
In his free time, he enjoys photography and hiking with his wife and young daughter, and scuba diving in the chilly waters of Puget Sound as a PADI Assistant Instructor. With any free money, he replaces the cameras he’s destroyed by taking them underwater for dive photography. Occasionally he remembers to share his thoughts on his blog, but more frequently updates his Flickr account.
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Ben Galbraith
Until recently the CIO of MediaBank, a well-funded software start-up in the advertising industry, and General Manager of Feature50, a boutique software production company, Ben Galbraith along with Dion Almaer now head up Mozilla’s new developer tools team. Ben has long juggled interests in both business and tech, having written his first computer program at six years old, started his first business at ten, and entered the IT workforce at twelve. He has delivered hundreds of technical presentations world-wide, produced several technical conferences, and co-authored over a half-dozen books.
Prior to his current roles, Ben acted as CEO of Ajaxian.com, a media property and related conference series he co-founded. He has enjoyed a variety of other business and technical roles throughout his career, including CIO, CTO, and Chief Software Architect roles. He lives in Draper, Utah, with his wife and four children.
photo credit James Duncan Davidson
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Scott Fegette
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 today.
Before joining Macromedia in 2000, Scott cut his teeth at web design and development 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.
In his copious free time, Scott’s also a professional musician and independent photographer/videographer in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Presenting
Lars Erik Bolstad
Lars Erik Bolstad has for the past 7 years headed Opera Software’s Core Technology Department which develops Opera’s cross-platform rendering engine, also known as Presto. Having joined Netscape in 1996, Lars Erik has worked with web technologies both on the client and server side for more than 12 years.
He is also currently co-chairing the W3C Geolocation working group.
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Derek Featherstone
Engaging, surprising, and inspiring, Derek Featherstone is an internationally-known authority on accessibility and web development, a respected technical trainer, and author. Creator of in-depth courses on HTML, CSS, DOM Scripting, and Web 2.0 applications, his approach never fails to champion the cause of web standards and universal accessibility. As founder of Further Ahead, he has been an in-demand consultant to government agencies, educational institutions, and private sector companies since 1999. He is the leader of the Accessibility Task Force of the influential Web Standards Project and also serves on their DOM Scripting Task Force.
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Dan Cederholm
Dan Cederholm is a web designer and author living in Massachusetts, and the founder of SimpleBits, a tiny design studio.
A recognized expert in the field of standards-based web design, Dan co-founded the wine community site, Cork’d and has worked with Google, MTV, ESPN, Fast Company, Blogger, Odeo (and others), also collaborating with Happy Cog on selected projects. He embraces flexible, adaptable design using web standards through his client work, writing, and speaking.
Dan is the author of two best-selling books: Bulletproof Web Design (New Riders) and Web Standards Solutions (Apress/Friends of ED). Dan also runs a popular blog where he writes articles and commentary on the web, technology and life. And he plays a mean ukulele.
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Eris Stassi
Eris Stassi is an interaction designer with a personal mission for better living through responsible, meaningful, good design. Her career revolves around the small matter of making people happy by redesigning and improving the world.
Currently, she accomplishes this by making software better. Her talents are on loan to Apple Computer in Cupertino where she has worked on Apple’s Aperture, iLife and primarily the iWork suite. She also has the honor of being the brainchild behind the Refresh community and creating the BarCamp branding. Eris resides in San Francisco where she continues to be awesome.
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Kevin Larson
Kevin Larson works for Microsoft’s Advanced Reading Technologies on developing new typefaces and rendering technologies to improve the experience of onscreen reading. He received his PhD in cognitive psychology in 2000 from the University of Texas at Austin. His academic research focused on word recognition and reading acquisition. Currently Kevin collaborates with many typographers and reading psychologists on the scientific understanding of how we read, and what can be done to make onscreen reading more efficient and pleasant. He is irrationally upset by bad letterspacing.
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Christian Heilmann
Christian Heilmann has been professionally developing for the web for over 10 years, wrote several books on accessibility and JavaScript and blogs for Yahoo, Ajaxian and on his own blog.
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What they said:
“A definite must have for any web professional.”
Dmitry Baranovskiy, Web developer
