Annie Blandel

Entrepreneurship, recognizing and driving forward innovative new products and services, and powering international expansion, have been the cornerstones of Annie Blandel’s 25 year career in technology marketing. Annie has successfully delivered international marketing and business development campaigns for numerous established leaders in their fields, including Nortel, Intel, Cisco, HP. She has also developed an impressive track record working with younger companies and start-ups. Since 2007, Annie has worked as a Senior Consultant and Professor in Marketing for Master’s in IT & Project Management at the University of Nice Sophia-Antipolis (France).

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Florian Effenberger

Florian Effenberger has been an Open Source evangelist for many years. He is lead of the international OpenOffice.org marketing project as well as a member of the management board of the non-profit OpenOffice.org Deutschland e.V. He has ten years' experience of designing enterprise and educational computer networks, including software deployment based on free software. Florian is also a frequent contributor to a variety of professional magazines worldwide on topics such as free software, open standards and legal matters.

• Blog (German): http://www.linux-magazin.de/Blogs/floeff
• Twitter: @floeff

Zak Greant

Zak has solid experience building and managing online communities, developing electronic frontier business strategies and working with Free Software and Open Source licenses. Additionally, he has spoken at, organized or chaired over 60 FLOSS events between 2001 to 2008 and has edited several dozen books, ranging in topic from PHP and databases and regular expressions and FLOSS business strategy. Zak has also been the primary author of two technical books and helped set up the MySQL Press imprint. He has been an active participant in many Free Software/Open Source communities, from PHP and MySQL (where he worked as MySQL AB's community advocate) to volunteering with the Free Software Foundation's License Compliance Lab Team and acting as a board observer for the Open Source Initiative.

• Blog: http://zak.greant.com
• Twitter: @zakgreant

Sandro Groganz

Sandro Groganz is founder and principal of Initmarketing. Prior to founding Initmarketing, he was the VP Marketing at Mindquarry, an Open Source startup financed by Hasso Plattner Ventures, and the VP Communication at eZ Systems, creator of the Open Source content management system eZ Publish. Sandro also has a background as a PHP developer, consultant and author contributing to various books covering LAMP programming.

• Blog: http://sandro.groganz.com
• Twitter: @ordnas

Alexander Kempkens

Alex Kempkens is a passionate spokesperson for open source software and actively involved in the organization, marketing and management of the Joomla content management system. Starting in 2004 as a developer for the Mambo project he co-founded the Joomla CMS in 2005. He is also founder of Think Network GmbH, a consulting company specialized on the integration of innovative corporate strategies in combination with open standard solutions. Read more about Alex.

• Twitter: @akempkens

Rory MacDonald

An archetypically radical youngest child of three, Rory MacDonald is a leftfield thinker. He delights in challenging conservative thinking and the status quo in order to bring out its true strengths, cut away the fat and drive innovation. With a passion for business, technology and creative disruption, Rory has worked for over a decade within a variety of roles in marketing, communications and journalism. He has worked with the broadest imaginable spectrum of companies which stretch the term “technology” to its outermost relevance. Read more about Rory.

Terri Molini

Terri Molini is an award-winning public/investor relations professional equipped with more than 18 years of experience in corporate, product, developer and partner media relations. During her nearly 13 year tenure with Sun Microsystems, she achieved high quality coverage across top business and trade press outlets as well as to cultivate ongoing conversations and new communities via new and social media strategies for a broad range of clients from startups to large enterprise organizations -- positioning Sun positively in more than 500M in media signal (reach) for software and open source coverage in the past year. Terri has proven experience managing international and US-based press, event coordination and executive support. In July 2009, she launched the Open Source for America coalition, a diverse cross-section of technology leaders to encourage broader U.S. Federal Government support of and participation in Open Source projects and technologies, with the development of the websites content and design.

• Twitter: @tmolini

Dave Neary

With many years understanding of the dynamics of consensus-based communities, and intimate knowledge of the concerns of businesses engaging with free software projects, Dave Neary is ideally positioned to advise you on optimising your return on investment in free software, whether the goal is to bootstrap a community, or to help your team work well with existing developer communities. He has served three terms as a member of the board of directors of the GNOME Foundation (2005 - 07). Dave served as OpenWengo Community Development Manager for the French company Wengo. He was a developer and release manager of the GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) from 1999 until 2006.

• Blog: http://blogs.gnome.org/bolsh/
• Twitter: @nearyd

Shezmeen Prasad

Shezmeen has been in the Sales and Marketing field for almost a decade, specializing in Open Source software for the past five years. Originally a Canadian, Shezmeen has spent the past 15 months in a small coastal town in Norway, working at the headquarters office of eZ Systems, an Open Source CMS company, in the positions of Events Manager, and Global Marketing & PR. Previously, she worked at ActiveState Software Inc., an Open Source tools and languages company based in Vancouver, British Columbia. With her passion for Open Source marketing, Shezmeen brings the Initmarketing team her expertise in event management, marketing campaign development and public relations strategies with a global focus. Now that she has traveled and worked internationally, Shezmeen has found her home in San Francisco, California.

Stefan Probst

Stefan studied computer science with a focus on operating systems. He founded his first Linux company in 1993 and developed Linux systems at LST, Caldera, SCO, SUSE and Novell. He has business experience as a general manager and engineering director for more than 15 years and is dedicated to Open Source since its early beginning. Today he is completing his MBA studies until end of 2009 and as a board member of the Open Source Business Foundation he is involved in several Open Source and entrepreneurship activities.

• Twitter: @entresol

Thomas Schläpfer

Thomas is co-founder and CEO of snowflake in Japan, providing open source solutions based on TYPO3, Magento and todoyu. Born and raised in Switzerland, he started his career in a Swiss bank after studying economics. Later at a media company and backed with a degree in marketing, he started a multimedia division doing website productions and ISP services. Back then, internet connections using an analog modem with a speed of 56kbps was still considered fast. Prior to snowflake, Thomas was working for a global leader in laboratory equipment overseeing all online media activities. At snowflake, he first setup the marketing department in Switzerland and worked on the plan to develop new business overseas. snowflake Japan was established in April 2009. He is supporting the TYPO3 community and also is leading the marketing activities for todoyu, the new task and project management software made by snowflake.

Vikram Vaswani

Vikram Vaswani is the founder and CEO of Melonfire, a consulting services firm with special expertise in open-source tools. He is a Felix Scholar for the University of Oxford, a passionate proponent of the open-source movement and a frequent contributor articles and tutorials on open-source technologies to the community at large.

His previous books include PHP Programming Solutions, MySQL: The Complete Reference and How to do Everything with PHP and MySQL.