The Big Picture, from the Big Players

Widely considered a leading “search engine guru,” Danny Sullivan has been helping webmasters, marketers and everyday web users understand how search engines work for over a decade.

Danny’s expertise about search engines is often sought by the media, and he has been quoted in places like The Wall St. Journal, USA Today, The Los Angeles Times, Forbes, The New Yorker and Newsweek and ABC’s Nightline.

Danny began covering search engines in late 1995, when he undertook a study of how they indexed web pages. The results were published online as “A Webmaster’s Guide To Search Engines,” a pioneering effort to answer the many questions site designers and Internet publicists had about search engines.

Danny currently heads up Search Engine Land as editor-in-chief, which covers all aspects of search marketing and search engine news. Danny also serves as Third Door Media’s chief content officer, which owns Search Engine Land and the SMX: Search Marketing Expo conference series. Danny also maintains a personal blog called Daggle and microblogs on Twitter: @dannysullivan.

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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).

Tom Wailes serves as the Senior Director for Yahoo! Local Product and Design, one of the most visited local network of sites online. Bringing a strong background of more than ten years in product and user experience management, Tom is responsible for setting overall strategy and prioritization for Yahoo! Local properties. He currently oversees all of the products that are core to Yahoo!’s ongoing local initiatives, including Yahoo! Local, Upcoming, Maps Geo and Yellow Pages. Prior to this role Tom has held roles at Yahoo! as interaction designer, information architect, usability engineer and design manager for Yahoo! Local, leading a team responsible for developing the user experience strategy, concepts and design execution. In his more than seven years at Yahoo! Tom has also led the design teams for Search, Autos, Real Estate, Travel, Yahoo! Post and Classifieds where he oversaw both original product development as well as multiple significant and successful redesigns.

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John oversees development and integration of the Google Maps and Google Earth products and services. He joined Google in October 2004 as part of the acquisition of Keyhole, a 3D mapping technology company that developed an “earth browser”, which he co-founded in 2001. At Google, the Keyhole technology became Google Earth in July 2005.

Prior to Keyhole, John co-founded Big Network, designed to pursue casual gaming online. Big Network was acquired by eUniverse in 2000. Earlier, he was involved in the startup of one of the first massively multiplayer games online, Meridian 59, which was acquired by 3DO in 1996. Before his work in technology began, John worked in foreign affairs for the U.S. government in Washington D.C. and Southeast Asia.

John earned a BA in Plan II from the University of Texas at Austin, and an MBA from the Haas School of Business at the University of California-Berkeley.

Dylan joined Yelp in December 2009 to lead the company’s local business marketing efforts. Dylan began his internet career in 1999 at eBay, where he spent 6 years growing the community via online marketing and business development. Dylan has also worked in marketing at Photobucket, Prosper and Lending Club. He has an MBA from Wharton and a BA in art history from Bowdoin College.

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