The Speakers

A great line-up of 10 internationally recognized educators and industry leaders...

As an evangelist for "design ethnography", Kelly Goto is dedicated to understanding how real people integrate products and services into their daily lives. Goto is principal of gotomedia, LLC, a global leader in research-driven, people-friendly interface design for web, mobile and product solutions for clients including Seiko Epson Japan, Adobe, NetIQ, WebEx and CNET. Her book, Web Redesign: Workflow that Works , is a standard for user-centered design principles. Goto is also the editor of gotomobile.com, a leading online publication on mobile user experience and was the former President of the AIGA Center for Brand Experience.

A serial entrepreneur, Edward “Ted” Murphy has founded six companies since 1994. Murphy’s latest venture, IZEA operates a variety of social media properties including SocialSpark and PayPerPost, the world’s largest Consumer Generated Advertising Network. Founded in June of 2006, IZEA has raised over $10 million in venture funding from leading venture capitalists including Draper Fischer Jurvetson, Village Ventures and Inflexion.

Murphy’s creative prowess and passion for the unconventional has earned him the ear of some of the world’s largest marketing organizations including FOX, Bombardier, General Motors and Disney. His efforts have received national recognition, including A/V Multimedia Producer Magazine’s “Top 100 Multimedia Producers” for two consecutive years. In 2006 Murphy’s viral campaign created for the launch of PayPerPost was inducted into Marketing Sherpa’s Viral Marketing Hall of Fame.

When I was 12 years old I decided that I wanted to be a teacher. When I was 18 years old I decided that I wanted to be a high school biology and chemistry teacher. When I was 23 years old I accepted my first full-time teaching job as a high school biology and chemistry teacher. When I was 27 years old I decided that I didn't want to be a high school biology and chemistry teacher any more. In 1999, I left all security in that full-time teaching job behind and started my own company: Further Ahead.

In growing the company I've been a hands-on developer, consultant, sales person, administrator, and accountant and only three of those by choice. I'm a well-known speaker with a reputation for inspiring and exciting the audience with practical demonstrations and techniques for making web sites and applications easier for everyone to use. In addition to technical sessions, I'm honoured to have delivered several keynote addresses at many conferences over the past 2 years and many full-day workshops focused on accessibility.

As of June 2008, I'm the Group Lead for the Web Standards Project, a grassroots coalition fighting for standards which ensure simple, affordable access to web technologies for all. I'm also an avid triathlete. I'm not fast, but I'm getting better. You might expect that I'd have a blog about triathlons and training. You would be correct: ironfeathers.ca

Ethan Marcotte is a respected standards authority who hails from Cambridge, Massachusetts. He is a senior designer at Airbag Industries, a design consultancy that has enjoyed working with such clients as the Sundance Film Festival, New York Magazine, and the World Wide Web Consortium.

Ethan was a contributing writer to Professional CSS: Cascading Style Sheets for Web Design and Web Standards Creativity, and is a much sought-after technical editor. He spends entirely too much time working and learning online, and would like to be an unstoppable robot ninja when he grows up.

Beep.

As an author, educator and Web developer, Dave has been designing and developing Web sites since 1995, when he created his first commercial Web site—an online magazine for communication professionals. He’s been the Web master at the University of California, Berkeley and oversaw a complete CSS-based redesign of Macworld.com.

Dave's books include CSS: The Missing Manual, JavaScript: The Missing Manual and Dreamweaver: The Missing Manual, and he's a regular columnist at CreativePro.com. In addition, Dave has been teaching Web design, development and programming for over 10 years. He currently teaches in the multimedia program at Portland State University.

Greg Rewis is the Group Manager, Creative Solutions Evangelism at Adobe Systems. With over 20 years of computer industry experience, Greg spends in excess of 200 days of the year on the road, talking with customers, giving product demonstrations at trade shows and seminars, speaking at industry conferences, and leading specialized, advanced training sessions featuring Adobe’s Web Tools product line. Greg has been passionate about the web since putting his first “home page” online in 1994. His career has taken him around the world, from the early days of desktop publishing, to a start-up in Hamburg, Germany, the glory days of the web at Macromedia and finally his current role at Adobe. The original GoLive Cyberstudio Product Manager and former Dreamweaver Technical Product Manager, Greg is the co-author of “Mastering CSS with Dreamweaver CS4″ published by New Riders.

When not on-the-road, Greg spends his time with his MacBook Pro on his lap, hanging out with his co-author and fiance Stephanie Sullivan, playing the guitar or killing his two sons in “Call Of Duty” on the Playstation 3.

Christopher Schmitt is the founder of Heat Vision, a small new media publishing and design firm. An award-winning Web designer who has been working with the Web since 1993, Christopher interned for both David Siegel and Lynda Weinman in the mid-90s while he was an undergraduate at Florida State University working on a fine arts degree with an emphasis on graphic design. Afterward, he earned a master's in communication for Interactive and New Communication Technologies while obtaining a graduate certificate in project management from FSU's College of Communication.

In 2000, he led a team to victory in the Cool Site in a Day competition, where he and five other talented developers built a fully functional, well-designed Web site for a nonprofit organization in eight hours.

Author of numerous Web design and digital imaging books, including Adapting to Web Standards: CSS and Ajax for Big Sites and CSS Cookbook, Christopher has also written for New Architect Magazine, A List Apart, Digital Web, and Web Reference. At conferences such as Web Visions, Voices that Matter and SXSW, Christopher has given talks demonstrating the use and benefits of practical standards-based designs. He is the list moderator for Babble, a mailing list community devoted to advanced Web design and development topics.

On his personal Web site, christopherschmitt.com, Christopher shows his true colors and most recent activities. He is 6'7" and does not play professional basketball but wouldn't mind a good game of chess because, quite frankly, he's not good at that either.

Jared M. Spool is the founder of User Interface Engineering, the largest usability research organization of its kind in the world. If you’ve ever seen Jared speak about usability, you know that he’s probably the most effective and knowledgeable communicator on the subject today. He’s been working in the field of usability and design since 1978, before the term "usability" was ever associated with computers.

Jared spends his time working with the research teams at the company, helps clients understand how to solve their design problems, explains to reporters and industry analysts what the current state of design is all about, and is a top-rated speaker at more than 20 conferences every year. He is also the conference chair and keynote speaker at the annual UI Conference, is on the faculty of the Tufts University Gordon Institute, and manages to squeeze in a fair amount of writing time. He is author of the book, Web Usability: A Designer’s Guide.

Stephanie Sullivan, founder and principal of W3Conversions, has been a web professional since 1999. A sought-after speaker, tech editor, corporate trainer, author, and coding guru, she's called on to solve especially perplexing problems for high-profile websites. Her true passion is creating impeccable markup and code behind the design, and teaching others how to do the same. Stephanie is available for in-house, customized corporate training.

Stephanie is a leader in the web industry who inspires others to strive for higher standards in their work. She serves as co-lead of the influential Web Standards Project (WaSP) Adobe Task Force, sits on the International Advisory Board for the Web Developer’s and Designer’s Journal, is an Adobe Community Expert, and is a partner at Community MX, a site offering over 2,900 tutorials to web developers seeking to increase their skills.

A tireless advocate of web community education, she is “List Mom” for the long-running WebWeavers discussion list for professional web designers, and a moderator of the search engine marketing discussion group SEM 2.0. She answers questions almost daily in the forums at Community MX where she also writes a widely-read blog.

Although she loves making websites fast-loading and lean, she loves beach volleyball even more. She tears herself away from the little people in her computer at least three times a week to get sandy or play Squash. Stephanie headquarters her business in the desert of Phoenix, AZ, where she lives with her youngest teenaged son, two semi-sons and her fiance, Greg Rewis. Her hobby, if only she had time? Studying brain function. Her guilty pleasure? Eighties music.

Shari is the Founder and SEO Director at Omni Marketing Interactive, a full-service search engine optimization (SEO), Web design, information architecture (IA), and website usability firm.

Shari has been designing and promoting Web sites since 1995 and is outsourced to many companies worldwide. As a pioneer in the area of search-engine friendly website design, she has a 100% success rate for getting client sites ranked at the top of search engines. Clients include Microsoft, Yahoo, AOL, ABC News, HSBC, Expedia, National Cancer Institute, and WebMD.

When she is not busy being a search geek, Shari is a die-hard Metallica fan and voracious reader. She loves Iceland and remains unconvinced that surfboards make good wall art.