Conférenciers

Joël Perras
Individual Digital, Web Developer

Joël is a core developer of CakePHP & a founding developer of Lithium (http://li3.rad-dev.org/), an up & coming PHP 5.3+ framework on the cutting edge of blending OOP & functional programming. Joël is a language agnost, and enjoys learning & using Python, Haskell and Ruby, and everything in between. His current interests are in the development & application of graph algorithms and machine learning to better understand the ever-increasing datasets that are the backbone of today’s social Web. Twitter

Jeremy Wright
76 Design

Jeremy Wright’s goals are to enable our clients to succeed via a strong focus on ensuring that each and every project is an “out of the park” success, a desire to be a profit centre for our clients instead of a cost centre and a history of growing businesses via strategic initiatives that make a real difference to the bottom line. Over the course of his career, Mr. Wright has made it his goal to coordinate activities both in the big picture strategic sense and via his detail-oriented mindset. This combination has enabled him to work exceedingly well both with clients and with the technical/creative teams to ensure that each strategic goal is properly implemented in the final product. Having built several multi-million dollar media companies, Mr. Wright’s primary value to clients is his results-oriented approach to projects, goals and strategic initiatives. By focusing on growth, results and revenue, he has managed to build one of the top 10 media companies in Canada, one of the top 5 social media companies in the world and a series of industry-leading companies in industries as diverse as web-hosting, blog marketing and time management.
Over the course of his career, Mr. Wright has created a wide number of products, platforms and strategies which have been used by hundreds of millions of people and driven more than 10 million dollars in investment while generating more than 100 million dollars in revenue. Past clients in the technology space include Microsoft, Intel, Nortel, Novell and Citrix; in the healthcare space include Red Cross (Canada), the National Health Service (UK) and Health Sciences Center (Winnipeg); in the media space include b5media, Rogers (Media Services), DoubleClick, PicScout and in the public arena include the Government of Canada, the Romanian Parliament and the City of Toronto. Other clients in other industries range from Mitsubishi Corp and Honda Corp to Virgin America and South By Southwest.

Christian Beauclair has been with Microsoft for over 15 years in three main roles. He’s been a consultant with lots of experience in the public sector, a Technical Specialist for enterprise clients and is now a developer advisor where he shares his passion for software development and its different facet with the Canadian ICT community. He has coded in Modula-2, xBase, VB, VB.NET and now C#. His passion also extends to games and various collectibles. He was also one of the major contributors to the creation of the Ottawa .NET user community and still sits on its steering committee.

Colin Melia
DreamDigital, Principal Architect

Colin is the Principal Architect for DreamDigital, a technical speaker and trainer on Microsoft technologies, as well as a user group leader and academic advisor in Ottawa. He has been a hands-on Architect for over 17 years having developed award-winning simulation technology with rich UI, cloud-based learning portals and workflow-driven BI systems. He also created the first streaming video community site with Windows Media. He has worked in the finance, telecoms, e-learning, Internet communications, learning and gaming industries, with his latest business solutions currently in use by thousands of users world-wide in corporations like GE, HP, O2, Cisco, IBM, Microsoft & Reuters.

Guillaume Bouchard
NVI, President

Guillaume Bouchard is the co-founder and president of NVI, a Montreal-based company specialized in interactive strategies. Founded in 2004, NVI has quickly become the largest web agency specializing in SEO and Social Media in Canada with over 50 employees. A graduate from the prestigious university HEC Montreal, Guillaume Bouchard forged his character as an entrepreneur over 9 years of experience as a consultant, blogger and as a public speaker for major international events. Guillaume maintained a column at SEOmoz.org, an English e-marketing reference blog, and he is the co-founder and journalist on the French blog Go-referencement.org, a leading resource on SEO, e-marketing and Web 2.0. Guillaume Bouchard is recognized by his peers as a leader in the industry and is a highly sought after conference speaker across North America (Toronto SES, PubCon, Infopresse …). Guillaume Bouchard develops long-term partnerships with his customers, offering them a clear perspective of the web in terms of return on investment. He knows how to surprise the market, maximizing websites that don’t usually get the attention they deserve. Guillaume is an enthusiastic individual, determined to overcome challenges while meeting and surpasing the needs of his clients.

Garrett Serack
Microsoft Canada, Software Development Engineer

Garrett Serack worked as an independent software development consultant in Calgary, Canada, for 15 years, with clients in fields such as government, telecom, petroleum, and railways. Joining Microsoft in the fall of 2005 as the Community Program Manager of the Federated Identity team, Garrett has worked with the companies and the Open Source community to build digital identity frameworks, tools, and standards that are shaping the future of Internet commerce and strengthening the fight against fraud.
In the summer of 2007, he transitioned to Open Source Technology Center at Microsoft where he works as a Software Development Engineer and operates closely with Open Source communities to improve the quality and performance of their software on the Windows Platform. In addition to being the Project Owner of the recently announced CoApp project, Garrett has started a number of other Open Source projects along with working as a committer on yet more projects, including PHP itself.

When you think of passionate love affairs, it’s not often that you also think about Internet Marketing. However, when you meet Erin Blaskie, you realize that those two things meld together in a way that just makes sense.
Erin Blaskie started her first company at the age of 21. After launching BSETC, a professional outsourcing team, she joined forces with some of the top Internet Marketers to support, build, grow and sell some amazing companies. To date, Erin and her team have serviced over 300 entrepreneurs in countless countries around the world.
Five years and a few more businesses later, Erin has put her hands on every style of business out there. Always one to figure out how things on the Internet work, she has made it her livelihood to experiment with the latest technologies, ideas and to even create concepts that didn’t exist before.
As a multi-faceted entrepreneur, Erin has been featured in five print books; received two awards at the 2010 Bootstrap Awards; honoured as Office Arrow’s 2008 Runner-Up Business Woman of the Year; interviewed by countless gurus and media personalities; featured in major news outlets such as Chatelaine, Costco Connection, ABC and CBC; and asked to speak at both national and international events.

Richard Claus
Microsoft Canada, IT Pro Advisor

Richard Claus is a bilingual IT Pro Advisor working for Microsoft Canada. Prior to joining Microsoft, Rick most recently worked as an Enterprise Architect. His previous design experience includes Active Directory implementations and migrations, highly available Exchange messaging solutions, and overall systems management using SMS 2003. Besides design and consulting work, Rick brings over 14 years of IT experience, ranging from front line “in the trenches” admin duties, to training / mentoring / facilitating individuals and teams on how to use Microsoft technologies more effectively in their organizations. Rick has his hands full on the home front. He helps his wife Kelli raise their 7 year old son and 5 year old twin girls. That being said, there isn’t much time left for any other leisure activities! Before having kids, he used to enjoy getting down and dirty with his off-road mountain bike while training for multi stage Adventure Races, or just playing in the dirt. Nowadays his biking has been limited to office commutes on designated bike paths or going for adventures while towing a bike trailer or two.

Craig Kitterman
Microsoft, Senior Technical Evangelist

Craig Kitterman is a Senior Technical Evangelist in the Microsoft Interoperability Strategy team at Microsoft. His team is chartered to create & drive the Interoperability Initiative across the company. Craig is responsible for engaging with the global developer community to drive awareness of Microsoft interoperability activity including technical bridges to Microsoft products and services. Additionally, Craig is responsible for driving understanding and awareness inside of Microsoft as to needs of the developer community; he collaborates daily with technical leaders across Microsoft product groups as well as the legal and standards groups to ensure the community voice is heard. Craig has over 15 years of experience in software engineering and technology strategy and enjoys the study of technology trends – his current interests include open government, cloud computing and social media. Craig holds a B.S. in Computer Science from Western Washington University and an M.B.A. from the University of Washington.

Paul Laberge
Microsoft Canada, Web Developer Evangelist

Paul Laberge is a Web Developer Evangelist with Microsoft Canada, which basically means that he works with web developers and designers to help them understand Microsoft’s web platform, both the good and the bad. When he doesn’t have his head in Expression Studio or Visual Studio, he can be found grilling on his patio barbeque (even in the dead of winter) or throwing his clubs into a creek after another dismal round of golf. Paul blogs on Microsoft’s Canadian Developer Connection and his own tech blog, Trascending the Traditional Web.

Mark O’Sullivan
Vanilla

Mark O’Sullivan is an entrepreneur and a developer. Mark created Vanilla, one of the most popular discussion forums on the web. Vanilla is forum software that has been used to grow communities by over 300,000 sites across the web.

John Oxley
MS Canada, Director Community Evangelism

As the Director of community evangelism, John manages a team of community advisors that reach out and connect with the IT community. John’s dedication to the community stems from his passion for supporting the success of others and his experience in delivering Application, Infrastructure and security solutions. Joining Microsoft in 2000 he spent his first 5 years in the Microsoft Consulting Services group delivering enterprise solutions to many large and medium organizations. John has been a consultant and manager for over 12 years working with many professional services companies. Previous to that, John’s spent many years in the Canadian Air force in technical and leadership roles which have taken him across Canada and around the world. His varied technical experiences have given him a unique insight and fuelled his passion for the IT Industry and community. Technology is not only a career for John, it is a passion and a way leverage his experiences to reach out and support the community. John, wife and two kids can attest that he is a geek at heart as he is always bringing home some sort of new technology gadget. There is no bounds and no matter if it is the latest software or hardware from Enterprise application, home automation to cool geek device, John will seek it out and share his experiences with other.

Benoit Piette
W3Québec, President

Benoit Piette is a Web technology professionnal since 1997. Sometimes software architect, developer, analyst or project manager, his ability to be handle many different roles and his passion for his work led him to quickly become a key player in the projects where he is involved. In his quest to improve the quality of his work, he became an active member of the W3Québec since its inception in 2003 and president of the organization between 2006 and 2008. He is also an invited expert on the W3C HTML Working Group and has participated in several conferences, including Barcamp Montreal, Webéducation, Intracom and now MakeWebNotWar.
Web solutions architect at GFI Solutions, Mr Piette collaborates to the success of several projects in many sectors including banking and aerospace. He is very interested in the emergence of agile practices and was a key player in the creation of the agile community at GFI Solutions.

Evan Prodromou
StatusNet, CEO

Evan Prodromou is a developer and entrepreneur based in Montreal. Best known for starting Wikitravel, the collaborative Open Content travel guide, he has worked on Open Source software and the Web for 15 years. His most recent project, StatusNet, is a microblogging platform used by over 15,000 sites across the Web. Prodromou is founder and CEO of StatusNet, Inc., which manages Identi.ca and provides service and support for the StatusNet microblogging software.

Guy Barrette
Microsoft, Regional Director

Guy Barrette is a Solutions Architect based in Montreal, Canada. He is the Microsoft Regional Director for the Montreal region and a MVP for ASP/ASP.NET. He has been working and developing with Microsoft development tools since the launch of VB 3 in 1994. His focus is helping organizations build better software using Microsoft technologies. He’s been a speaker at developers’ conferences like Microsoft TechDays and DevTeach. Guy is president of the Montreal .NET Community and he is the Visual Studio Talk Show podcast co-host.

Joel Quimper
Architect Advisor

Joel Quimper is an Architect Advisor for Eastern Canada, working mainly with architects in large accounts, helping them to leverage the richness of the Microsoft Platform in order to allow them and their business to realize their full potential. Joel have extensive experience into designing service oriented solutions and using web services. He is passionate about interoperability and how with .Net you can leverage the existing enterprise investments.
Before joining Microsoft, he worked 10 years for IBM Canada in several roles. Most recently, he worked as a WebSphere Integration Architect. He worked with several customers in successfully implementing SOA solutions.

Morten Rand-Hendriksen
Pink & Yellow Media, Creative Director

Morten Rand-Hendriksen is a Norwegian web designer and developer living in Burnaby, B.C., Canada. He is the owner and Creative Director of Pink & Yellow Media (http://www.pinkandyellow.com), a boutique style digital media company specializing in standards-based web development with a focus on WordPress and Microsoft Expression Web. Morten has published two books on Microsoft Expression Web (Sams Teach Yourself Microsoft Expression Web 2 in 24 hours and Sams Teach Yourself Microsoft Expression Web 3 in 24 hours and his tutorials have been published by amongst others Computer Arts magazine. He is a regular contributor to the Microsoft Expression Newsletter and runs the blog Design is Philosophy (http://www.designisphilosophy.com) where he publishes articles and tutorials on web design, web development, Expression Web and WordPress theme customization. Morten is a 2009 and 2010 Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) for Expression Web.

Brendan Sera-Shriar
Digibomb

Brendan Sera-Shriar has been an interactive designer, developer, author and teacher for over 10 years. Brendan studied Graphics, Animation, and Web Development at Seneca College of Applied Arts and Technology (Toronto, Canada), Ryerson University (Toronto, Canada), and Pratt University (Brooklyn, NY).
Brendan is a prominent member of FlashinTO, PHUG – Open Source Culture, has taught web design at Long Island University Brooklyn campus, and has been a professor at Seneca College in the School of Communication Arts for over 7 years. Brendan currently owns and operates digibomb, a freelance web company specializing in WordPress Design and Development. He is also the founder of PHUG, an open source community for designers and developers with currently over 4000 members. Brendan has contributed to many open source projects including papervision3D, red5, Firefox, WordPress, and Drupal, just to name a few.

Julia Stowell
Interoperability Lead

Julia is the Interoperability Lead in the Canadian subsidiary. She focuses on engaging with developers, IT pros and public sector audience in order to share the Microsoft Interoperability story. Microsoft is committed to solving the real-world interoperability challenges of its customers, developers, partners, and independent software providers, through innovative products, community engagement, technology access, and support for technology standards. She came to Canada two years ago from the Microsoft Latin headquarters in Miami where she managed the Market Intelligence practice for the region. Prior to that she lived in Guatemala, helping to run a school and learn Spanish. She’s holds an MBA from Thunderbird School of Global Management and a Bachelors in Communications from Old Dominion University.