Web Directions

Speakers

• In: Uncategorized
• By:Maxine
• May 1, 2007
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This year we think we just might have come up with the best lineup of local and inter­na­tional speak­ers of any of our con­fer­ences yet. In fact, you’d be hard pressed to find a bet­ter lineup anywhere.

1. Cameron Adams
2. John Allsopp
3. Angela Beesley
4. Scott Berkun
5. Bert Bos
6. Jonathan Boutelle
7. Scott Buchanan
8. Mike Cannon-​​Brookes
9. Sebastian Chan
10. Andy Clarke
11. Stephen Cox
12. Andrew Downie
13. Brian Fling
14. Grant Focas
15. Justin French
16. Scott Gledhill
17. Aaron Gustafson
18. Lisa Herrod
19. Adrian Holovaty
20. Paul McCarthy
21. Ben McGuire
22. Rob Manson
23. Mark Mansour
24. George Oates
25. Laurel Papworth
26. Mark Pesce
27. Rashmi Sinha
28. Raul Vera
29. Dr Nic Williams
30. Chris Wilson
31. Ben Winter-​​Giles
32. Alex Young

1. Cameron Adams

   http://​www​.the​man​in​blue​.com/

   Cameron Adams – The Man in Blue – melds a back­ground in Computer Science with over eight years expe­ri­ence in graphic design to cre­ate a unique approach to inter­face design. Using the lat­est tech­nolo­gies, he likes to play in the inter­sec­tion between design and code to pro­duce inno­v­a­tive but usable sites and applications.

   In addi­tion to the projects he’s cur­rently tin­ker­ing with, Cameron writes about the Internet – and design in gen­eral – on his well respected weblog, and has writ­ten sev­eral books rang­ing in top­ics from JavaScript, to CSS, and design.

   Cameron will be pre­sent­ing The future of web based inter­faces.

2. John Allsopp

   http://​john​fall​sopp​.com

   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.

   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.

   John will be pre­sent­ing Trends and pre­dic­tions in web tech­nol­ogy.

3. Angela Beesley

   http://​wikian​gela​.com/​b​l​og/

   Angela Beesley is a founder of Wikia, the community-​​focused wiki host­ing site which is devel­op­ing over 2500 wikis. Angela is the Vice President of Community for Wikia and man­ages a remote team of com­mu­nity sup­port staff located across five con­ti­nents. Additionally, Angela is Chair of the Advisory Board of the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-​​profit organ­i­sa­tion respon­si­ble for Wikipedia, Wikibooks, Wikinews, and the other Wikimedia projects. She con­tributed a chap­ter on man­ag­ing wikis to the book “Wikis: Tools for infor­ma­tion Work and Collaboration” which was pub­lished in 2006, and has been involved with Wikipedia since early 2003. Her blog can be found at WikiAngela.

   Angela will be pre­sent­ing Wikis and com­mu­nity col­lab­o­ra­tion.

4. Scott Berkun

   http://​www​.scot​tberkun​.com/

   Scott Berkun worked on the Internet explorer team at Microsoft from 1994 – 1999 and left the com­pany in 2003 with the goal of writ­ing enough books to fill a shelf. He wrote the 2005 best seller, The Art of Project Management, and his sec­ond book, The Myths of Innovation, was pub­lished in May 2007. He makes a liv­ing writ­ing, teach­ing and speak­ing. He teaches a grad­u­ate course in cre­ative think­ing at the University of Washington, runs the sacred places archi­tec­ture tour at NYC’s GEL con­fer­ence, and writes about inno­va­tion, design and man­age­ment at scot​tberkun​.com

   Scott will be pre­sent­ing The myths of inno­va­tion.

5. Bert Bos

   http://​www​.w3​.org/​P​e​o​p​l​e​/​B​os/

   Bert Bos was, in 1994, one of the orig­i­nal authors of CSS. He joined W3C in 1995 to set up W3C’s inter­na­tion­al­iza­tion activ­ity and was part of the groups that cre­ated HTML and XML. He is now coor­di­na­tor for W3C’s style sheet and math activ­i­ties. Bert stud­ied math­e­mat­ics in Groningen, The Netherlands, and holds a PhD from that uni­ver­sity. He is co-​​author with Håkon Wium Lie of the book “Cascading Style Sheets: design­ing for the Web” (3^rd ed., Addison-​​Wesley, 2005)

   Bert will be pre­sent­ing A new life for old stan­dards — revi­sions to HTML, CSS and oth­ers as well as appear­ing at the W3C SIG day. Additionally, this year Bert will be the host of the Web Directions Breakfast.

6. Jonathan Boutelle

   http://​www​.jonathanboutelle​.com/

   Jonathan Boutelle is the CTO for Slideshare​.net, a social site for shar­ing PowerPoint and other types of slideshows. Built on Ruby-​​on-​​Rails, SlideShare makes gen­er­ous use of both AJAX and Flash. Prior to this, Jonathan was the the tech­ni­cal archi­tect of MindCanvas, a rich online sur­vey appli­ca­tion for design research that also relies on both AJAX and Flash. Jonathan spe­cial­izes in archi­tect­ing rich web expe­ri­ences, using what­ever tech­nolo­gies are most suit­able for the task.

   Jonathan’s intro­duc­tion to com­puter sci­ence was work­ing in the lab of Andy Van Dam (the pio­neer­ing com­puter graph­ics researcher at Brown University), where he learnt how build­ing stun­ning expe­ri­ences meant think­ing about both art and tech­nol­ogy. His expe­ri­ence has included work­ing in data visu­al­iza­tion sys­tems and busi­ness to busi­ness e-​​commerce. Jonathan writes an occa­sional rant on his blog.

   Jonathan will be pre­sent­ing Ajax or Flash: what’s right for you?

7. Scott Buchanan

   Buchanan Law

   Scott Buchanan is the pas­sion­ate founder of Buchanan Law and expe­ri­enced IP, IT and telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions lawyer. Scott’s client base spans inno­v­a­tive oper­a­tors across such sec­tors as telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions, fed­eral gov­ern­ment, new and tra­di­tional media, pay TV, biotech­nol­ogy and a diverse range of play­ers in the web ser­vices sphere. He reg­u­larly advises IT start-​​ups on the inter­ac­tion of IP rights in the on-​​line envi­ron­ment, pri­vacy, telco reg­u­la­tion, e-​​commerce and is espe­cially inter­ested in work­ing with clients to develop and imple­ment clever IP com­mer­cial­i­sa­tion strate­gies. Scott is also reg­is­tered by the Australian Institute of Patent & Trade Marks Attorneys to prac­tise as a reg­is­tered Trade Marks Attorney.

   When not run­ning cut­ting edge legal argu­ments Scott enjoys run­ning after his two lit­tle kids and long dis­tance run­ning generally.

   Scott will be pre­sent­ing Wig meets Web (2.0): har­ness­ing the law to com­mer­cialise and pro­tect your IP

8. Mike Cannon-Brookes

   http://​blogs​.atlass​ian​.com/​r​e​b​e​l​u​t​i​o​n​a​ry/

   Mike Cannon Brookes is co-​​founder and CEO of Atlassian Software Systems, the fastest grow­ing Australian soft­ware com­pany. Atlassian pro­duces JIRA, a pro­fes­sional issue tracker, and Confluence, the enter­prise wiki. Mike has received inter­na­tional recog­ni­tion for his work includ­ing Australian IT Professional of the Year in 2004 (Consensus Awards) and was the 2006 Australian Entrepreneur of the Year (Ernst & Young).

   Mike will be pre­sent­ing Organisational wiki adop­tion.

9. Sebastian Chan

   http://​www​.pow​er​house​mu​seum​.com/​d​m​s​b​l​og/

   Sebastian Chan is cur­rently the Manager of the Web Services Unit at the Powerhouse Museum. Coming from a back­ground in social pol­icy, jour­nal­ism and media crit­i­cism as well as infor­ma­tion tech­nol­ogy, he has been build­ing and pro­duc­ing web­sites and inter­ac­tive media since the mid 1990s. At the Powerhouse he has been respon­si­ble for dri­ving a strong user focus in design, usabil­ity and con­tent, as well as expand­ing the scope and reach of the museum’s suite of online projects. In the last finan­cial year his team was respon­si­ble for tripling vis­i­ta­tion to the Museum’s online resources and a large suite of inno­v­a­tive exper­i­men­tal projects. He is known as a cul­tural sec­tor spe­cial­ist in social media and Web 2.0 appli­ca­tions, as well as web analytics.

   A reg­u­lar speaker in Australia who has also deliv­ered work­shops and pre­sen­ta­tions in the USA, Canada and UK, Sebastian’s other inter­ests include elec­tronic music and dig­i­tal art. He has directed and curated large scale national and inter­na­tional events and festivals, and also pro­duces related media from radio broad­casts to print. At the Powerhouse he runs the inter­na­tion­ally pop­u­lar Fresh + New blog cov­er­ing issues and new ideas around dig­i­tal media and museums.

   Sebastian will be pre­sent­ing Social media and Government 2.0.

10. Andy Clarke

    http://​www​.stuffand​non​sense​.co​.uk/

    Andy Clarke has been work­ing on the web for almost ten years. He is a visual web designer based in the UK and started his design con­sul­tancy Stuff and Nonsense in 1998. As lead designer and cre­ative direc­tor, his clients include national and inter­na­tional busi­nesses, char­i­ties and gov­ern­ment bodies.

    Andy is a mem­ber of the Web Standards Project where he redesigned the organization’s web site in 2006. He is also an invited expert to the W3C’s CSS Working Group. Andy reg­u­larly edu­cates web design­ers on how to cre­ate beau­ti­ful, acces­si­ble web sites and he speaks at work­shops and con­fer­ence events world­wide. He writes about design and pop­u­lar cul­ture on his blog, All That Malarkey and is the author of Transcending CSS: The Fine Art of Web Design.

    Andy will be pre­sent­ing The October Revolution as well as a full day work­shop Transcending CSS.

11. Stephen Cox

    http://​www​.intu​ity​.com​.au/​w​o​r​d​p​r​e​s​s​/​?​p​a​g​e​_​i​d=6

    Stephen is the Design Research Lead at News Digital Media (NDM) in Sydney. His job involves work­ing with the busi­ness to help extend the work of the user expe­ri­ence team from the reac­tive day-​​to-​​day project work into the areas of strat­egy and inno­va­tion. The design research team utilises a range of tech­niques and the­o­ries from the social sci­ences to help cap­ture and under­stand the moti­va­tions of real peo­ple. Working with the user expe­ri­ence team, busi­ness units and busi­ness strate­gists, the design research team helps cre­ate prac­ti­cal, effec­tive and inno­v­a­tive design solutions.

    Stephen will be pre­sent­ing Making use­ful things no-​​one knew they needed: build­ing ethnog­ra­phy into the design process.

12. Andrew Downie

    Andrew Downie is a psy­chol­o­gist and also has a post-​​graduate diploma in edu­ca­tion. He has, for both per­sonal and pro­fes­sional rea­sons, a keen inter­est in mak­ing prod­ucts and ser­vices avail­able to the widest pos­si­ble range of peo­ple. Andrew has worked for the NSW Department of Education and Training since 1992, pro­vid­ing adap­tive tech­nol­ogy resources to staff and stu­dents. As the world wide web has become more impor­tant in the edu­ca­tional envi­ron­ment, Andrew’s role has increas­ingly involved eval­u­at­ing web­site accessibility.

    Andrew is totally blind and uses screen read­ers to access com­put­ers. He has devel­oped a work­ing knowl­edge of HTML and is cur­rently frus­trated at his slow progress with Javascript.

    Andrew will be pre­sent­ing Javascript and other cod­ing for good or evil.

13. Brian Fling

    http://​www​.blue​fla​vor​.com/​p​a​g​e​s​/​a​b​o​u​t​/​b​i​o​s​/​b​r​i​a​n​_​f​l​i​ng/

    Brian Fling is a leader in inter­ac­tive strat­egy and both the web and mobile fields. He has worked with sev­eral Fortune 500 com­pa­nies to help design and develop their web and mobile expe­ri­ences. Brian is a fre­quent speaker and author on the issues on mobile design, the mobile web and mobile user experience.

    He has authored the dot­Mobi Mobile Web Developers Guide, the first free pub­li­ca­tion to cover mobile web design and devel­op­ment from start to fin­ish. Brian also runs one of the largest online com­mu­ni­ties focused on mobile design.

    When he isn’t dis­cussing mobile, Brian serves as co-​​founder and Director of Strategy of Blue Flavor, an inter­ac­tive agency based in Seattle USA.

    Brian will be pre­sent­ing Web 2.0 + Mobile 2.0 = ? as well as a full day work­shop, Mobile web design and devel­op­ment.

14. Grant Focas

    Grant Focas is a Senior Educational Programmer for the Centre for Learning Innovation. He helped develop OptionKeys — a web­site pro­vided by the NSW Department of Education and Training for stu­dents, teach­ers and resource devel­op­ers to assist in the pro­duc­tion of acces­si­ble online resources. For the past 6 years Grant has been a keen advo­cate of web stan­dards. Though known to dab­ble in the dark arts of .NET he is hap­pi­est when eat­ing the web tri­fle of XHTML, CSS and JavaScript with an entree of XSLT.

    Grant will be pre­sent­ing Javascript and other cod­ing for good or evil.

15. Justin French

    http://​justin​french​.com/

    Justin French is a graphic-​​designer-​​turned-​​web-​​application-​​developer cur­rently enjoy­ing life work­ing with the Ruby on Rails frame­work on a daily basis as a Senior Developer at Melbourne startup RedBubble, fol­low­ing a few years with US host TextDrive and many years con­tract­ing both locally and internationally.

    Justin will be pre­sent­ing Pushing beyond design.

16. Scott Gledhill

    http://​www​.stan​dard​zilla​.com/

    Scott is Web Technology Strategist at News Digital Media (NDM) in Sydney. He has lead sev­eral major redesigns of NDM web­sites, con­vert­ing them from legacy table based lay­outs to stan­dards com­pli­ant, acces­si­ble and search engine friendly web­sites. His cur­rent role involves strat­egy and edu­ca­tion on search engine opti­mi­sa­tion, acces­si­bil­ity and best prac­tice web devel­op­ment across the broad net­work of NDM web­sites. Scott believes and prac­tices a holis­tic approach of usabil­ity, design, devel­op­ment and find­abil­ity, and com­mu­ni­cates the end result across all areas of the business.

    Scott also moon­lights as co-​​founder for molt:n dig­i­tal, a Sydney based web con­sul­tancy. In his spare time he finds time to blog about SEO, acces­si­bil­ity and all things web stan­dards on his web­site, stan​dard​zilla​.com

    Scott will be pre­sent­ing Is SEO evil?

17. Aaron Gustafson

    http://​easy​-reader​.net/

    After get­ting hooked on the web in 1996 and spend­ing sev­eral years push­ing pix­els and bits for the likes of IBM and Konica Minolta, Aaron Gustafson decided to focus full-​​time on his own web con­sul­tancy, Easy! Designs LLC. Aaron is a mem­ber of the Web Standards Project (WaSP) and the Guild of Accessible Web Designers (GAWDS). He also serves as Technical Editor for A List Apart, is a con­tribut­ing writer for Digital Web Magazine, and is quickly build­ing a library of writ­ing and edit­ing cred­its in meat­space. He has graced the stage at numer­ous con­fer­ences includ­ing An Event Apart, COMDEX, SXSW, and The Ajax Experience and is fre­quently called on to pro­vide web stan­dards train­ing in both the pub­lic and pri­vate sector.

    Aaron will be pre­sent­ing Learning to love forms as well as a full day work­shop on Progressive enhance­ment with JavaScript.

18. Lisa Herrod

    http://​www​.sce​nar​io​seven​.com​.au/

    Lisa Herrod is the Principal Usability Consultant at Scenario Seven. The pri­mary focus of her work is web usabil­ity, which she believes incor­po­rates much more than just user test­ing. Drawing on a vari­ety of dis­ci­plines, Lisa takes an holis­tic approach to web usabil­ity incor­po­rat­ing user research, acces­si­bil­ity, inter­ac­tion design and web stan­dards development.

    Having started in the web dur­ing the last cen­tury, Lisa is occa­sion­ally caught mak­ing jokes about font tags, lay­out tables and shims. Nobody ever laughs.

    Lisa will be pre­sent­ing Usability: More than skin deep

19. Adrian Holovaty

    http://​www​.holo​vaty​.com/

    Adrian Holovaty, a Web developer/​journalist, is founder of EveryBlock, a local infor­ma­tion startup in Chicago. He has worked as a programmer/​journalist at wash​ing​ton​post​.com and a num­ber of other American news­pa­per Web sites. Just as news­pa­per reporters write arti­cles and TV jour­nal­ists shoot video, Adrian writes jour­nal­ism Web apps.

    Cocreator and lead devel­oper of the pop­u­lar Django Web frame­work, Adrian enjoys con­tribut­ing to open-​​source projects, mak­ing infor­ma­tion acces­si­ble for the pub­lic good and reverse-​​engineering things. His All Music Guide fixer was the inspi­ra­tion for Greasemonkey, and his site chicagocrime​.org was one of the orig­i­nal Google Maps hacks.

    He lives in Chicago and at Holovaty​.com.

    Adrian will be pre­sent­ing Being smart about your data

20. Paul McCarthy

    Paul McCarthy is inter­ested in inno­va­tion and the rapidly emerg­ing global dig­i­tal ser­vices econ­omy. He is Manager, Strategic Projects with the NSW Department of Commerce, Government Chief Information Office and adviser to Australia’s peak inter­ac­tive media indus­try group: AIMIA. Formerly, McCarthy was co-​​founder of The Digital Media Group Ltd, a finan­cial soft­ware com­pany and IBM’s Asia Pacific Multimedia Centre based in Sydney.

    Paul will be pre­sent­ing What’s under the hood? Which open source tools are fuelling today’s lead­ing websites?

21. Ben McGuire

    Ben McGuire is Regional General Counsel for Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Management Asia Pacific. He takes care of the legal aspects of the Virgin group’s regional invest­ments and estab­lishes new Virgin busi­nesses inAus­tralia and Asia Pacific. One of his more chal­leng­ing tasks is deal­ing with the intel­lec­tual prop­erty issues aris­ing in pro­tect­ing one of the world’s most respected brands.

    Ben apol­o­gises, but he is a noto­ri­ous Luddite: he is not on Facebook, does not write a blog, has no idea how a style sheet works, and only recently learned what itunes does. Instead, he swims. He clearly spends too much time face down in cold water, hav­ing recently swum the English Channel.

    Ben will be pre­sent­ing Wig meets Web (2.0): har­ness­ing the law to com­mer­cialise and pro­tect your IP

22. Rob Manson

    Mobile Online Business

    Rob has been mod­el­ing Information Architectures and IA dri­ven busi­ness mod­els since 1989. As the tech­nol­ogy land­scape evolved he moved from dig­i­tal pre-​​press, to inter­ac­tive media, to net­work appli­ca­tions and finally to per­va­sive com­put­ing. Now he has joined Mobile Online Business (MOB) and is focused upon explor­ing life after Convergence — a place where objects and their inter­faces Diverge allow­ing you to con­trol them any­where, any­time. His pri­mary goal is to pro­vide MOB’s clients with hands on, real world expe­ri­ence with this intan­gi­ble new world.

    Rob will be pre­sent­ing E is for every­where: mobile con­tent, ser­vices and com­merce strat­egy in Australia

23. Mark Mansour

    Red Bubble

    Mark Mansour has been hack­ing soft­ware since com­put­ers had 64k of mem­ory. During his pro­fes­sional career Mark has worked for star­tups in Silicon Valley and Melbourne build­ing arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence appli­ca­tions and social net­work­ing plat­forms. Mark has also spent more than a few dark years in the bro­ker­age and bank­ing world both here and in New York. Currently, Mark heads up the soft­ware devel­op­ment group at RedBubble but for fun pho­tographs street art, tin­kers with micro­for­mats and builds geospa­tial applications.

    Mark will be pre­sent­ing Redbubble: build­ing a site for peo­ple with big imaginations

24. Raul Vera

    Raul has been involved in digital-​​media tech­nol­ogy (video ani­ma­tion, graph­ics, image pro­cess­ing, print­ing) for over 25 years, as soft­ware devel­oper, archi­tect, entre­pre­neur, and team leader. He recently joined Google Australia where he is help­ing to build and man­age the grow­ing Engineering team.

    Alan will be pre­sent­ing Mashups, web apps and APIs.

25. George Oates

    http://​abitof​ge​orge​.com/

    George Oates joined a com­pany called Ludicorp back in the mid­dle of 2003, hav­ing moved from Australia, where she had enjoyed a suc­cess­ful career in the web indus­try. At the time, Ludicorp was mak­ing a hilar­i­ous online game called Game Neverending and George jumped in, help­ing design game ele­ments, the GNE uni­verse, and how play­ers interacted.

    It wasn’t long before Ludicorp shifted gears some­what and decided to enter the photo-​​sharing space. The entire team were torn between want­ing to keep doing fun game things and the need for money. So, they man­aged to find a way to blend the two, and Flickr was born!

    George will be pre­sent­ing Human Traffic.

26. Laurel Papworth

    http://​silkcharm​.blogspot​.com/

    Laurel Papworth runs a con­sul­tancy spe­cial­is­ing in edu­cat­ing com­pa­nies in how to max­imise value from social net­works, user gen­er­ated con­tent and web 2.0 technologies.

    In the past she had lead roles in digi­tis­ing Fairfax Newspapers and estab­lish­ing Optus Convergent media and now Laurel lec­tures on mar­ket­ing into social net­works at the University of Sydney and advis­ing clients such as Channel 10 (devel­op­ing online com­mu­ni­ties around shows such as Australian Idol) and Mobiles2Go (world leader in loca­tion based mobile ser­vices). Laurel fre­quently presents on Web 2.0 tech­nolo­gies and how they can best be used at a busi­ness level includ­ing cor­po­rate blog­ging, RSS feeds, user doc­u­men­ta­tion wikis and vibrant cus­tomer communities.

    Laurel will be pre­sent­ing Social net­works and mobiles as well as a full day work­shop, Building and main­tain­ing vibrant social net­works.

27. Mark Pesce

    http://​blog​.future​street​con​sult​ing​.com/

    Known inter­na­tion­ally as the man who fused vir­tual real­ity with the World Wide Web to invent VRML, Mark Pesce has been explor­ing the fron­tiers of media and tech­nol­ogy for a quar­ter of a cen­tury. The author of five books and numer­ous arti­cles, Pesce has writ­ten for WIRED, Feed, Salon, PC Magazine, and The Age.

    For the last three sea­sons, Pesce has been a pan­elist on the hit ABC show The New Inventors. From 2003 to 2006, Pesce chaired the Emerging Media and Interactive Design Program at the world-​​renowned Australian Film Television and Radio School. In February he received an appoint­ment as an Honorary Associate at the University of Sydney, and has gone on to found FutureSt, a Sydney media and tech­nol­ogy consultancy.

    Mark will be pre­sent­ing Mob rules

28. Rashmi Sinha

    http://​www​.rash​mis​inha​.com/

    Rashmi Sinha is a designer, researcher and entre­pre­neur. She is the CEO for SlideShare, a rapidly grow­ing site for shar­ing slideshows. Rashmi writes a blog at rash​mis​inha​.com.

    Rashmi received a PhD in cog­ni­tive psy­chol­ogy from Brown University in 1998. After mov­ing to UC Berkeley for a PostDoc, she fell in love with the web, and real­ized that many issues that web tech­nol­o­gists think about are prob­lems of human psy­chol­ogy. She switched depart­ments and worked on search inter­faces & rec­om­mender sys­tems at the Information School, UC Berkeley. Deciding that she enjoyed prac­ti­cal prob­lems more, she co-​​founded Uzanto, a user expe­ri­ence con­sult­ing com­pany. Lately Uzanto has focused on prod­ucts — their first prod­uct MindCanvas (released Nov 2005) — reshapes tra­di­tional research tech­niques like card-​​sorting, and divide-​​the-​​dollar into game-​​like expe­ri­ences for remote research. In Oct 2006, Uzanto released its sec­ond prod­uct — Slideshare, a web­site for shar­ing pre­sen­ta­tions. Now, Rashmi is focused on the busi­ness side of things but is still inti­mately involved with design for both products.

    Rashmi will be pre­sent­ing The per­ils of popularity

29. Dr Nic Williams

    http://​drnicwilliams​.com

    Dr Nic Williams is known for his excit­ing blend of soft­ware devel­op­ment, enter­tain­ing edu­ca­tion, and thor­ough training.

    He picked up Ruby on Rails in 2005, he has released suc­cess­ful web­sites, such as MyConfPlan, and a grow­ing col­lec­tion of open source projects that are used through­out the Ruby on Rails com­mu­nity — New Gem Generator, Composite Primary Keys, and the Magic Model Generator, plus more.

    For the last two years, Dr Nic has lived and worked in India, Sweden and Netherlands; has attended RailsConf 2006 and 2007 in the USA, and met and learned from many of the leg­ends of the Ruby on Rails com­mu­nity. He is ranked in the top 10 of all Ruby/​Rails devel­op­ers for his con­tin­u­ous con­tri­bu­tions mashed with good humour.

    Dr Nic will be pre­sent­ing a full day work­shop Beginning Ruby on Rails

30. Chris Wilson

    Albatross

    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.

    Chris will be pre­sent­ing Moving the Web Forward as well as par­tic­i­pat­ing in the W3C SIG Day

31. Ben Winter-Giles

    http://​ben​win​tergiles​.word​press​.com/

    Ben Winter-​​Giles is a Consultant with SMS, is cur­rently engaged at the Programme Management level of a whole of Government ini­tia­tive with the Department of Treasury. Ben has over 10 years expe­ri­ence in Web, Design and Programme Management in the Government ICT sec­tor. Ben also has spe­cial­ties in enter­prise level Human Factors Integration and user cen­tered design for software.

    Recently Ben has focussed his efforts on the devel­op­ment of inte­grated man­age­ment and tac­ti­cal solu­tions. Aiming to free cre­ativ­ity and pro­mote respon­sive­ness and flex­i­bil­ity as a way for­ward for deliv­er­ing effec­tive design and devel­op­ment solu­tions within the highly con­tained Federal Government environment.

    Ben’s pre­vi­ous clients include, Department of Employment and Workplace Relations, Medicare Australia, Australian Taxation Office, and a large num­ber of local gov­ern­ment and Private sec­tor clients. He is cur­rently devel­op­ing a Human Factors Integration assess­ment and blue­print­ing toolset.

    Ben will be pre­sent­ing Managing agile projects in large organisations

32. Alex Young

    Mobile Online Business

    Alex Young has been involved in online for over a decade, mov­ing from instruc­tional design, visual and inter­ac­tion design through to project and peo­ple man­age­ment within the edu­ca­tion, train­ing, TV and telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions fields. This jour­ney has instilled a sense of pur­pose to strive for an opti­mal user expe­ri­ence for every solu­tion or chal­lenge that presents itself.

    As part of Mobile Online Business, Alex is focused on how to help com­pa­nies com­mu­ni­cate bet­ter with their cus­tomers by under­stand­ing the per­va­sive­ness of emerg­ing tech­nolo­gies and the ways to best utilise these to com­mu­ni­cate with their customers.

    Alex will be pre­sent­ing E is for every­where: mobile con­tent, ser­vices and com­merce strate­gies in Australia

17 responses to “Speakers”:

1. • By:microformatique - a blog about microformats and “data at the edges” : Web Directions South 2007 announced
   • May 20th, 2007

   […] Andy Clarke — Transcendent CSS […]

2. • By:Web Directions North » Blog Archive » Announcing Web Directions South 2007
   • May 20th, 2007

   […] Andy Clarke — Transcendent CSS […]

3. • By:RuthEllison.com » Web Directions South has launched!
   • May 20th, 2007

   […] Web Directions South. The web­site has just launched, and there’s a great line up of inter­na­tional and local speak­ers. The venue has moved to the Sydney Convention and Exhibition Centre as well as the Powerhouse […]

4. • By:Dipping into the Blogpond » Community, Web Directions and New Blogs
   • May 22nd, 2007

   […] a well known line up of speak­ers from Australia and around the world. Early bird pric­ing is avail­able until 30/​6 at $795 for the […]

5. • By:Web Directions South 2007 » Blog Archive » Web Directions - it’s not just for geeks
   • June 2nd, 2007

   […] Developing and grow­ing com­mu­ni­ties using wiki tech­nolo­gies with Wikipedia’s Angela Beesley […]

6. • By:Web Directions South 2007 » Blog Archive » New addition to program - Javascript and other coding for good or evil
   • July 22nd, 2007

   […] very pleased to announce an addi­tion to our already full pro­gram for Web Directions South 2007 — Andrew Downie and Grant Focas from the DET’s Centre for Learning Innovation will now be pre­sent­ing a […]

7. • By:Web Directions South 2007 » Blog Archive » Social media and government 2.0 at Web Directions South this year
   • July 22nd, 2007

   […] very excit­ing to announce then the lat­est addi­tion to the Web Directions South pro­gram for 2007: Sebastian Chan on Social media and gov­ern­ment 2.0. Come along to hear why the museum has made these very […]

8. • By:Web Directions South 2007 » Blog Archive » Scott Berkun - The Myths of Innovation
   • July 23rd, 2007

   […] yet another new speaker announced today. Scott Berkun will now be pre­sent­ing the open­ing keynote on the morn­ing of the sec­ond day of the con­fer­ence this […]

9. • By:Web Directions South 2007 » Blog Archive » New keynote speaker - Chris Wilson
   • August 14th, 2007

   […] are really excited to announce our final keynote speaker for Web Directions South 2007 — Chris Wilson. Chris, cur­rently the co-​​chair of the W3C’s HTML work­ing group, and Platform Architect of the […]

10. • By:Got a question? « Bens world
    • August 28th, 2007

    […] I am in the mid­dle of the night… again. And I’m putting together my pre­sen­ta­tion for Web Directions South 07 and I’m hit with a shin­ing light of bril­liance. Well, a dull murmur anyway. I’m […]

11. • By:Web Directions South 2007 » Blog Archive » Thanks to our sponsors, Microsoft Australia
    • September 3rd, 2007

    […] Whistler to Australia, in addi­tion to help­ing us ensure the pres­ence of such a fan­tas­tic speaker as Chris Wilson (we’ve wanted to have him speak at a con­fer­ence for a long time) Microsoft’s support […]

12. • By:SitePoint Blogs » Four events to keep you learning
    • September 4th, 2007

    […] focus on user expe­ri­ence, there are cer­tainly a few, includ­ing one by [shame­less plug] me on web usabil­ity and another by Stephen Cox on ethnog­ra­phy. Oh and did I men­tion George Oates of […]

13. • By:Presenting at Web Directions South 07 at Scenario Girl
    • September 8th, 2007

    […] really look­ing for­ward to pre­sent­ing at Web Directions South this […]

14. • By:Web Directions South 2007 » Blog Archive » Focus on Aaron Gustafson
    • September 9th, 2007

    […] a book on Javascript due out soon, Aaron Gustafson has been one of the quiet achiev­ers of the web indus­try these last few years. A won­der­ful educator […]

15. • By:Pressure on for Australian pharmaceutical companies to join the conversation?
    • September 23rd, 2007

    […] linked on Facebook to this arti­cle from the Sydney Morning Herald, an inter­view with Mark Pesce, who is pre­sent­ing at this week’s Web Directions con­fer­ence in Sydney. [Mr Pesce] predicts […]

16. • By:scottberkun.com » Six amazing reasons why I haven’t posted in a month
    • September 24th, 2007

    […] leave for Sydney, Australia in 48 hours (health per­mit­ting) to speak at Web Directions, but mostly to get some vaca­tion in one of my favorite places in the […]

17. • By:Chad
    • June 6th, 2010
    

    Does any­one know when the next con­fer­ence will be held and where will it be held. Looking for­ward to it!

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