Make the Next Great User Experience

Mike Beltzner

Director of Firefox Development

Mike Beltzner is responsible for coordinating the efforts of a talented cast of thousands of people to ensure each thrilling Firefox release is made with quality and love. He is a cognitive scientist and teacher by education, usability specialist and product manager by training, and an optimist and compromise-seeker by nationality. He lives in Toronto, Canada with his wife and his cat.

Aza Raskin

Head of User Experience for Mozilla Labs

Aza is Head of User Experience for Mozilla Labs, and is keenly interested in all things that make computers and the Web better for humans. Aza gave his first talk on user interface at age 10 and got hooked. At 17, he was talking and consulting internationally; at 19, he coauthored a physics textbook; and at 21, he co-founded Humanized. Two years later, Aza founded Songza.com. Since joining Mozilla, he's worked on Ubiquity, Fennec, and numerous other projects. In another life, Aza has done Dark Matter research at both Tokyo University and the University of Chicago, where he graduated from with honors in math and physics. When not working (ha!) Aza enjoys playing music and punning.

John Resig

JavaScript evangelist

John Resig is a JavaScript evangelist for the Mozilla Corporation, developing JavaScript tools and promoting good practices in JavaScript development. He’s also the author of the book Pro JavaScript Techniques and the creator of the jQuery JavaScript library. He currently resides in Cambridge, MA.

Dion Almaer

Director of Developer Tools

Dion Almaer is the co-founder of Ajaxian.com, the leading source of the Ajax community. For his day job, Dion co-leads a new group at Mozilla focusing on developer tools for the Web, which is something he has been passionate about doing for years, and is excited for the opportunity!

Gina Trapani

Founding Editor, Lifehacker.com

Gina Trapani is the founding editor of Lifehacker.com, a daily weblog on software and personal productivity. Her latest book, Upgrade Your Life: The Lifehacker Guide to Working Smarter, Faster, Better, hit bookstores in the spring of 2008. As a freelance tech writer, Gina has contributed to various publications, including Wired, Popular Science, ReadyMade, Women's Health, PC World, and Macworld magazines. An enthusiastic JavaScript and XUL hacker, Gina compiled one of Mozilla Add-ons' official recommended Firefox extensions, Better Gmail. She holds a B.A. in English and an M.S. in Computer Information Science from the City University of New York.

Adam Pash

Lead Editor, Lifehacker.com

Adam is a freelance writer, web application tinkerer, and the lead editor for Lifehacker.com, a weblog focused on productivity and software. Outside of Lifehacker, Adam has written a book called How to Do Everything with Your iPhone and contributed to various publications, including Wired, PC World, and Popular Science. A web enthusiast and dabbling developer, Adam built a web site devoted to music sharing called MixTape.me, a simple checklist creator called PrintableChecklist.org, and several small Windows utilities.

Jeff Bonforte

CEO, Xobni.com

Before joining Xobni as CEO, Jeff was VP of Social Search at Yahoo!, where he ran Yahoo! Answers and Delicious. Jeff also ran Yahoo! Messenger and oversaw its move from #2 to #1 IM client in the US. Before Yahoo!, Jeff was President of SIPphone, where he conceived and designed the Gizmo project, one of the earliest leaders in VoIP. In 1998 Jeff founded and was the CEO of IDrive, the largest online storage tool of the time, with over 10mm monthly unique visitors. Jeff joined Xobni as CEO in February of 2008.

Garrett Camp

Founder & CEO, StumbleUpon

Garrett leads StumbleUpon’s product and business strategy. He has guided SU’s development and design since 2001, from inception to over 7.5M members. StumbleUpon is now the largest personalized content discovery engine on the web, delivering over 425 million recommendations per month within its index of 29 million pages.

Garrett completed his Masters in Software Engineering at the University of Calgary, where he researched interfaces for collaborative systems, evolutionary algorithms and information retrieval. He is also a 2007 recipient of MIT Technology Review’s TR35 award.