Merlin Mann
San Francisco, CA
Keynote: There Is No Plugin For Awesome (And the only tool here is you)
Merlin Mann is an independent writer, speaker, and broadcaster based in San Francisco. Merlin created 43 Folders, co-hosts You Look Nice Today, appears on MacBreak Weekly, and speaks and consults about things like email, time & attention, and creative work. Through his work in 43Folders Merlin been featured in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Time Magazine and has also been tapped to present to tech giants such as Apple, Google and Yahoo.
Connect with Merlin: Blog | @hotdogsladies | 43 Folders
Brandon Dove
Orange County, CA
Thematic: The Cool Parent (Theme)
Brandon is an official WordPress fanboy who enjoys pushing the platform to its limits. He’s a plugin and theme developer for Pixel Jar, a WordPress focused development firm based in Orange County, CA. Brandon has attended WordCamps throughout the United States and organized Orange County’s first WordCamp earlier this year. Brandon is currently creating detailed documentation and code samples for the Thematic theme framework.
Connect with Brandon: Blog | @brandondove | Pixel Jar
Álvaro Degives-Más
Reno, NV
Lightning Round: Security: how it works in your own benefit
Álvaro is a professional interpreter and translator with Spanish, Dutch and English as his A-languages. He has a storied background in marketing, advertising, public relations, direct marketing, publishing, journalism, as well as print media and TV production. Álvaro discovered WordPress in 2004 and has used it ever since to run several websites for non-profit organizations.
Connect with Álvaro: Blog | @renolanguages | Nevada Interpreters and Translators Association
Liz Franco
Sacramento, CA
Living in The Blogosphere: How to Blog so People Listen & Engage
Liz is a blogger, writer and dabbler of web design. She has a penchant for WordPress, cupcakes, her equally nerdy boyfriend & their ewok look-a-like pup. Liz passionately blogs 5 days a week and has successfully created a niche in her little corner of the web. When she’s not creating on teh internetz Liz likes to craft, discover new wineries & music.
Chris Gandolfo
Reno, NV
Optimizing WordPress for Search and Users
Chris is a Reno freelance web designer with over six years experience in web design and development, PPC advertising, and search engine optimization for large corporations, start-ups and non-profits. He has vast experience in usability and visitor behavior analysis to make sure what he develops looks great, is functional and findable. He is a web geek, online marketer, classic muscle car lover, golfer, animal lover, beer drinker, artist, pragmatist and dreamer.
Connect with Chris: Blog | @clustrfck | ClustrMedia
John Hawkins
Las Vegas, NV
Writing your first plugin
John has been working in the web development field for more than a decade. He started his first blog back in 2003, moved to WordPress a short time later and hasn’t looked back. John has been active in all aspects of the WordPress Universe. He’s customized themes, released plugins to the WordPress repository, hosted WordCamp: Las Vegas, and presented at WordCamp events all over the United States. John currently creates custom WordPress solutions for his clients at 9seeds.com.
Connect with John: Blog | @vegasgeek | 9seeds
Michael Higdon
Carson City, NV
Lightning Round: Sex on WordPress
Mike works as an advertising designer, photographer, news designer and innovator at Swift Communications in Carson City. He’s recently become obsessed with homebrewing and hopes someday you’ll try his stout. He used to write the sex column for the University of Nevada’s newspaper.
Connect with Michael: Blog | @mikehigdon | Swift Communications
Colin Loretz
Reno, NV
WordPress as a CMS
Colin is a developer, designer, entrepreneur and community builder. He develops custom solutions for Salesforce.com, WordPress and the iPhone platforms as the Chief Architect of Lively Labs. A supporter of tech culture, Colin also heads up Ignite Reno, organizes Reno-Tahoe WordCamp, and co-founded the Reno Collective coworking space for fellow entrepreneurs and freelancers.
Connect with Colin: Blog | @colinloretz | Lively Labs
Elisa Maser
Reno, NV
Lightning Round: Sex on WordPress
Elisa Maser handles lobbying and elections work for Planned Parenthood in Nevada. Communications degree from Mills College (where she edited the paper and only wrote a few sex columns) MANY years ago. Not nearly as much fun: Master’s in Business Administration from UNR. She started blogging on WordPress in 2006 when she ran for County Commission. Now she contributes to Planned Parenthood’s two blogs on topics relating to reproductive health and safe sex.
Connect with Elisa: @elisapiper
Dave Moyer
Denver, CO
WordPress as a Multimedia Platform
Dave Moyer has been on the web since 2003 and on the
airwaves even longer. Today he’s the founder and President of Bitwire Media, a multimedia content network that produces all-original podcast, radio and web TV programming, including the WordCast blogging, social media, and WordPress network. Bitwire also provides professional production services to individuals and organizations worldwide. Dave is an in-demand speaker, and regularly presents at all sorts of blogging, social media and tech conferences around the country and the world. Dave is also seventeen years old.
Connect with Dave: Blog | @davemoyer | Bitwire Media
Chelsea Otakan
Reno, NV
Designing with WordPress
Chelsea is a web designer and digital artist. She loves spaceships, aliens, and technology and dreams of living in a midbulk transport, standard radion-accelerator core, classcode 03-K64, Firefly class ship. She’s been dabbling in design and web development for 8 years and couldn’t dream of doing anything else for a living.
Connect with Chelsea: Blog | @chexee | Lively Labs
Dustin Ring
Reno, NV
An In-Depth Look into Running a WordPress Site
Dustin Ring is a Reno native who discovered his passion for design by painting graffiti murals. Now, more than 10 years later, his skills have expanded to graphic and web design, and to the creation of Media Militia, a web site where designers can download free vectors and stock images. Media Militia also offers the latest in design tutorials and inspiration. The site has quickly grown, generating high traffic and attracting content partnerships supported by advertisers and authors from around the world. In addition to design and graffiti, Dustin enjoys skateboarding, snowboarding, hip-hop, downhill mountain biking, and of course, WordPress.
Connect with Dustin: @mediamilitia | Media Militia
Joseph Scott
Salt Lake City, UT
WordPress Performance & Scaling Tips
Joseph is a California native, living in Utah with his wife and children. He got hooked on email when it meant dialing into a BBS with a 2400 baud modem and ended up memorizing way too much of the AT command set. Access to the Internet changed all that and going to work for an ISP cemented that shift. It also exposed to him to the world of open source, starting with FreeBSD in 1996. From there he spent a number of years in IT doing a little bit of everything. Joseph joined Automattic in 2007, where he focuses on WordPress APIs (XML-RPC/AtomPub), realtime-ish updates (rssCloud/PuSH), WordPress.org themes and stats, and likes to dabble in front and back end performance hacks.
Connect with Joseph: Blog | @josephscott | Automattic
Annie Vranizan
San Francisco, CA
Building a Community with BuddyPress I
An athlete, marketer and entrepreneur based in San Francisco, California, focusing on philanthropy, social media, WordPress and community awareness. She is the cofounder of Vivanista, a community for philanthropic living and giving. She enjoys skiing, surfing, biking, yoga, tweeting, coding html, multimedia-multitasking and is known to fit them all in one day if you let her.
Connect with Annie: Blog | @avranizan | Vivanista
Jeffrey Zinn
Huntington Beach, CA
WordPress for Noobs
Jeff has been developing web sites and applications for over a decade. WordPress became his favorite playground about four years ago and he’s never looked back. He develops sites, plugins and themes for Pixel Jar, a Southern California web firm specializing in WordPress projects. When programming overwhelms Jeff, he can be found out surfing, playing games or wandering the Sierras.
Connect with Jeffrey: Blog | @jeffreyzinn | Pixel Jar
