Where 2.0 Keynotes

Blaise Agüera y Arcas is the Architect of Bing Maps and MSN at Microsoft. He works in a variety of roles, from designer and coder to strategist, and he leads an Advanced Engineering team of researchers and engineers with strengths in social media, computer vision, and graphics. He joined Microsoft when his startup company, Seadragon, was acquired by Live Labs in 2006. Shortly after the acquisition of Seadragon, Blaise directed his team in a collaboration with Microsoft Research and the University of Washington, leading to the first public previews of Photosynth several months later. His TED talk on Seadragon and Photosynth in 2007 is still rated “most jaw-dropping” on ted.com.

Blaise has a broad background in computer science and applied math, and has worked in a variety of fields, including computational neuroscience, computational drug design, data compression, and others. In 2001 he received press coverage for his discovery, using computational methods, of the printing technology used by Johann Gutenberg. Blaise’s work on early printing was the subject of a BBC Open University documentary, entitled “What Did Gutenberg Invent?”. He has published essays and research papers in theoretical biology, neuroscience, and history in The EMBO Journal, Neural Computation, and Nature. In 2008-9 he was a recipient of MIT Technology Review’s TR35 award (35 top innovators under 35) and Fast Company’s MCP100 (100 most creative people in business).

A few people have asked me to post a little more information about myself. If you want to see my corporate bio, check out my LinkedIn profile. You can also check out my Flickr pictures (includes both business and personal pictures).

I grew up in California and Surrey, England. I started college at U.C. Berkeley, and transferred to Claremont McKenna, a tiny college located near Los Angeles, after my freshman year. I majored in economics. I went straight from college to law school at Stanford in 1992, and graduated in 1995.

I spent a few years as a corporate attorney at O’Melveny & Myers and Wilson Sonsini, working exclusively with technology companies. My clients included idealab, Netscape, Pixar, Apple and a bunch of startups, venture funds and investment banks.

The late nineties were heady days in Silicon Valley - at any given time I was working on a number of IPOs, venture financings, and merger transactions. I also co-authored a book on IPOs while I was working at Wilson Sonsini, which is still in print (on its second edition) by Bowne. I worked all the time.

I left law firm life to join a hot startup and run sales and business development. The startup, RealNames, filed to go public but didn’t make it out before the bubble burst. Eventually, RealNames liquidated after raising over $100 million in venture capital. I left that startup as it was going through the IPO process and co-founded a company called Achex. We raised nearly $20 million after the bubble burst and sold the company to First Data Corp about a year later for $32 million. Achex is now the back end infrastructure to Western Union online.

I’ve worked in an operational role at a Carlyle backed startup in London, founded and ran two companies in Canada (Zip.ca and Pool.com), was COO to a Kleiner backed company called Razorgator, and consulted to other companies, including SnapNames and Verisign. In addition to TechCrunch, I am a founder of edgeio and a member of the edgeio board of directors.

Dennis Crowley is the Co-founder and CEO of foursquare. Previously, Dennis founded Dodgeball, one of the first mobile social services in the U.S., which was acquired by Google in 2005. He has been named one of the “Top 35 Innovators Under 35” by MIT’s Technology Review magazine (2005) and has won the “Fast Money” bonus round in the TV game show Family Feud (2009). His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Wired, Time Magazine and Newsweek. He is currently an Adjunct Professor at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP).

Dennis holds a master’s degree from New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program and a bachelor’s degree from the Newhouse School at Syracuse University.

John coordinates a community of developers who build solutions for big problems in humanitarian assistance and disaster response operations. One of those issues is how to create a bridge between governments, NGOs, and stressed populations using crowdsourcing and other forms of collective intelligence.

Supporting the STAR-TIDES initiative at the National Defense University, he led a tiger team to connect crowdsourcing communities with the U.S. Southern Command’s emergency operations centre during the Haiti response. Between earthquakes, John coordinates the “Camp Roberts” RELIEF experiments through the Naval Postgraduate School—a program that gathers participants from responder communities and challenges them to swarm around shared problems. Through the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, John is expanding an existing program in crisis mapping to include the theory and practice around collective intelligence for response operations.

John holds an MPA from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, where he was the Robert C. Seamans Fellow in Science, Technology, and Public Policy. He also holds masters and bachelors degrees in intellectual history and music from Boston University. He tweets at @jcrowley.

Jack Dangermond is the founder and president of Esri. Founded in 1969 and headquartered in Redlands, California, Esri is widely recognized as the technical and market leader in geographic information system (GIS) software, pioneering innovative solutions for working with spatial data on the desktop, across the enterprise, in the field, and on the Web. Esri has the largest GIS software install base in the world with more than one million users in more than 300,000 organizations worldwide.

Dangermond fostered the growth of Esri from a small research group to an organization of over 2,900 employees, known internationally for GIS software development, training, and services.

Dangermond holds ten honorary doctorates from California Polytechnic University-Pomona, State University of New York at Buffalo, Technical University for Civil Engineering of Bucharest – Romania, University of West Hungary, City University in London, University of Redlands in California, Ferris State University in Michigan, Loma Linda University, University of Arizona, and University of Minnesota.

In September, 2008, Mr. DeMulder returned to the United States Geological Survey (USGS), after having served for more than two years at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. In his new role at the USGS, Mr. DeMulder, a member of the Senior Executive Service, has responsibility for the National Geospatial Program of the USGS, including its topographic mapping and digital data programs. He has also been selected by the U.S. Ambassador to the Permanent Mission of the Organization of American States (OAS) to serve as President of the US National Section to the Pan American Institute of Geography and History, a specialized organization of the OAS.

Until September, 2008, Mr. DeMulder served as Deputy Director, Office of the Chief Architect, at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) in addition to his critical role as Director of the National Center for Geospatial Intelligence Standards (NCGIS) at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA). As Deputy Director of NGA’s Office of the Chief Architect, Mr. DeMulder supported enterprise level architecture and engineering strategies by organizing and implementing architecture practices that efficiently advanced and sustained both the National System for Geospatial Intelligence (NSG) and the NGA corporate enterprise. As Director of the NCGIS, Mr. DeMulder led the development and implementation of critical Geospatial Intelligence (GEOINT) standards that support technological advances in the use of imagery, imagery intelligence, and geospatial data.

From 1993 to 2006, Mr. DeMulder served in a range of positions at the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) in Reston, Virginia, including the Chief, Data Policy and Standards Branch, in the National Mapping Division of USGS. In this role, he was the senior policy advisor on geospatial data standards activities to the Chief, National Mapping Division. From 1998 through 2002, Mr. DeMulder served in increasingly influential positions within the USGS, including one special assignment working with the Vice President’s National Performance Review to institute geospatial data projects in communities across the United States. This special assignment required close collaboration with industry leaders and with elected officials at multiple levels of government. His efforts resulted in the successful integration of geographic information system technologies, data, and standards in communities of practice as diverse as law enforcement, hazards response, community health, and land-use planning. He also served as the program coordinator for the largest appropriated program in the USGS; the Cooperative Topographic Mapping Program. During this period he led the team that designed the USGS topographic mapping program for the 21st Century, The National Map, and led its implementation. As a result of his leadership on national mapping issues, he served as the primary liaison to the National Academy of Sciences, Mapping Sciences Committee for its review of The National Map, concept, which led to the National Academy Press publication of Weaving a National Map (2003).

From 1989 to 1993, Mr. DeMulder worked for the US Army’s Intelligence and Threat Analysis Center, collocated with the National Photographic Interpretation Center, in Washington DC, as a civilian imagery analyst in the photogrammetry branch. He quickly rose to become the Chief of that Branch. During Desert Shield and Desert Storm, his team worked around the clock, helping to meet the intelligence needs of the deployed forces. He was part of a small team that developed an innovative product that combined geographic information systems technology and national systems data to support battlefield operations.

He began his career as a military officer, serving in the US Air Force as an Imagery Intelligence Officer from 1981 to 1989. He was a distinguished graduate from the Reserve Officer Training Corps, and a distinguished graduate from the Armed Forces Air Intelligence Training Center’s Imagery Intelligence Officer Training Course in Denver Colorado. He received follow-on advanced imagery analysis training through both the Department of Defense and the Central Intelligence Agency. He served as an imagery analyst at Air Force Systems Command’s Foreign Technology Division at Wright-Patterson AFB, and as the Chief, Imagery Analysis Branch, 496th RTS, RAF Alconbury, United Kingdom.

Mr. DeMulder holds a B.A. Degree from the University of Connecticut and an M.S. Degree from George Mason University, both in Geography. He is also a graduate of the Senior Executive Fellows Program at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government and the Federal Executive Institute. Mr. DeMulder completed the Department of the Interior’s Senior Executive Service Career Development Program in 2003. In 2007, Mr. DeMulder received the Open Geospatial Consortium’s Vision Award for his work to advance the international geospatial community, and in 2008 he received the Outstanding Alumni Award from the College of Science at George Mason University. Mr. DeMulder resides in Springfield, Virginia with his family.

Schuyler Erle has been a Free Software developer and evangelist for over a dozen years. He was a co-author of ‘Mapping Hacks’ and ‘Google Maps Hacks’. Schuyler was also a co-founder of the OpenLayers and TileCache projects, and is a charter member of the OSGeo Foundation. Schuyler currently resides in San Francisco, where he designs and builds new and exotic geospatial technology at SimpleGeo.

Deborah Estrin is a Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at UCLA. She holds the Jon Postel Chair in Computer Networks, and is Founding Director of the National Science Foundation funded Center for Embedded Networked Sensing (CENS). CENS’ mission is to explore and develop innovative, end-to-end, distributed sensing systems, across an array of scientifically and socially relevant applications, from ecosystems to human systems. Estrin and her colleagues are currently exploring Participatory Sensing systems that leverage the location, motion, image, and attached-sensor data streams increasingly available globally from mobile phones; with particular emphasis on human and environmental health applications and on privacy-aware architectures. Estrin’s earlier research addressed Internet protocol design and scaling, in particular, inter-domain and multicast routing. She received her PhD in 1985 from MIT and her BS in 1980 from UC Berkeley, both in EECS. Estrin currently serves on the National Research Council’s Computer Science and Telecommunications Board (CSTB) and was previously a member of the NSF National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) Advisory board, the NSF CISE Advisory Committee, and DARPA-ISAT. Estrin was selected as the first ACM-W Athena Lecturer in 2006 and was awarded the Anita Borg Institute’s Women of Vision Award for Innovation in 2007. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2007 and to the National Academy of Engineering in 2009. She is a fellow of the IEEE, ACM, and AAAS and was granted Doctor Honoris Causa from EPFL in 2008.

Dave Fetterman is an engineering manager at Facebook, where he leads the mobile engineering team. Dave was central to the launch of the Facebook Platform project and has been an influential voice in the developer community. Prior to joining Facebook in 2006, he worked as a software engineer on projects in Microsoft’s developer division, including the .NET Common Language Runtime (CLR). He holds a bachelor’s degree in applied mathematics and a master’s degree in computer science from Harvard University.

Michael Halbherr is Vice President, Social Location in the Services business unit in Nokia. In this role, Michael is responsible for heading the Social Location business including maps and other location based services. Before joining Nokia in 2006, Michael worked for the Boston Consulting Group and at europatweb, the Internet investment vehicle of Groupe Arnault, overseeing all technology investments, including gate5. After that Michael headed gate5 AG, the former leading supplier of mapping, routing and navigation software and services, for five years. Since the acquisition of gate5 through Nokia, Michael has been heading the location based experiences in Nokia.

Michael holds a PhD in Computer Science from MIT and a Masters in Electrical Engineering from ETH Zurich.

Jeffrey Johnson is a web developer who is passionate about geospatial applications of web technology.

Michael Jones is Google’s Chief Technology Advocate, charged with advancing the technology to organize the world’’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. Michael travels the globe to meet and speak with governments, businesses, partners and customers in order to advance Google’s mission and technology. He previously was Chief Technologist of Google Maps, Earth, and Local Search-the teams responsible for providing location intelligence and information in global context to users worldwide. Before its acquisition by Google, Michael was CTO of Keyhole Corporation, the company that developed the technology used today in Google Earth. He was also CEO of Intrinsic Graphics, and earlier, was Director of Advanced Graphics at Silicon Graphics. A prolific inventor and computer programmer since the 4th grade, he has developed scientific and interactive computer graphics software, held engineering and business executive roles, and is an avid reader, traveler and amateur photographer using a home-built 4 gigapixel camera made with parts from the U2/SR71.

Othman is Director of Geo at Twitter (@othman). Prior to Twitter, he was the co-founder & President of Mixer Labs (GeoAPI.com/TownMe), which Twitter acquired.

Before Mixer Labs, Othman was at Google, where he managed a number of products including the Google Toolbar, Google Gears, early Firefox extensions, as well FastNet (real-time fetching and caching infrastructure). Prior to Google, Othman was at ACCESS Systems, where he ran server-side engineering. Othman currently serves on the board of directors of ESI Group, a publicly traded French software company. Othman has an MBA from MIT and a BS + MS in Computer Science & Industrial Engineering from Stanford.

Martin Lefebure holds a doctorate in applied mathematics from Paris University. He started as chief scientist for Poseidon (now MGI), the first drowning video detection system for public pools, which has been installed on more than 150 sites and directly saved 12 lives. He also launched Realeyes3D, a camera-phone document scanning and motion sensing technology company that is enabled on more than 30 million phones. He joined Parrot in 2007 to manage the AR..Drone project.

Kati London is Vice President at Area/Code, which creates cross-media games and entertainment. London designs and develops opportunities for interacting with others – whether that be for people and plants, residents of Gaza City and Tel-Aviv or gamers playing tag with tiger sharks in the Great Barrier Reef. Her collaborative projects have been featured in the Museum of Science & Industry, the Victoria & Albert Museum, and the Design Museum of London. She frequently speaks on digital/physical hybridization.

At Area/Code, London works with clients that include the BBC, the Carnegie Institute/Girls Math and Science Project, Disney Imagineering, the United Kingdom’s Department for Transport, Nike, Discovery Channel, CBS, MTV and the Peter G. Peterson Foundation.

Ted Morgan co-founded Skyhook Wireless in 2003 to capitalize on the increasing demand for location-based services. Prior to founding Skyhook, Mr. Morgan was the VP of Marketing for edocs Inc., a provider of customer self-service solutions that was sold to Siebel Systems in January 2005 and worked in Product Management for Open Market, one of the early leaders of the e-commerce revolution. Prior to the technology industry, he spent four years in financial services. Mr. Morgan holds an undergraduate degree in mathematics from Georgetown University and an MBA from the University of Chicago.

Marc leads the team that creates and operates the various programs and services that support individuals and companies that develop enterprise and/or consumer solutions using the NAVTEQ map®, including any related products and services. In addition, Marc’s team engages with key technical and strategic partners to accelerate development by providing choices in geospatial platform tools, business channels, value-added technologies and alternative content.

Marc joined NAVTEQ from Nokia, where he was the head of developer programs, based primarily at Nokia’s corporate headquarters in Espoo, Finland. While there he launched several developer and partner offerings, including Forum Nokia PRO. Prior to joining Nokia, Marc was with Motorola for several years, having worked in the mobile devices, cellular infrastructure, enterprise and semiconductor business sectors. Prior to leaving Motorola to join Nokia, Marc created and led the team that launched Motorola’s Motocoders developer program.

Marc is open to being contacted by developers and partners, and he often arranges private meetings upon request at popular industry shows such as CTIA, 3GSM, CommunicAsia, Smartphone Expo, JavaOne and many others.

Tim O’Reilly is the founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media, Inc., thought by many to be the best computer book publisher in the world. O’Reilly Media also hosts conferences on technology topics, including the O’Reilly Open Source Convention, the Web 2.0 Summit, Strata: The Business of Data, and many others. O’Reilly’s Make: magazine and Maker Faire has been compared to the West Coast Computer Faire, which launched the personal computer revolution. Tim’s blog, O’Reilly Radar, “watches the alpha geeks” to determine emerging technology trends, and serves as a platform for advocacy about issues of importance to the technical community. Tim is also a partner at O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, O’Reilly’s early stage venture firm, and is on the board of Safari Books Online.

Tasso Roumeliotis is Founder and CEO of WaveMarket, a leader in mobile location based services. The pre-eminent expert in location based services for the last decade, Mr. Roumeliotis brings Silicon Valley entrepreneurial innovation to mobile carrier networks, most recently launching Veriplace, the Location API that allows rapid development and commercial launch of location based websites, WAP sites, SMS applications, and even Facebook widgets for 100’s of millions of devices on carrier networks.

Walter brings over 24 years of experience in business and technical management of sophisticated space, defense, computing and remote sensing programs. Walter founded DigitalGlobe (as WorldView Imaging Corporation) in 1992 and managed the team that led to the successful launch of QuickBird in October 2001. He currently leads the team that is executing the company’s WorldView program, building DigitalGlobe’s next generation satellite and ground processing system. Walter previously worked at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), where he served as assistant associate director of the Physics Department, managed the “Brilliant Pebbles” Strategic Defense Initiative program, and led the development of computer automated design and manufacturing tools for wafer-scale integration. Prior to joining LLNL, Walter was president of Scott Consulting, a Unix systems and applications consulting firm. Walter received his doctorate and master of science degrees in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley; and a bachelor of arts in applied mathematics, magna cum laude, from Harvard College in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Jeremy co-founded Yelp Inc. in July 2004 with former colleague Russel Simmons. Prior to Yelp, Jeremy was the VP of engineering at PayPal. He left PayPal in the summer of 2003 to attend Harvard Business School. He joined a start-up incubator in the Summer of 2004 and left Harvard to launch Yelp. Jeremy holds a B.S. in computer engineering from the University of Illinois.

Called San Francisco’s “tech zeitgeist” by Computerworld Magazine, Chris Vein is the Chief Information Officer (CIO) for the City and County of San Francisco (City). In this role, he is responsible for setting the City’s technology vision and direction, ensuring the development and implementation of Citywide standards, policies, and procedures, and running the technology “utility” department providing enterprise services to the City with its 28,000 employees, 52 departments, and $6.5 billion annual budget.

In his tenure as CIO, Chris has led the City in becoming a national force in the application of new media platforms, use of open source applications, creation of new models for expanding digital inclusion, emphasizing “green” technology, and transforming government.

In 2010, Chris was named to Government Technology Magazine’s Top 25: Dreamers, Doers, and Drivers. Last year, Chris was named to the top 50 public section CIOs by InformationWeek Magazine and was honored as the Community Broadband Visionary of the Year by the National Association of Telecommunications Officers and Advisors. Chris has been quoted in a wide range of news sources from the Economist Magazine to his hometown paper, the Grand Forks Herald.

In past work lives, Chris has worked in the public sector at Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), for the American Psychological Association, and in a nonpolitical role, at the White House supporting three Presidents of the United States. In his spare time, Chris is a voracious reader, pretty darn good cook, and sometimes mentor.

Josh Williams is a co-founder and CEO of Gowalla, a locative social network inspiring people to share their favorite places and experiences with friends. With an ever growing collection of game-like rewards, the beautifully designed service has connected people in 150 countries with over 450,000 places around the world. He loves mid-century modern design, architecture, snowboarding and longboarding. He lives in Austin with his wife Rachel and two effervescent daughters. In a future life, he’d like to be an accomplished woodworker.