Weekend Apps has some great speakers lined up!

Offerpal Panel Discussion

Nicholas Talarico, Director of Operations, Sibblingz, Inc.

Nicholas is the director of operations at Sibblingz, Inc., which build engaging and enriching youth-focused virtual worlds that encourage creativity and collaboration in a safe environment. Sibblingz is the company behind the popular Make a Baby application on Facebook, MySpace and Bebo. Nicholas has also served as the Operations Director of FORGE, a non-profit organization that works with displaced communities in Africa.

Randal Truong, Lead Developer, Dog World

Randal Truong is the lead developer and product manager for Dog World, a game on the MySpace platform. Randal has guided Dog World from its initial conception to growth and monetization. Dog World is owned by Good Tree Inc, one of several consumer Internet companies created under the Ooga Labs brand, an independent start-up incubator. Other products include the Green Spot MySpace application, and Medpedia.com a long term effort to evolve the new model for sharing and advancing medical knowledge.

Ben Chow, Director of Web Products, Hive 7

Ben spent many years building awesomeness and pulling off feats of incredulity at IDEO and AKQA. After learning how to orchestrate oohs and ahs using heaps full of crazy and smart use of instinct, he turned his attention to the problem of grasping the bareness of fun and wrapping it in relationships. He is the Director of Web Products at Hive7, weaving magic between product, design, and user experience.

Kevin Marks, 6:30 pm Friday

Google Engineer, and one of the founders of Microformats.

Kevin Marks works at Google. From September 2003 to January 2007 he was Principal Engineer at Technorati responsible for the spiders that make sense of the web and track millions of blogs daily. He has been inventing and innovating for over 17 years in emerging technologies where people, media and computers meet. He is one of the founders of Microformats.

Dave Westwood, 6:45 pm Friday

Dave Westwood, creator of Buddy Poke.

Dave Westwood created Buddy Poke, an OpenSocial application with over 30 million downloads.

Here is Dave in his own words:

Lalit Sarna 10:00 am Saturday

Lalit Sarna, CEO Oxylabs

Founder & CEO of Oxylabs Networks. Lalit’s applications serve over 40 million page views a day to over 1 million daily active users on 6 OpenSocial containers: hi5, orkut, netlog, friendster, hyves, and ning.

Fred Sauer, 10:15 am Saturday

Fred Sauer, Developer Advocate, Google

Fred Sauer is a Developer Advocate at Google where most of his time is devoted to Google-Web-Toolkit and Google App Engine. He is the author of various GWT related open source projects including gwt-dnd (providing in browser Drag and Drop capabilities), gwt-log (an advanced logging framework) and gwt-voices (for cross browser sound support). Fred has dedicated much of his career to Java related development, with an increasing focus on Web 2.0 technologies. As a consultant he has worked on a wide variety of projects in North America, Asia and Europe, primarily in the financial and billing industry.

Mike Culver 10:30 am Saturday

Mike Culver joined Amazon Web Services in 2006 as a Web Services Evangelist in the Developer Relations Group. He is responsible for working with software developers to help them understand the principals and benefits of what is popularly known as Cloud Computing.

A 20-year technology veteran, Mike was previously at Microsoft where he helped launch the .NET platform, among other roles. In that capacity he managed a team that evangelized large companies to help provide them the tools and knowledge to become successful early technology adopters. In addition to the large-company focus, he evangelized the other end of the innovation spectrum during the infancy of what has exploded into the smartphone industry.

Prior to that he was president and founder of Extencia, Inc.; which was an early innovator in the ecommerce vertical.
 

Dave McClure, 7:00 pm Saturday

Dave McClure

About Dave from 500hats.com:

Dave McClure has been geeking out in Silicon Valley for almost twenty years as a software developer, entrepreneur, startup advisor, angel investor, blogger, & internet marketing nerd. He is an advisor or investor for Mint, SlideShare, TradeVibes, TipMobile, Oortle/PhotoPhlow, 750 Industries, KissMetrics, Spock, TeachStreet, Eventvue, RichRelevance, Mashery, Simply Hired, HealthUnity, & Canopy Financial. His current passion is helping startups with internet marketing, product strategy, and startup metrics.

Maxwell Newbould, 7:30 pm Saturday

Max Newbould, Product Developer for MySpace OpenSocial

Maxwell Newbould is the product owner and lead developer for the MySpace Developer Platform’s OpenSocial container. He has been working for MySpace since March 2006, and was the first developer at MySpace’s Seattle office. Maxwell also provides engineering support for companies building applications for the world’s most popular social networking and lifestyle portal. Previously to MySpace, Maxwell worked in government, finance, travel and technology sectors.

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