SXSW Interactive 2012 speakers

Willo O’Brien has made a career out of creativity. As an artist, social supercollider, and self-described geek for over a decade, Willo has a passion for empowering fellow creative entrepreneurs. Willo’s online home since ‘99, WilloToons.com, has served as a platform for selling her ‘geek meets rock ‘n roll’ product line, for showcasing her illustrations and designs, and as an outlet for her thoughts on business, technology, and work/life balance. In 2011 she premiered WilloToons Connect, a video series dedicated to discussing Creative Sustainability with other successful artists whose craft has evolved into a business. Channeling her creative passion into a new venture, Willo is now Co-Founder and VP Marketing at Stitch Labs, a design-focused business tool for entrepreneurs who make and sell products. A perfect fit with her career and expertise, Willo is now able to support business owners with an elegant tech solution that helps save their precious time and energy, so that they can sustainably grow their business. Willo can be found as @WilloToons on everything... say hello!

Winston Binch is Partner and Chief Digital Officer at Deutsch LA, where he’s responsible for agency-wide digital strategy and vision, operations, and business and invention development. Prior to Deutsch, he worked at CP+B as Partner/Managing Director, where he led digital and worked on brands like Burger King, Domino's, Best Buy, and American Express. His work has been recognized with awards, such as Cyber Lions, Andys, and Clios. In 2011, Winston was also named one of media’s top 25 Internet marketing leaders and innovators. Before joining CP+B, he worked at R/GA on the Nike account, and played guitar in a math rock band, Stereobate. Winston is a founder of Boulder Digital Works at the University of Colorado, a digital education initiative focused on developing digital leaders. He enjoys time with his wife and two children, making and listening to music, and rapid mountain descents on alpine skis and mountain bikes.

Winston Damarillo is a proven serial entrepreneur with a track record of building successful technology start-ups. His past entrepreneurial endeavors include several companies which Winston grew to profitability and subsequently sold to major IT players: Gluecode Software, an open source application infrastructure company which was acquired by IBM in 2005, Logicblaze, acquired by Iona Technologies in 2007, and Webtide, acquired by Intalio in 2009. Winston is also the chairman of the board of directors for Exist, an award-winning leader in enterprise software development, and MaestroDev, a collaborative software development automation company. Prior to his entrepreneurial endeavors, Winston was among the highest performing venture capital professionals at Intel, having led the majority of his investments to either a successful IPO or a profitable corporate acquisition. In addition to leading Morphlabs, Winston is also involved in several organizations that are focused on combining the expertise of a broad range of thought leaders with advanced technology to drive global innovation and growth. In 2011, Winston was selected as a Commissioner in the TechAmerica Foundation Commission on the Leadership Opportunity in the U.S. Deployment of the Cloud (CLOUD2)/State and Local Government (SLG), which will enable state and local governments to better serve their citizens by optimizing their use of cloud technologies and solutions. As one of the prestigious Young Global Leader (YGL) honorees for 2010 and an active participant of the World Economic Forum, Winston is working with other leaders in business, government, academia and other disciplines to understand global challenges and trends and create a brighter future through the Open Cloud Initiative. Winston is a trustee of the Philippine Development Foundation (PhilDev), an organization committed to social development initiatives for Filipinos in the Philippines and around the world by developing programs and supporting partnership initiatives in science, technology, innovation and entrepreneurship. Winston holds a B.S. in Industrial and Mechanical Engineering from the De La Salle University.

Winston Wang is Global Director, Strategic Innovations for marketing technology at AB InBev with responsibility for exploring and experimenting with cutting-edge digital technologies from start-ups and innovators that are transforming consumer marketing. Winston joined AB InBev in 2011, bringing with him an extensive background in innovation leadership and mobile products and technologies; both at start-ups, and within global companies. From 2007-2010, he was the director of T-Mobile USA’s advanced R&D group that created next-generation product and service concepts. He was previously with Adobe Systems where he co-led the Mobile Authoring product management team, developing products such Adobe Device Central CS3. He previously held a variety of roles focused on mobile user experience design at Symbol Technologies, PalmSource, Good Technology, and startup Covigo for both consumer and enterprise mobile products. Winston holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Mechanical Engineering from U.C. Berkeley, and a Master’s of Science degree in Product Design from Stanford University. He lives in San Francisco, California with his wife.

Xanthe Matychak teaches design thinking in the Saunders College of Business and in the Innovation Center at the Rochester Institute of Technology. At present her students are working with the Global Village Construction Set, a set of open source blue prints for fifty farm tools. She is also working on a book project called 'Make Better Stuff: the rise of social business and distributed manufacturing.' She is a contributor the industrial design site Core77.com and her background is in fine art and industrial design.

Xavier Facon leads product development and directs Crisp's technical strategy.
He is a mobile software disruptor who has continually improved technology and standards to make it easier to deliver mobile content and advertising. In the early days of Crisp, Xavier developed platforms for deploying some of the first mobile applications and mobile sites for major U.S. media brands such as CNN, AT&T, ESPN, NBC, Time, AP, and hundreds more. Based on his experience in mobile content delivery, Xavier began in 2008 to build an HTML5-based, advertising technology platform called Crisp Engage, which is now used all over the world to develop world class advertising creative on iOS and Android devices.
Xavier's interest in moving the mobile industry forward has influenced a wide network of software developers. Xavier co-founded the Micro Java Network in 2000, a global R&D group for mobile app development, and ORMMA (Open Rich Media for Mobile Advertising) in 2010. ORMMA is an open-source community, which evolved the premise of ad standards from display size to ad functionality. This laid the groundwork for the IAB MRAID standard API for delivering HTML5 ads into native applications. Xavier writes regularly on the state of mobile advertising and best practices, and holds degrees in Computer Science and Business Management from his country of origin, Belgium.

In one short sentence: Yadid likes to build stuff. In one much longer sentence: Yadid's research explores creating a digital representation of human physiological and affective state by using sensors and mobile phones for gathering physiological and contextual data. He is part of the Affective Computing and New Media Medicine research groups in the MIT media lab.
Prior to MIT, Yadid held various engineering management positions in the mobile, medical and communication system industries. Most recently he was the director of Software in PMC-Sierra, a global leader in communication and storage semi-conductor manufacturing where he oversaw all software research and development activities of the company's optical communications devices.

I teach literature, philosophy, and the culture of sports as equipment for living at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. At Michigan, I started the Cultures of Basketball course in the humanities that I have chronicled at my blog, Go Yago! and that has been featured on espn.com and freedarko.com. I also write for the Good Men Project and Voice on the Floor. I'm currently working on a book on The Meanings of Basketball.

Yair started his career as a software engineer in VocalTec Communications, where he worked for 8 years. After leaving VocalTec, Yair made a sharp turn into the marketing world and started his own internet marketing consulting firm helping companies sell online. In 2011, Yair and his old friend from VocalTec, Gil Megidish, founded Macademia Apps, and in January 2012 they released their first app - GroupShot.
Yair holds a computer science degree from the Academic College of Tel Aviv, loves hiking, camping and is a 3 star scuba diver.
Yair's name is pronounced Ya-Ear :-)

Yasser Ansari is the co-founder and chief leaf of Networked Organisms, a National Geographic-backed software company focused on helping people reconnect with the natural world. He studied molecular biology and bioinformatics at U.C. San Diego and spent time researching plant genomics at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. After the lab, he moved into the wireless industry where he helped design and develop hand-held radiation detectors, gaming accessories, and new mobile software at companies including Kyocera, Qualcomm, and Peek. He earned his Master’s degree from NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program where he is currently adjunct faculty. He holds several technology patents and likes frogs.

Yasuharu is a kayaker,
riding the rivers of Japan and abroad.
There is no digital or analog sense on the river. He thinks it is most important to find what moves your heart.
That applies within the creative world as well.
He rides the raging rivers of the changing media in a teeny tiny kayak. But along the way he has collected some floating awards
from D&AD, One Show, Cannes Lions, Webby, Clio, Adfest, Spikes
and has been judges of all these awards as well. --
2011 Cannes Cyber Lions Gold, Silver and Bronze
2011 One Show Interactive Gold
2011 AdFest Grand Prix and Golds

Yelena Nakhimovsky is the UX Manager for Consumer Products at Tendril, where she helps create engaging & empowering products for residential energy management, and guides user-centered success metrics. Prior to Tendril, Yelena was a Senior UX Researcher at Google, with a focus on mobile products. Yelena received her MS in Human Computer Interaction from Georgia Tech.

As a designer at Happy Cog, Yesenia creates beautiful, adaptable design systems that are innovative but always appropriate to the client. She thrives on collaboration, and is equally comfortable expanding upon established brands as she is inventing new visual identities. Yesenia is a graduate of Drexel University’s Antoinette Westphal College of Media Arts. While receiving her undergraduate degree, she developed her interactive knowledge working at international design consultancy Electronic Ink. In 2010, she and a team received an Honor Award from the Society of Environmental Graphic Design, for a branding system created for a Rwandan survivors village. In her spare time, Yesenia enjoys creating original recipes that combine the cuisines of her native Puerto Rico with the delectable fare of her home in Southern Philadelphia.

Yesica, a researcher in urban design with a master's degree in Architecture and Urbanism from MIT, who devotes most of her research in border issues between Mexico and the United States. She challenges the notion of pair-cities as separate entities, instead looking at them through a unilateral lens where the conflict manifested in opposing relations between needs, values, interest, and concerns of the two different entities can become the tool for negotiation among multiple systems. Following her graduation from MIT, Ms. Guerra was granted an Internship at UNESCO’s headquarters in the Social and Human Science department. While in that organization, Ms. Guerra collaborated to create a toolkit/guide for social and spatial inclusion for international migrants where she confirmed the need of collaborative approaches to integrate different systems. Currently, Yesica is the Director of Crónicas de Héroes/Hero Reports -- an instance of the Center for Civic Media at MIT as well as Research Affiliate of this center. Her expertise in leading multi-media initiatives, as she has been doing with Crónicas de Héroes and achieving excellent results assures the Center that projects such this are needed and have great impact. Ms. Guerra believes that conflict and disparities through pair cities along the border between México and the United States is a subject that cannot be ignored. However, by only focusing on the negative happenings in those regions, the everyday perspective of citizens is dragged down and possible positive outcomes obstructed.

A little over six years ago graphic designer Yves Peters started reviewing type in his Bald Condensed column on Typographer.org. In August 2008 he put his graphic design career on the back burner, freeing him to concentrate on his writing and related activities in the digital type business. Yves currently edits The FontFeed, a daily dispatch of recommended fonts, typography techniques, and inspirational examples of digital type at work in the real world; and Unzipped, his blog on the FontShop BeNeLux home page. Yves also is an accomplished drummer with British/American/Belgian pop/rock bands Troubleman and Rosa Luxe*. His talent for being able to identify most typefaces on sight is utterly useless in daily life.

Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye is a graduate student at the MIT Media Lab engineering stochastic tools to harness the power of rich behavioral datasets, such as human movement data and communication patterns in networks.
Before coming to MIT, he was a researcher at the Santa Fe Institute where he used cell phone data to model the dynamics of urbanization in developing countries. Over a period of 6 years he obtained an M.Sc. from the Université catholique de Louvain in Applied Mathematics, an M.Sc. (Centralien) from Ecole Centrale Paris as part of the Top Industrial Managers for Europe program, an M.Sc. from Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Mathematical Engineering as well as his B.Sc. in engineering at the Université catholique de Louvain.

Zach Blas is an artist and theorist working at the intersections of networked media, queerness, and the political. His work engages emerging media technologies with a multitude of aesthetic and resistant tactics to challenge neoliberal control structures and generate new potentials for queer politics, affect, and collectivity. He is a PhD student in The Graduate Program in Literature, Information Science + Information Studies, Visual Studies, Women’s Studies, as well as a lab member of s-1: Speculative Sensation Lab, led by Mark B. N. Hansen, at Duke University. He is also a founding members of The Public School Durham, and a contributing editor for the online journal Version. His on-going project, Queer Technologies, is an organization that produces critical applications, tools, and situations for queer technological agency, interventions, and social formation. By re-imaging a technology designed for queer use, Queer Technologies critiques the heteronormative, capitalist, militarized underpinnings of technological architectures, design, and functionality. Queer Technologies includes, transCoder, a queer programming anti-language; ENgenderingGenderChangers, a “solution” to Gender Adapters’ male/female binary; and Gay Bombs, a technical manual manifesto that outlines a “how to” of queer networked activism. QT items are often displayed and deployed at the Disingenuous Bar, an attack on Appleʼs Genius Bar that offers a heterotopic space for political support for “technical” problems. Zach’s on-going practice-based research spans five areas: 1) unhuman modes of resistance that address the human and nonhuman together, 2) a set of political works on abandonment, escape, nonexistence, desertion, and imperceptibility that re-conceptualize resistance, 3) affect, specifically engaging with political love, and affect as weapon and incalculable, 4) the virus and viral as a form of aesthetics, politics, and philosophy, and 5) networked hacktivist practices of hypertrophy, invagination, electronic civil disobedience, and disturbance. Drawing from these areas, Zach is configuring a conception of THE WEAPON as a practiced-based research methodology, pulling from weaponry’s long history of reconceptualization on the Left and various forms of aesthetic resistance. This involves configuring queerness as a militant weapon. Zach holds a Master of Fine Art,  Design | Media Arts, University of California Los Angeles; a Post-Baccalaureate Certificate, Art and Technologies Studies, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago; and a Bachelor of Science, Film and Philosophy, Boston University. Zach also conducted a year of PhD research at the University of California Berkeley in the Film & Media track of the Rhetoric Department with a joint appointment in the Center for New Media.

Zach J. Brand is Sr. Director of Technology, NPR Digital Media. Zach oversees the technical strategy and operation of NPR’s content on new media platforms, including NPR.org, podcasts and mobile devices. He has focused on developing extensible and re-usable architectures for tools and content. This includes the redesigned, and Peabody award winning website, mobile apps including iPhone, iPad and Android, and the NPR API.

Zach is CTO of Rally Software and AgileZen, the collaboration platforms that allow companies to build great products faster with Agile and Lean practices. Prior to joining Rally, Zach was co-founder of a startup that radically changed how creative professionals managed projects. His company was acquired by publicly-traded Creo, Inc., now a division of Kodak. He also served as Chief Software Architect at Quark, where he provided the technological vision for the company that led the creation of the desktop publishing market. At the age of 13, Zach began commercially publishing software and, at age 16, started a successful consulting business. A Boettcher Scholar, Zach received his BS with distinction in Computer Science Engineering from the University of Colorado. He lives near Boulder, Colorado and enjoys playing golf, mountain biking and spending time with his family.

Zach Sims is the cofounder and CEO of Codecademy, the easiest way to learn to code. The startup, which launched in August of 2011, has taught more than a million people the fundamentals of JavaScript. Codecademy is backed by venture capital firms like Union Square Ventures, SV Angel, Yuri Milner, and more. Zach dropped out of Columbia University to start Codecademy and has previously worked at drop.io (sold to Facebook), AOL Ventures, and GroupMe (sold to Skype).

Zach works to create and maintain happy relationships with DonorsChoose.org supporters. He manages the donor user experience, oversees donor customer service and communication, and serves as the DonorsChoose.org ambassador to reddit. Previously, he worked for Google as a marketing consultant, and spent 4 years with Warner Music Group marketing and selling a lot of bad records. A few good ones.

campus/urban/startup development at zappos.com & downtownproject.com. no title at both.

Zachary Smith is Co-Founder and CEO of gtrot, a platform for discovering and sharing local restaurants, nightlife, deals, events, and more based on social data. Under his leadership, the company took top prize in the Harvard Innovation Challenge and attracted Series A funding from Lightbank, the Chicago-based VC headed by Groupon co-founders Eric Lefkofsky and Brad Keywell. gtrot was recently named a Top 5 Startup at Chicago TechWeek 2011 and winner of the PhoCusWright 2011 Innovation Award for Social Media.

Zawadi is an Afropolitan feminist digital native, working as a free agent to use her non-profit experience, creativity, social media skills, extensive global networks, fundraising expertise, spirituality, passion & fire for social justice to create the world she wants to see. She has been working in the field of sexual and reproductive rights for almost seven years, and advocating for women's rights for over ten years. In 2010 she published a book with Akina Mama wa Afrika, called, "When I Dare to be Powerful" - a collection of short stories told by five women who are engaged in sex work in East Africa. She has worked with several women's rights organizations, including the Association of Women's Rights in Development (AWID) in Mexico, and Urgent Action Fund-Africa, an African women's fund that is based in Nairobi where she is from. She is currently acting as the CEO of the newly established Africa Cancer Foundation, whose mission is to promote the prevention of cancer and provide holistic solutions to people affected by cancer in Africa. Zawadi is a founding member of RESURJ (Realizing Sexual and Reproductive Justice) a new global feminist alliance that is led by younger feminist activists working to advance a progressive, comprehensive, effective and sustainable sexual and reproductive rights and health agenda, with a particular focus on the Global South. She also serves as an advisor to a number of other initiatives including Akili Dada & Earth Birth. She is also currently working on bringing my spirituality, creativity, geek girl tendencies, fire for social justice and movement building, love for dance, yoga and African fashion together. Her new company, “Zero By Zawadi” is an expression of this.