Where 2.0 2011 Keynote Speakers

Jack is the founder and former CEO of Milo.com, which was acquired by eBay (EBAY) in December 2010. The idea to build a local shopping engine originated when Jack, then a junior at the Wharton School, went to buy a camera at a store in Philadelphia, only to be told that it was out-of-stock. The experience got him thinking about the potential for a local shopping search engine, one that could tell you which nearby stores currently had a product in-stock. Hence, Milo.com was born.

Jack always knew he wanted to be an entrepreneur. At age 12, he built some of comScore¹s (SCOR) first data extraction and processing mechanisms to help the company grow from three to 40 employees. His continuing interest in data then propelled him to write software that capitalized on arbitrage opportunities programmatically in eBay’s marketplace. He also has experience developing behavioral targeting campaigns for companies such as Microsoft and Drugstore.com.

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).

Sam Altman is co-founder and CEO of Loopt, a company that builds mobile applications to help people enjoy the friends, places, and events around you right now. Sam sees mobile location as completely transforming how people can and will communicate and consume content on their mobile devices. Since starting the company in 2005 while studying at Stanford University, Sam has consistently been recognized for his entrepreneurship. He was featured in Inc. Magazine’s Top 30 Entrepreneurs Under 30 and BusinessWeek’s Tech’s Best Entrepreneurs. As an early innovator in mobile location services, Sam joined Apple CEO Steve Jobs on stage at WWDC 2008, presenting Loopt as one of the first applications in the iPhone App Store. Sam has been a valuable source for many media outlets including Charlie Rose, CNN, The Economist, New York Times, Wall Street Journal and numerous others. Additionally, he mentors new companies at the venture company Y-Combinator, and is on the Advisory Boards for a number of Silicon Valley startups.

Recently named one of the top 50 most creative people in Business (Fast Company,) Genevieve Bell is an Intel Fellow and director of the Interaction and Experience Research Group within the Intel Labs.

Bell joined Intel in 1998 and has come to lead an R&D team of social scientists, interaction designers and human factors engineers to drive human-centric product innovation in Intel’s consumer electronics business. In this role, she is responsible for setting research directions, conducting comparative qualitative and quantitative research globally, leading new product strategy and definition, and championing consumer-centric innovation and thinking across the company.

Prior to joining Intel, Bell was a lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at Stanford University. She has written more than 30 journal articles and book chapters on a range of subjects focused on the intersection of technology and society. Her book, “Techno-Cultural Tales,” co-authored with Prof. Paul Dourish, will be released by MIT Press in 2011. In 2009, she had a distinguished appointment as South Australia’s 15th Thinker-in-Residence. In this role, she helped develop new policy and strategic directions for governmental responses to high-speed internet.

Raised in Australia, Bell received her bachelor’s degree in anthropology from Bryn Mawr College in 1990. She received her master’s and doctorate degrees in anthropology from Stanford University in 1993 and 1998, respectively.

Krissy Clark is an award-winning journalist and documentary-maker, with a passion for location-aware technologies and their power as storytelling tools. Clark is currently the Los Angeles Bureau Chief for KQED public radio, where she uncovers the people, places and events that make Southern California such a fascinating region or, in the words of Wernor Herzog, “a place of cultural substance.”

Clark has spent more than a decade covering public affairs, politics, the economy and the environment for outlets including APM, NPR, and the BBC. She is a frequent contributor to the business show Marketplace, where she covered the gulf oil spill and its economic implications. She is a former staff reporter and editor for the weekly syndicated show Weekend America.

In 2009 Clark received a Knight Journalism Fellowship at Stanford to explore the geospatial web and its applications for innovating journalism, working with the Stanford Computer Science Department, the Bill Lane Center for the Study of the American West, and the Hasso Platner Institute of Design, or d.school.

“Foreclosure City,” Clark’s documentary on the epicenter of the nation’s foreclosure crisis, Las Vegas, made her a finalist for the Livingston Award for Journalists under 35, one of journalism’s highest honors. Earlier in her career she spent several years in a small town in Colorado where she reported on the rural American West for the environmental newspaper High Country News. There, her documentary on the legacy of nuclear weapons development in western states was awarded Best Documentary by the Public Radio News Directors Inc.

Clark graduated cum laude with honors from Yale University, where she earned a B.A. in The Humanities. She is a frequent speaker on journalism and the geospatial web at institutions including Google, Stanford’s Human Computer Interaction Group, and the American Association of University Women.

As a fifth generation Californian, Clark is interested in history and the way people shape places, and places shape people. Her audio installation, Block of Time: O’Farrell Street, was featured alongside MIT’s SENSEable Cities project and Stamen Design’s TenderVoice/TenderNoise at the City Centered Festival in San Francisco, sponsored by the Gray Area Foundation for the Arts. Block of Time and other experiments in narrative landscapes can be found at her website, storieseverywhere.org.

If you want to know more about Krissy’s work, this short article she wrote might help.

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.

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.

Chairman Platial, Community Geographer Waze. Currently raising chickens, studying transactional cartography and real time data geo displays.

I run the engineering team at Etsy where we apply a surprising amount of sophisticated technology to the problem of selling hand made goods. Before that I was the architect at Flickr. That takes us back to pre-history.

Brady Forrest is co-chair for O’Reilly’s Where 2.0. Additionally, he co-chairs Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco and NYC. Brady writes for O’Reilly Radar tracking changes in technology. He previously worked at Microsoft on Live Search (he came to Microsoft when it acquired MongoMusic). Brady lives in Seattle, where he builds cars for Burning Man and runs Ignite. You can track his web travels at Truffle Honey.

Ben Fry runs a software and design consultancy in Cambridge, Massachusetts that focuses on understanding complex data. Fry received his doctorate from the Aesthetics + Computation Group at the MIT Media Laboratory, where his research focused on combining fields such as computer science, statistics, graphic design, and data visualization as a means for understanding information. With Casey Reas of UCLA, he develops Processing, an open source programming environment used by tens of thousands of students, artists, engineers, and scientists. At the end of 2007, he published “Visualizing Data” with O’Reilly. Fry’s personal work has shown at the Whitney Biennial, the Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. His information graphics have also illustrated articles for the journal Nature, New York Magazine, The New York Times, Seed, and Communications of the ACM.

Matt Galligan, 25, is the CEO and Co-Founder of SimpleGeo, based out of Boulder, CO that provides a ready-to-use location infrastructure for app developers. He previously founded Socialthing, a company that was chosen to be part of the inaugural year of TechStars. Socialthing.com went into private beta in March, 2008 at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas. The company was acquired five months later by AOL. Socialthing was later rebranded as AOL Lifestream.

Matt currently resides in Boulder, CO and is an active member of the startup community there.

Building on a passion for both computer science, sociology and art, Julia received her Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill with Honors. She went on to compete her Master of Science in Computer Science from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill in 2007, focusing on communication and collaboration in online communities.

She joined IBM Research - Almaden in 2006, specializing in creating visualizations for large datasets of unstructured information. She went on to design and built innovative user interfaces and applications for a wide range of domains including healthcare, finance and government. In 2008 Julia joined the USER (User Sciences and Experience Research) group at Almaden, focusing on social and collaborative software. Her current work is focused on how to visualize and make sense of the massive amounts of data from social networking sources. She is excited by the prospect of cleanly and concisely presenting social information as to help people all over the world more effectively.

She has been featured in two internationally aired IBM television commercials about her work, speaks regularly at universities about her passion for collaboration, and has come to love giving Ingite talks. In her spare time she runs, backpacks through the state parks of California, and practices yoga. She is a certified wine dilettante.

Vice President, Services Nokia

Michael Halbherr leads the Services Product Development at Nokia. In this role, he is responsible for defining the services product strategy and proposition to create and deliver superior experiences for consumers. 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 by Nokia, Michael has been heading the location based experiences at Nokia, and, most recently, the Ovi Experience unit. Michael holds a PhD in Computer Science from MIT and a Masters in Electrical Engineering from ETH Zurich.

Charlie Kim serves as Chief Executive Officer and Chairman of Next Jump, Inc. Mr. Kim founded Next Jump in 1994. He worked in the Information Technology and Human Resources groups of Morgan Stanley in New York, Hong Kong and Tokyo from 1995 to 1997. He returned to Boston in April 1997 to grow the business full-time. To grow Next Jump from a one-person operation to a multi-layered corporation, he raised millions in independent investments from Wall Street’s most influential players. He graduated with Honors from Tufts University in 1995, where he earned a B.S. in Computer Science and a B.A. in Quantitative Economics.

Steve is the Co-Founder of GroupMe. Previously, he was a Lead Software Engineer at Gilt Groupe. Before joining Gilt, Steve was the founder of Sympact Technologies, a startup focused on developing dynamic images for real-time email marketing. Steve also founded Bandwith.us, a friends and family ticketing platform for Lollapalooza and Austin City Limits and nationally touring acts. Steve graduated from Carnegie Melon University in 2004 with a B.S. in Information Systems. With a penchant for non-profits and community activism, Steve serves as a technical advisor to Headcount.

Marissa leads Google’s efforts on search products - web search, images, news, books, products, maps, - and other consumer-facing initiatives such as iGoogle, Google Earth, Google Chrome, and more. Her contributions have included designing and developing Google’s search interface, internationalizing the site to over 100 languages, and launching more than 100 features and products on Google.com. Several patents have been filed on her work in artificial intelligence and interface design. Google’s first female engineer, Marissa joined in 1999 and led the user interface and web server teams at that time.

Concurrently with her full-time work at Google, Marissa has taught introductory computer programming classes at Stanford University, where she earned both her B.S. in Symbolic Systems and her M.S. in Computer Science. Stanford has recognized her with the Centennial Teaching Award and the Forsythe Award for her outstanding contribution to undergraduate education.

Marissa has been featured in various publications, including Fortune (“50 Most Powerful Women”), Newsweek (“10 Tech Leaders of the Future”), Red Herring (“15 Women to Watch”), Business 2.0 (“Silicon Valley Dream Team”), BusinessWeek (“Top 25 Innovation Leaders”) and Fast Company.

Patrick Meier is the Director of Crisis Mapping at Ushahidi and the co-founder of the International Network of Crisis Mappers. He previously co-founded and co-directed Harvard University’s (HHI) Program on Crisis Mapping and Early Warning. He has consulted for many international organizations including the UN, OSCE and OECD on numerous crisis mapping and conflict early warning projects in Africa, Asia and Europe. Patrick is a recognized expert and thought leader on the intersection between new technologies, early warning, civil resistance, human rights and humanitarian response. He has written extensively on these topics and has presented his work at numerous high-profile conferences worldwide. Patrick is also completing his PhD at The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and is currently a Visiting Fellow at Stanford University’s Program on Liberation Technologies. He has an MA in International Affairs from Columbia University and is an alum of the Sante Fe Institute’s (SFI) Complex Systems Program. Patrick blogs at iRevolution.net.

Mike works on distributed geodata storage at SimpleGeo.

Before that, he spent 3 years at Yahoo! performing a variet of roles. Initially hired to the Ops Tools team to work on infrastructure projects such as DNS automation, he then went on to spread his time around on automating abuse/spam prevention, rebuilding the offline batch processing system, optimizing database queries, building out high-profile integrations, and rescuing kittens at Flickr.

When not writing code, Mike spends his time playing soccer, occasionally giving talks at conferences, and learning about how computers work.

DJ is the “Data Scientist in Residence” at Greylock Partners.

Previously he was the Chief Product Officer for Color and the Chief Scientist at the LinkedIn Corporation, leading the and Data Teams. Some of the products shipped include, People You May Know, Who’s Viewed My Profile, Talent Match, Skills, and Career Explorer.

He has held roles at Skype, PayPal, and eBay. As was a member of the faculty at the University of Maryland, he helped start a major research initiative on numerical weather prediction. As an AAAS Science & Technology Policy Fellow for the Department of Defense, Dr. Patil directed new efforts to leverage social network analysis and the melding of computational and social sciences to anticipate emerging threats to the US. He has also co-chaired a major review of US efforts to prevent bioweapons proliferation in Central Asia and co-founded the Iraqi Virtual Science Library (IVSL).

More details can be found on his LinkedIn profile.

Nick Pudar, Vice President of OnStar Planning and Business Development, is responsible for managing OnStar’s planning, business development, and service evolution. He has responsibility for future services development and for management of the overall service portfolio. He assumed the business development role in 2005.

Pudar started his General Motors career in 1981 in manufacturing, and held various positions in GM of Canada’s Windsor Transmission Plant. In 1986, he joined the Stamping Plant Modernization team as part of the Chevrolet-Pontiac-Canada Group and worked on metal-fab automation systems. In 1990, he joined the Industrial Engineering department in the Chevrolet-Pontiac-Canada to coordinate cross-plant throughput improvement efforts for GM’s newly modernized stamping plants. In 1993, Pudar joined the Corporate Strategy staff as a business analyst. Three years later, he was appointed Director of Corporate Strategy and Knowledge Development. In 2002, Pudar was named Director of GM Strategic Initiatives. In 2004 he became Director of Global Planning and Strategic Initiatives.

Pudar received his Bachelor of Science degree in Mechanical Engineering from General Motors Institute (now Kettering University) in 1986, and his Masters of Science in Management degree from Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management in 1990.

Laurel Ruma is the Director of Talent for O’Reilly Media. Most recently she co-chaired Where 2.0, OSCON Java, and Gov 2.0 Expo. She joined the company in 2005 after working for five years at various IT analyst firms in the Boston area. Laurel is also the co-editor of Open Government, published by O’Reilly.

Robert Scoble is an American blogger, technical evangelist, and author. Scoble is best known for his blog, Scobleizer, which came to prominence during his tenure as a technology evangelist at Microsoft. He currently works for Rackspace and the Rackspace sponsored community site Building 43. He previously worked for Fast Company as a video blogger and is also co-author of Naked Conversations: How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers with Shel Israel.

Justin Shaffer is a Product Manager at Facebook, where he currently manages the Events and Places products. Previously, he worked on Groups. Prior to Facebook, Justin was the Founder and CEO of Hot Potato, an early stage startup that helped people socialize around live events and share what they’re doing with friends. Hot Potato was acquired by Facebook in 2010. Prior to founding Hot Potato, Justin served as Senior Vice President, New Media at MLB Advanced Media, the online arm of Major League Baseball. Previously, Justin served at ScreamingMedia Inc., a content aggregator and syndicator in New York. He’s an avid skier and racing sailor, and also enjoys engineering pursuits of all kinds.

Mihir Shah is the Vice President and General Manager of Mobile at Groupon. Prior to its acquisition by Groupon, he was CEO and Co-founder of Mob.ly/Goodrec. Mihir also served in key product leadership roles at Yahoo!, most recently as Senior Director of Product Management for Yahoo! Search. Mihir was responsible for the US Web Search product and also helped launch Yahoo’s first mobile search products.

Before joining Yahoo!, Mihir was Director of Product Marketing at Grand Central, where he helped launch one of the first Web Services networks for businesses. He also served as Director of Product Management at Respond.com, a lead generation service for local businesses.

Mihir started his career as a management consultant at R. B. Webber & Company. At Webber he worked with a number of startups and Fortune 500 technology companies to develop go-to-market strategies across a wide range of high-tech product segments. Mihir holds a B.S. in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.