Meet Our Speakers

Chris Adamson
Chris Adamson is a Mac and iPhone developer, editor, and author, based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He is the author of QuickTime for Java: A Developer's Notebook (O'Reilly) and co-author of iPhone SDK Development (Pragmatic Programmers) and the upcoming Core Audio (Addison-Wesley Professional). He has several apps on the App Store, including the navigation app "Road Tip". He maintains a corporate identity as "Subsequently & Furthermore, Inc.", and has thus far owned 11 ½ Macs.

Kevin Avila
Kevin has 15 years of experience developing for the Mac and, since its release, the iPhone. Kevin has been involved in every corner of the audio market, from being an engineer at Apple to configuring professional recording studios, and even title-winning dB Drag Racing vehicles.

Erik Buck
Erik M. Buck is the co-author of Cocoa Design Patterns (2009, Addison-Wesley Professional) and Cocoa Programming (2002). Erik founded EMB & Associates, Inc. in 1993 and built the company into a leader in the aerospace and entertainment software industries by leveraging the NeXT/Apple software technology that would later become Apple's Cocoa frameworks. Erik has also worked in construction, taught science to 8th graders, exhibited oil on canvas portraits, and developed alternative fuel vehicles. He sold his company in 2002 and currently manages a software product line for one of the world's largest aerospace companies.

Robert Clair
Robert Clair holds a B.A. in Physics from Oberlin College and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Physics from the University of California, Berkeley. He has more than twenty years experience in commercial software development, working mainly in CAD, modeling, and graphics. For the last seven years he has worked primarily in Objective-C on the Mac and now on the iPhone. Among other programs, he has written ZeusDraw, a vector drawing program for Mac OS X, and ZeusDraw Mobile, a drawing and painting program for the iPhone. He is the author of the forthcoming Addison-Wesley book, Learning Objective-C 2.0: A Hands-On Introduction to Objective-C for Mac and iPhone OS Developers. Robert lives in New York City where he is the principal of Chromatic Bytes, LLC, an independent software company.

Joe Conway
Joe Conway is the iPhone instructor at the Big Nerd Ranch. He has been writing Mac applications for 10 years until recently switching most of his focus towards the iPhone platform. Joe is the primary author of iPhone Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide, co-written by Aaron Hillegass. He is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin and has worked for the Big Nerd Ranch ever since. He is the author of Baaahlast, an iPhone game.

Mike Daley
By day Mike Daley works for the largest enterprise software company in the world whilst by night his alter ego writes computer games for his children. Mike started writing games soon after getting his first computer in 1983 and has been an avid gamer ever since. He has worked in IT for more than 17 years, spending a significant amount of this time as a developer. The release of the iPhone reignited the passion he'd had way back in the 80's, when a single person could create an entire game. Having experimented and prototyped on the iPhone since its release, Mike's book Learning iPhone Game Programming: A Hands-on Guide to Building Your First iPhone Game, publishing this summer, will be a unique journey into game development.

Andrew Donoho
Andrew Donoho has a small mobile device consulting firm, Donoho Design Group, L.L.C., which concentrates on iPhone development. He has personally developed two REST based applications: weLost™ and ch@tter™. This work is the natural extension of his over 25 year history of developing with Apple technologies. He has experience in developing 3D visualization software, designing hardware, and crafting web standards. He is trained in experimental physics with a degree from the University of Texas at Austin and lives in Austin with his wife.

Suzanne Ginsburg
Suzanne Ginsburg has been working in technology for more than 12 years, designing everything from productivity applications to content rich websites. She has worked with non-profit organizations and academic institutions, as well as technology companies like CNET, Yahoo!, and several stealth startups.

At Yahoo!, Suzanne initially worked as an Interaction Designer for the Communities and Publishing Group. A few years into her tenure, Suzanne was promoted to Sr. Design Manager for Yahoo! Photos. Through Ginsburg Design, Suzanne has worked with a variety of clients on a diverse set of projects. In addition to design services, Suzanne has also provided companies such as Google and Yahoo! with consulting on Agile Design best practices. Suzanne earned a Bachelor of Science at Cornell University and a Master's in Information Management at UC Berkeley. She is currently writing Designing the iPhone User Experience, due to be released this summer.

Aaron Hillegass
Aaron Hillegass has more than 20 years of experience as a software engineer. He wrote the Big Nerd Ranch course on Cocoa, drawing from his experiences as a trainer and curriculum developer at Apple Computer, Inc. and NeXT Software, Inc. Aaron is the author of Cocoa® Programming for Mac® OS X, 3rd Edition. This book is generally regarded as "The Book" from which to learn Cocoa programming. He is the creator of Campwhere, an iPhone application for finding campgrounds.

Jeffrey Hughes
Jeffrey Hughes brings more than 18 years industry leadership and skills as a marketer, publisher and keynote speaker in high technology industries including such companies as McAfee, Blue Coat Systems, Webroot, Intel and Novell. Hughes is the author of 11 marketing and technology books and numerous trade press articles on high technology marketing topics. His latest book, iPhone and iPad Apps Marketing: Secrets to Selling Your iPhone and iPad Apps, gives independent developers the skills, tips, and tools they need to successfully compete and sell their apps on the App Store.

Ed Keenan
Ed Keenan is a member of the DePaul University's Game Development faculty specializing in advanced software engineering for video game development. He developed one of the first iPhone game classes in the nation. His primary research is in optimization and performance of real-time systems used in games. Ed is a former Executive Technology Director at Midway Games, with more than 17 years experience in the game industry.

Ed has extensively designed and refactored many critical game systems such as Audio, Physics, Graphics, Operating Systems, Networking, Animations, Cinematics, UI and content creation tools. Ed has contributed to 30+ different titles shipped during his tenure at Midway, most notably WarGods, Hyperdrive, the Mortal Kombat Series, NFL Blitz, NBA Ballers, Psi-Ops, Stranglehold, TNA iMPACT and Wheelman.

Kyle Kinkade
Kyle Kinkade has been working with the iPhone SDK since day one. He has helped design some of the most recognizable iPhone UIs in the app world, including some for Tapulous for their Tap Tap Revenge series. He currently owns a multi-touch UI design company in Seattle called Monster Costume Inc.

Matt Long
Matt Long is an independent iPhone/Mac OS developer. He is the co-author of Core Animation: Simplified Animation Techniques for Mac and iPhone Development. He is also the administrator and co-contributor to the popular Mac OS and iPhone development blog, Cocoa Is My Girlfriend. Matt has been developing software professionally since 1999. He began his programming career using perl to develop web applications and is known on the web as the @perlmunger. Matt is married with five kids. He lives in Colorado Springs, Colorado.

Ben Newhouse
Ben Newhouse is a developer at Yelp and is responsible for the creation and development of Yelp Monocle, one of the first implementations of Augmented Reality on the iPhone. Raised in a small town in New York, he spent a year in Taipei as an exchange student learning Mandarin before coming to Stanford to "study" electrical engineering as an excuse to get involved in the Silicon Valley start-up culture. Since coming to Stanford he has worked at SwayLaw LLC, Microsoft Research in Beijing, and Yelp in San Francisco where he will start working full-time upon graduation in June 2010.

A builder at heart, Ben is a relentless prototyper, working in whatever technologies are required to bring his vision to life. At various points in the past he has specialized in front-end development (JavaScript and CSS), systems networking (C), web middleware (Python), and mobile development (Obj C andJava). He is busily trying to make 2010 the year of computer vision on consumer devices.

Jonathan Rentzsch
Jonathan Rentzsch is a Chicago based Mac software developer whose passion and specialty is rapid, value-driven custom software. He eschews big-design up-front development and believes in getting real, working software into the user's hands as quickly as possible. In addition to his day job, Jon organizes the Programming Special Interest Group near Chicago and the C4 conference for independent developers.

Eros Resmini
Eros Resmini has more than 15 years experience in digital entertainment and gaming, focused on marketing and customer relationship roles in both large and small company settings. He currently runs Marketing and Developer Relations teams at gaming start-up Aurora Feint where he joined as employee number six. The company, funded in late 2009 by DeNA Global, now enjoys massive success as a social gaming platform provider and game developer. Eros held similar roles at Hewlett Packard, Real Arcade (GameHouse), and is a founding partner of San Francisco's independent label Los Kamikaze Records.

Erica Sadun, Conference Chair
Erica Sadun is the bestselling author, co-author and contributor to over two dozen books on programming, digital video and photography and web design, including the widely popular The iPhone Developer's Cookbook: Building Applications with the iPhone 3.0 SDK, 2nd Edition. She has blogged for TUAW.com, Mac Devcenter and Ars Technica. In addition to being the author of more than a dozen iPhone-native applications, Erica holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Georgia Tech's Graphics, Visualization and Usability Center. A geek, a programmer, and an author, she's never met a gadget she didn't love. When not writing, she and her geek husband parent three adorable geeks-in-training, who regard their parents with restrained bemusement.

Jeff Sinclair
Jeff has been helping organizations create exceptional online experiences since 1996. Convinced that mobile will soon be the preferred channel for accessing information, he co-founded Xomo (pronounced "Zoh-Moh") in 2009 to deliver mobile apps for large events and festivals. Jeff was previously CEO of The Level, a software company producing a Global Content Management System relied on by customers such as Google, which used it to manage content for its popular websites in more than 100 locales worldwide (including Google.com). Before that, Jeff was responsible for managing Stockhouse.com, a popular North American online financial community. Jeff also co-founded the Vancouver Canary Derby, an annual charity event for the technology industry raising funds for research into the early detection of cancer. In 2007, Jeff won the Business in Vancouver 'Top 40 Under 40' Award.

Fraser Speirs
Fraser Speirs is a Mac OS X and iPhone Developer and Director of Connected Flow, Ltd. On Mac OS X, he is best known for the FlickrExport plugins for iPhoto and Aperture, and the file and folder comparison application Changes. On iPhone OS, his Flickr client Darkslide has consistently been one of the most popular Flickr apps. In the past, Fraser has written for Mac Developer Journal and blogged at MacDevCenter. He has also worked to support the Large Hadron Collider experiment at CERN.

Rod Strougo
Rod is the founder and lead developer of the studio Prop Group. Rod's journey in physics and games started way back with an Apple, writing games in Basic. From the early passion in games, Rod's career moved to enterprise software development; he spent 10 years writing software for IBM and recently for a large telecom company. Rod's dinner conversations are much easier nowadays. Instead of trying to explain a J2EE asset management system, he simply pulls out his iPhone and starts showing Prop's games. Originally from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Rod lives in Atlanta, GA, with his wife and son. Rod is currently writing Learning iPhone & iPad Game Development with Cocos2D.

August Trometer
August lives and breathes code and is a true believer in living on the cutting edge. August previously created iPodderX, the world's very first podcasting application. He's been writing software for longer than he can remember, and over the years has had his hand in the creation of a number of websites and web communities. In his spare time, he develops his own software for the Mac and iPhone. He has written Optimizing Your Website for Mobile Safari and is the lead developer behind Yowza!!, a mobile coupon application for the iPhone and iPod touch.

Zachary West
Zachary West is a lead developer of Adium, the popular open source instant message client for OS X and the author of Prowl, the Growl client for iPhone OS. Prowl has sent more than 36 million push notifications in the eight months it has been available, or a little over 160,000 per day. Zachary is currently a graduate computer science student at the University of Central Florida in Orlando, Florida.