Creating Context for Search

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

• Web site

Alexa Andrzejewski is the founder of Foodspotting, a visual local guide that makes finding and sharing food recommendations as easy as snapping a photo. Foodspotting, an angel-backed startup, has received attention from the Techcrunch, Mashable, The Wall Street Journal and CNN blogs and was named one of Time Magazine’s 50 Best Websites of 2010.

Before launching Foodspotting in January 2010, Alexa was a User Experience Designer for Adaptive Path, where she helped both startups and established companies create great experiences that improve people’s lives. From redesigning MySpace to conducting the research that underlies the Palm Pre, Alexa has helped clients reimagine products from the ground up.

Following in the footsteps of Adaptive Path colleagues who’ve started their own UX-driven ventures, Alexa looks forward to drawing upon her interest in how companies can achieve business goals and improve people’s lives by appealing to core motivations and needs.

Through speaking, writing and teaching, Alexa strives to advance experience-minded thinking and methods to all who will listen. Recent appearances include WebVisions, Big Omaha, SXSW, the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco and New York, UX Week and LIFT in South Korea.

• Web site

Lior Ron is the lead Group Product Manager for Google Places. He has spent the last 12 years innovating in the geo industry where he was the CTO of the Israeli Intelligence mapping and search efforts, product manager at Yahoo, founder of a geo search startup and in the last 4 years part of the Google geo leadership team. He holds an MBA from Stanford GSB, BSc and MS from the Technion – the Israeli institute for technology.

Eric joined Yelp in November 2007 as a Product Manager and now is Yelp’s consumer product lead. During his two years with the company, most of his efforts have been focused on Yelp’s search and mobile products. Prior to Yelp, he worked as a product manager, UI designer and software engineer. Eric holds a B.S. in Computer Science from Northwestern University.

• Web site

Jyri is founder and CEO of Ditto, a new mobile communication app. Jyri cofounded Jaiku, which grew into the leading European microblogging service and was acquired by Google in 2007. At Google Jyri was Product Manager of mobile applications including Mobile Calendar and the Gmail Mobile client, and started up social products including Google Buzz, Google Profiles, and Google Latitude. Jyri is an advisor/angel investor in companies such as Applifier, Betabrand, and Mobclix. Before founding Jaiku Jyri was Senior Product Manager, Internet Handhelds at Nokia. A sociologist by training, he is noted for coining the term ‘social object’ to refer to photos, bookmarks, and other shareable Web content. He blogs at zengestrom.com.

• Web site