Paul Gardner Allen was an American business magnate, computer programmer, researcher, investor, film producer, and philanthropist. He is best known for co-founding Microsoft Corporation with his childhood friend Bill Gates in 1975, which helped spark the microcomputer revolution of the 1970s and 1980s. Microsoft went on to become the world's largest personal computer software company. Allen was ranked as the 44th-wealthiest person in the world by Forbes in 2018, with an estimated net worth of $20.3 billion at the time of his death.
O'Reilly Media is an American learning company established by Tim O'Reilly that publishes books, produces tech conferences, and provides an online learning platform. Its distinctive brand features a woodcut of an animal on many of its book covers.
Timothy O'Reilly is an Irish-American author and publisher, who is the founder of O'Reilly Media. He popularised the terms open source and Web 2.0.
Seattle Hempfest is an annual event in the city of Seattle, Washington advocating the legalization of cannabis. Vivian McPeak serves as the organization's executive director. Founded in 1991 as the Washington Hemp Expo, a self-described "humble gathering of stoners" attended by only 500 people, and renamed the following year as Hempfest, it has grown into a three-day annual political rally, concert, and arts and crafts fair with attendance typically over 100,000. Speakers have included Seattle city council member Nick Licata, actor/activist Woody Harrelson (2004), travel writer and TV host Rick Steves (2007), (2010), 2012 Green Party speaker Jill Stein, Dallas Cowboys center Mark Stepnoski (2003), and former chief of the Seattle Police Department Norm Stamper (2006). Hempfest has also in recent years attracted such well-known performers as Fishbone (2002), The Kottonmouth Kings (2004), Rehab (2006), and Pato Banton (2007) to its five stages spread throughout Myrtle Edwards Park and Elliott Bay Park, on Seattle's waterfront.
The Emerald City Comic Con(ECCC), formerly the Emerald City Comicon, is an annual comic book convention taking place in Seattle, Washington. Originally taking place at the city's Qwest Field (first at West Field Plaza, then at the Event Center), the venue changed in 2008 to its current home at the Seattle Convention Center. The show expanded to a three-day event in 2011 and began using the entire convention center for the first time in 2013. In 2014, the Gaming portion of the show was moved to the third floor of the nearby Sheraton Seattle Hotel to make room for an expanded show floor.
TED Conferences, LLC is an American-Canadian non-profit media organization that posts international talks online for free distribution under the slogan "ideas worth spreading". It was founded by Richard Saul Wurman and Harry Marks in February 1984 as a technology conference, in which Mickey Schulhof gave a demo of the compact disc that was invented in October 1982. It has been held annually since 1990. It covers almost all topics—from science to business to global issues—in more than 100 languages. As of June 2015, more than 13,000 TEDx events have been held in at least 150 countries.
Foo Camp is an annual hacker event hosted by publisher O'Reilly Media. O'Reilly describes it as "the wiki of conferences", where the program is developed by the attendees at the event, using big whiteboard schedule templates that can be rewritten or overwritten by attendees to optimize the schedule; this type of event is sometimes called an unconference.
Danese Cooper is an American programmer, computer scientist and advocate of open source software.
An unconference is a participant-driven meeting. The term "unconference" has been applied, or self-applied, to a wide range of gatherings that try to avoid hierarchical aspects of a conventional conference, such as sponsored presentations and top-down organization.
A lightning talk is a very short presentation lasting only a few minutes, given at a conference or similar forum. Several lightning talks will usually be delivered by different speakers in a single session, sometimes called a data blitz.
Gnomedex was a single-track technology conference hosted by Chris Pirillo, the owner of Lockergnome, LLC and was produced by Chris Pirillo and his staff at Lockergnome. Pirillo was the co-host of the show Call For Help on the former cable television channel TechTV. Gnomedex started as an outgrowth of Pirillo's technology newsletters, IRC channel and web site. The conference name is a satirical portmanteau of Pirillo's Lockergnome and the now-defunct Comdex technology trade show, which was a massive and influential annual event at the time of the first Gnomedex conference.
Tableau Software is an American interactive data visualization software company focused on business intelligence. It was founded in 2003 in Mountain View, California, and is currently headquartered in Seattle, Washington. In 2019 the company was acquired by Salesforce for $15.7 billion. At the time, this was the largest acquisition by Salesforce since its foundation. It was later surpassed by Salesforce's acquisition of Slack.
Chic Meets Geek is a red carpet event and conference hosted by Carol Tran. A non-profit beneficiary is highlighted at every Chic Meets Geek event and is themed around the speaker panelists' expertise, often ranging from fashion to science.
Chase Jarvis is an American photographer, director, artist, and entrepreneur. From April 2014 until July 2022 Jarvis was the chief executive officer of CreativeLive, an online education platform that he co-founded in 2010.
Hadley Alexander Wickham is a New Zealand statistician known for his work on open-source software for the R statistical programming environment. He is the chief scientist at Posit, PBC and an adjunct professor of statistics at the University of Auckland, Stanford University, and Rice University. His work includes the data visualisation system ggplot2 and the tidyverse, a collection of R packages for data science based on the concept of tidy data.
Raffi Krikorian is an Armenian-American technology executive, and the CTO of the Emerson Collective. He was the CTO of the Democratic National Committee, Head of Uber's Advanced Technologies Center, and the former VP of Platform Engineering at Twitter where he was in charge of infrastructure for all of Twitter up to August 2014. He is credited with leading the charge to improve the reliability of Twitter as well as the move from Ruby to the JVM. He currently also serves on the board of directors of the Tumo Center for Creative Technologies in Yerevan, Armenia.
Geeks OUT is a New York City-based, non-profit organization, founded in 2010, whose mission is to rally, empower, and promote the queer geek community. The content on its website often focuses on gaming, video gaming culture, comics, superheroes, science fiction, television, film, and other "geek" media, through a queer lens. Geeks OUT has left a "solid impact on geek culture." Geeks OUT is host to the world's largest LGBTQ queer comic con, Flame Con.
GeekWire is an American technology news website that covers startups and established technology companies. The site launched in March 2011 and is based in Seattle. It was founded by journalists Todd Bishop and John Cook with investment from Jonathan Sposato.
Maciej Cegłowski is a Polish-American web developer, entrepreneur, speaker, and social critic, based in San Francisco, California. He is the owner of the bookmarking service Pinboard, which he calls a social bookmarking site for introverts.
Sincerely, X is a podcast featuring anonymous TED Talks, created as a co-production between TED and Audible. The anonymous speakers included a doctor who believed she killed a patient; a Silicon Valley executive who experienced a mental breakdown; a yoga instructor who unleashed pepper spray in a department store; and a woman in a violent marriage who invented a ritual that she believes saved her life. The series was hosted by June Cohen in season 1, and Sarah Kay hosts season two. It was created by Deron Triff, and executive produced by Deron Triff and Colin Campbell.
