Speakers | Web Directions Unplugged

Speakers

Interesting and talented people from the four corners of the web

• Juliette Melton
• Dave Balmer
• Wendy Chisholm
• Nicholas Zakas
• Ross Boucher
• Brian Fling
• Dave Orchard
• Stephanie (Sullivan) Rewis
• Daniel Davis
• Robby Ingebretsen
• Yehuda Katz
• Chris Wilson
• David Kaneda
• Rachel Hinman
• Aaron Weyenberg
• You
• Relly Annett-Baker
• Dan Saffer
• Divya Manian
• Aaron Parecki
• Daniels Lee™

Juliette Melton

Presenting: Mobile User Experience Research

Juliette has ten years of experience building, managing, and researching digital environments and is a human factors researcher based at IDEO in San Francisco. She’s deeply interested in the intersections between digital culture, learning, and communication. Her work has spanned a broad range of industries including social media, casual gaming, education administration, electronic publishing, corporate banking, computer hardware, and public health.

Community education — through workshops, lectures, and writing — is an important part of her work. Remote user experience methods, agile project management, and research program planning are frequent topics.

Juliette holds an MEd from the Technology, Innovation, and Education program at the Harvard Graduate School of Education where she focused on developing models for innovative networked learning applications. She also has a BA in Comparative Literature from Haverford College.

Follow Juliette on Twitter: @j

Dave Balmer

Presenting: HTML5 Graphics - Canvas Deep Dive

As a Senior Software Engineer with Palm Developer Relations, Dave is a JavaScript guru currently focused on mobile app development. He is the creator of four JavaScript application frameworks, including Jo HTML5 Mobile App Framework, which is a lightweight solution for cross-platform mobile apps.

In his spare time, Dave designs and writes games, makes music, and writes.

Follow Dave on Twitter: @balmer

Wendy Chisholm

Presenting: Universal Access - now for apps as well

Wendy Chisholm is an author, activist and developer. She co-wrote “Universal Design for Web Applications” with Matt May (O’Reilly, 2008), and before that co-edited Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 and 2.0–the basis of most web accessibility policies. She has focused on inclusive web design since 1995. Being both a developer (B.S. in Computer Science) and a Human Factors Engineer (M.S. in Industrial Engineering/Human Factors), Wendy bridges communication between developers and designers. As a staff for the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) for 6 years, she helped synchronize work on the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines with developments in internationalization and mobile design.

She is currently a Senior Strategist at Microsoft, where she works to make all web-related applications throughout the company accessible.

Her personal mission is to find elegant solutions that remove barriers that prevent everyone from participating fully in society. “I am an advocate for people with disabilities, people who are injured (especially vets) and people who are aging (i.e., all of us). I want to make inclusion a reality–both online and off”.

Wendy’s photo is courtesy of Matt.

Follow Wendy on Twitter: @wendyabc

Nicholas Zakas

Presenting: Web Speed Bumps

Nicholas C. Zakas is principal front-end engineer for the Yahoo! homepage, a contributor to YUI, and an author. Nicholas has written Professional JavaScript for Web Developers, Professional Ajax, and High Performance JavaScript. He has also contributed a chapter to Steve Souders’ Even Faster Web Sites. Nicholas posts regularly at his blog as well as on YUI Blog.

Follow Nicholas on Twitter: @slicknet

Ross Boucher

Presenting: Quality Control - Testing and debugging your apps

Ross Boucher is co-founder of 280 North, the organization behind 280 slides and the popular Cappuccino and Atlas frameworks. At 280 North, he splits his time between server and client-side code, including the text system in 280 Slides. He has a M.S. in Electrical Engineering from USC. After graduating, he worked as an engineer at Apple on the iTunes Store. His team was responsible for music recommendations, charting, and search. Ross is currently working with his colleagues to create tools that will help everyone build rich applications.

Follow Ross on Twitter: @boucher

Brian Fling

Presenting: Native v hybrid v web

Brian Fling is an authority in the field of in mobile user experience and designing for multiple contexts. He has worked with hundreds of businesses from early stage start-ups to Fortune 50 companies to leverage a variety of mediums, like mobile devices, to design for the needs and context of real people.

Author of O’Reilly Media’s Mobile Design and Development: Practical concepts and techniques for creating mobile sites and web apps, Brian goes in depth into the design principles involved in creating compelling mobile experiences for this new era of multiple devices and context. As well as explore the rapidly growing area of how to easily design and build a mobile site and web app, how to deal with devices practically and how to translate an experience to a variety of mobile devices.

Brian is a frequent author and speaker on the issues on mobile design, the mobile web and mobile user experience, teaching people how to leverage mobile all over the world. Brian is also the founder and president of pinch/zoom, a design and development agency specializing on mobile experiences helping clients like Best Buy, Lonely Planet and others dive into the world of mobile.

Follow Brian on Twitter:@fling

Dave Orchard

Presenting: The best of both worlds - Offline Web Apps with HTML5

Dave Orchard is Mobile Architect at Salesforce.com and located in Vancouver, Canada. This means being involved in many mobile platforms, architectures, tools, technologies and APIs. Prior to that, he was a co-founder of Ayogo Games and focused on iPhone and ruby/merb/mysql based casual social games. Back further in the mists of time, he was the Web standards lead for BEA Systems for 7 years, including being elected three times to 2 year terms on the W3C Technical Architecture Group chaired by Sir Tim Berners-Lee.

Follow Dave on Twitter: @DaveO

Stephanie (Sullivan) Rewis

Presenting: Move it! CSS3 Transitions and Animations

Stephanie (Sullivan) Rewis is the founder of W3Conversion, a web design company with a passion for web standards. A front-end developer, Stephanie created the CSS Starter Layouts in Dreamweaver CS3 and recently updated for DW CS5. Her passion for sharing knowledge has led her to write books and tutorials, pen a bi-monthly column for Web Designer Magazine, train corporate web departments, and speak at numerous conferences. Stephanie is the WaSP liaison to Adobe Systems, working with product managers to ensure the output of its web products continues to move toward today’s web standards. An admitted workaholic who rarely leaves the office, she frequently escapes to talk to the people inside her computer via Twitter. Her hobby, if only she had time? Studying brain function. Her guilty pleasure? Eighties music.

Follow Stephanie on Twitter: @stefsull

Daniel Davis

Presenting: Widgets in Theory and Practice

Daniel is the Web Evangelist for Opera’s Japan office based in Tokyo. His previous work experience includes project management, IT training, web development, software development and system administration in both Japan and the UK, his home country. After studying Japanese and Chinese at university, he grew more and more interested in the flourishing field of IT and the web, learning as much as he could by playing and experimenting with internet-related technologies. His current work promoting web standards and cross-device web development at Opera fits in perfectly with his ideology of openness and equality across linguistic, social and socio-economic borders.

Follow Daniel on Twitter: @ourmaninjapan

Robby Ingebretsen

Presenting: Get your game on - HTML5 for game building

Robby Ingebretsen is a user experience designer and developer with a singular purpose: making great ideas real. As the founder of Pixel Lab, a user experience consultancy that specializes in Silverlight, HTML5 and mobile technologies, he helps clients make cool stuff–the kind that needs the unique full-bodied blend of a little design love and a little engineering kung-fu.

Follow Robby on Twitter: @ingebretsen

Yehuda Katz

Presenting: Sproutcore

Yehuda Katz is a member of the SproutCore, Ruby on Rails and jQuery Core Teams; during the daytime, he works as an architect at Strobe.

Yehuda is the co-author of the best-selling jQuery in Action, the upcoming Rails 3 in Action, and is a contributor to Ruby in Practice. He spends most of his time hacking on open source—his main projects, along with others, like Thor, Handlebars and Janus—or traveling the world doing evangelism work. He blogs at http://yehudakatz.com and can be found on Twitter as @wycats.

Chris Wilson

Presenting: The Convergence of All Things

Chris Wilson is a Developer Advocate at Google Inc. He began working on web browsers in 1993 when he co-authored the original Windows version of NCSA Mosaic, the first mass-market WWW browser. After leaving NCSA in 1994 and spending a year working on the AIRMosaic web browser for SPRY, Inc., he joined Microsoft’s Internet Explorer team as a developer in 1995.

Over the course of 15 years, Chris represented Microsoft in many standards working groups, in particular helping develop standards for Cascading Style Sheets, HTML, the Document Object Model and XSL through the W3C working groups. He also developed the first implementation of Cascading Style Sheets in Internet Explorer – the first, in fact, in any mass-market web browser. Beginning in 2001, he spent a few years working on the WPF project, but rejoined the IE team in 2004 to lead the IE Platform and Security team, then moved to work on the Javascript engine team in 2009.

In 2010, Chris left Microsoft and joined Google’s Developer Relations team, and is currently working on the Google TV project.

In his free time, he enjoys photography and hiking with his wife and daughter, and scuba diving in the cool waters of Puget Sound. Occasionally he remembers to share his thoughts on his blog.

Follow Chris on Twitter:@cwilso

David Kaneda

Presenting: SenchaTouch for app development

David Kaneda has nine years of experience designing in a variety of fields, from architecture and fashion to education and software. Recently, David created jQTouch, a Javascript framework for iPhone development. David also maintains WebKitBits, a site about the browser engine in Safari, Google Chrome, and the iPhone. David currently works as creative director at Sencha, and is responsible for the look and feel of their websites and software, including Sencha Touch.

You can follow him on Twitter @davidkaneda

Rachel Hinman

Presenting: Mobile Prototyping Essentials

Rachel Hinman is a researcher, designer and a recognized thought leader in the mobile user experience field.

Currently, Rachel is a Senior Research Scientist at the Nokia Research Center in Palo Alto, California. There she focuses on the research and design of emergent and experimental mobile interfaces and mobile experiences for emerging markets. Prior to joining Nokia, Rachel was an experience design director at Adaptive Path, and a mobile researcher and strategist for Yahoo’s mobile group.

Rachel writes and speaks frequently on the topic of mobile research and design. She is the creative force behind the 90 Mobiles in 90 Days Project and her perspectives on mobile user experience has been featured in Interactions Magazine, BusinessWeek and Wired. She is currently writing a book entitled, “The Mobile Frontier: A Guide for Designing Mobile Experiences” with Rosenfeld Media. Expected publication is late 2011.

Follow Rachel on Twitter:@Hinman

Aaron Weyenberg

Presenting: Realistic UI Design – the good, the bad and the ugly

A mixed breed designer/developer, Aaron’s career is built upon a unique blend of creative and technical sensibilities. He began twelve years ago leading interactive initiatives for Colorado’s top design agencies, delivering successful projects for a range of clients including HP, Spyder Active Sports and the National Center for Atmospheric Research. In 2004 he joined ESPN New Media where he provided instrumental leadership in an Art Director role. At ESPN he guided best practices, developed core UI components and designed pioneering real time game and scoring applications. Aaron currently serves as Creative Director for Fanzter, a lean and profitable New England based startup. His work has appeared on Smashing Magazine, Six Revisions, Ajax Rain and was awarded at the 27th annual Sports Emmys.

Aaron’s academic background spans three fields of study at three different universities, settling into a B.S. in Scientific and Technical Communication from Michigan Tech. His offline hobbies involve learning about social psychology and human behavior, photography, and a quest to find the perfect iPod earphones.

Follow Aaron on Twitter:@aweyenberg

You

Presenting: The Unplugged Roundtable

Unplugged doesn’t just feature leading edge experts discussing their ideas, work, and the lessons they’ve learned. Our events are just as much about you. So bring your ideas and experiences to share throughout the event, and in particular come along to The Unplugged Roundtable on Friday morning.

Relly Annett-Baker

Presenting: You had me at "signup"- Content Strategy for Apps

Relly Annett-Baker lives in a leafy market town with her husband and two small sons. As a result, she eats far too many cakes from Waitrose and can be guaranteed to stand on Lego at least once a day. As well as being content strategist and content writer for Headscape, she is employed as live-in domestic staff by two cats. She also writes articles and jabbers on about copy to anyone who will listen, creates scrapbooks, and continues to procrastinate over the draft for her book, a guide to creating web content for designers and developers, to be published in Spring 2011 by Five Simple Steps. She better finish this biography before her editor spots she isn’t writing her book again.

Follow Relly on Twitter: @RellyAB

Dan Saffer

Presenting: Top Ten Things To Tackle Touchscreens

Dan Saffer is an interaction designer and the author of two books: Designing Gestural Interfaces and Designing for Interaction. He is the co-founder and one of the principals at Kicker Studio, a design consultancy in San Francisco that does “interaction-infused” product design.

Since 1995, Dan has designed devices, software, websites, and services that are currently used by millions every day. He speaks at conferences and teaches workshops on interaction design all over the world. He and his products have been in BusinessWeek, Fast Company, and Wired, and his design innovations have received several patents.

Follow Dan on Twitter: @odannyboy

Divya Manian

Presenting: Bring your apps to life with CSS3 magic

Divya Manian is a Web Designer in Seattle. She made the jump from developing device drivers for Motorola phones to designing websites and has not looked back since. She takes her duties as an Open Web vigilante seriously which has resulted in collaborative projects such as HTML5 Readiness and HTML5 Boilerplate. Speaker Photo: © Mohini Patel Glanz.

Follow Divya on Twitter: @nimbuin

Aaron Parecki

Presenting: Geolocation in web and native mobile apps

Aaron Parecki is a Portland-based iPhone and PHP developer interested in solving practical problems with technology. In his free time, he enjoys geolocation, linguistics, and building home automation systems and IRC bots with a sense of humor. For the past 2½ years, he has been tracking and visualizing his location every 6 seconds. He created Geoloqi.com with Amber Case in an effort to help people connect in the real world. He has 11 years experience in web app development, database design, and server administration.

Follow Aaron on Twitter: @aaronpk

Daniels Lee™

Presenting: Designing for the 10 foot UI

Daniels is a Developer Programs Engineer who’s had the pleasure of working with several developer communities since he joined the team in 2006. After starting with iGoogle gadgets, he worked closely with advertisers and agencies via Gadget Ads, then onto Geo APIs focusing on V2 to V3 migration, and now Google TV. He’s not afraid to publicly confess his love for JavaScript and recognizes its profound ability to make the web more interactive. With a growing love for HTML5 technology, sky’s the limit. On his off time, he enjoys cultivating authentic relationships while always pursuing a greater sense of self and awareness.

Follow Daniels on Twitter: @dannon81

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