Speakers
Bringing you some of the best and brightest from the local Denver, Boulder, and Ft. Collins communities in addition to visitors from across the country.
Doyle Albee
Doyle Albee is the president of Metzger Associates, a full-service media relations firm specializing in social media strategy and execution. Doyle founded the New Media Practice Group at Metzger four years ago and has been helping communications professionals understand and manage social media ever since. Doyle has an extensive background in public relations, marketing communications and social media with experience in a number of industries, including consumer packaged goods, cable and telecommunications, healthcare and technology.
Josh Byers
Josh Byers is a graphic designer and web developer who lives by a beautiful lake and some golden cornfields in Polk City, Iowa. Its not heaven, but its still a pretty cool place to live and work. For the the past 13 years Josh has run his own design and development firm Red Letters Studio. He has had the privilege to create web sites, logos and other media for institutions like Michigan State and Iowa State University, many small businesses, and churches and even for a-list movie star Rachel McAdams. Josh has been exclusively developing on WordPress since 2005 and has developed many commercial themes and open source plugins.
Kevin Conboy
Kevin lives in Boulder, Colorado, where the sun shines more than 300 days out of the year, which is good because he’s originally from San Diego. After attending art school for graphic design in the late 90s, Kevin found himself caught up in the whirlwind of the web agency world during the dot-com boom. Recently a designer for Automattic and working on cool products like Polldaddy. Happily married with three kids, Kevin plays in a band and has been blogging for more than 10 years.
Jeff Finkelstein
Jeff Finkelstein is the founder of Boulder-based, Customer Paradigm, an interactive marketing firm that has helped clients including Xcel Energy, 3M, Level 3, BP achieve top rankings through search engine optimization and web marketing. Finkelstein is an adjunct professor for Colorado State University, and has lead workshops around the country teaching companies how to better optimize their websites and get found. Finkelstein has written syndicated columns on web marketing, and reaches tens of thousands of people each week through Customer Paradigm’s eLearning Series newsletter.
Nick Gernert
Nick heads up the Platform Services team for Voce Connect, overseeing all web development projects. Prior to joining Voce, Nick headed up the web development group cnp_studio. It was there that Nick and his team developed the technical platforms behind some of Voce’s high profile social media projects (see: PlayStation.Blog, eBay). Throughout his years in web development Nick has had developed projects for brands such as Discovery, Prudential, SeaWorld, Honeywell, MIT, and Symantec.
Aimee Giese
Business owner, graphic designer, web developer and photographer from Denver. My husband Bryan and I have one son, Declan, who is in second grade, loves to read, loves to draw, and did I mention, REALLY loves to read? I am proud to call myself a mommy blogger, but in truth, I am probably more of a lifestyle blogger who talks about her kid a lot. Because photography, music, travel, social media, technology and liberal politics also play a huge role on my blog.
Holly Hamann
Holly is co-founder of BlogFrog, a Boulder-based web 2.0 start-up that offers social and community-building tools for websites. She has spent 18 years launching and growing tech start-ups and has a passion for researching and studying internet and social media use by teens, GenY, and women. She is a blogger, public speaker, contributing writer on technology and marketing to various publications, is an American Marketing Association “Marketer of the Year” award recipient and a guest blogger for The HuffingtonPost. She lives outside Boulder, Colorado and blogs about technology and parenting teenagers.
Beth Hayden
Beth Hayden is a blogging expert who has provided training, consulting, blog coaching and WordPress development services for New York Times bestselling authors, political commentators, personal development coaches and university professors. She can convince any business owner or entrepreneur – even the *really* skeptical ones – that blogging can be fun and good for business! She writes her own blog at http://www.bloggingwithbeth.com.
Alex King
A web developer living in Denver, Colorado, having moved from the Bay Area in 2004, Alex is the founder of Crowd Favorite, a web development company that specializes in WordPress development (including themes and implementation) and web-based applications. Alex also has a number of development projects.
Steve Martin
Steve has worked in the web design industry since 2001 and has been involved in all aspects of website design and development. For six years he owned Floating Point Media, Inc., a full-service web design agency in Colorado Springs and Fort Collins, Colorado, and was a partner in Ecommerce Rep, LLC, a consulting firm based in Colorado Springs that assisted large manufacturers in selling their products direct to the public online. And, since Steve likes to make people smile, he started (and now runs) Clever Cubed, Inc., a User Experience consulting company which focuses on Usability, Information Architecture, and making users happy.
Kevin Menzie
Kevin is the CEO of Slice of Lime, an online strategy, design, and development company in Boulder, Colorado. Kevin has spent his career exploring the relationship between design and code and practicing “results-oriented design.” He has grown Slice of Lime on this principal and leverages WordPress to bridge the gap between great design, user experience, and functionality. When not at the office, Kevin works on being a new dad, teaches Adobe Illustrator, draws cartoons, plays piano, and takes his mountain bike for the occasional spin/crash.
Sean O’Shaughnessy
Sean is the Systems Administrator for the Voce Connect platforms team. He ensures on a daily basis that the platforms team has access to an efficient development environment and that all production environments for clients are running smoothly. Sean’s server environment strengths lie in Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), nginx, MySQL and memcached, but also has strengths in Ruby on Rails, Git, JavaScript and Mac OS X Hardware & Software.
Shawn Parker
Shawn “Wookiee” Parker earned his bachelor’s degree in visual arts with an emphasis in photography from the University of Northern Colorado. After graduating, he moved to southern Colorado and began his career as a photojournalist, where he won a first-place award from the Associated Press for general news photography. Later, he relocated to Denver and started working in pre-press and graphic design while also teaching himself web development. A self-taught programmer, Shawn eventually earned a job as a web designer and developer for a computer hardware and software distributor before joining Crowd Favorite.
Lisa Sabin-Wilson
Lisa Sabin-Wilson is the owner and Creative Designer for E.Webscapes Design Studio and the author of WordPress For Dummies, BuddyPress For Dummies and the WordPress All In One Desk Reference. Lisa’s work specializes in the area of custom theme development and writing books on the development, use and user experience of WordPress, and related tools. Lisa currently resides in Southeastern Wisconsin with her family, 6 exotic birds, 3 cats and handful of fish.
Bethany Siegler
Bethany Siegler of UniqueThink.com helps you build your complete online presence (web, blog, social media, email marketing, mobile…). She is a WordPress instructor at Boulder Digital Arts and internally for the University of Colorado at Boulder. Bethany has created online marketing campaigns for Frank Black (Pixies), Lloyd Cole, Stephen Lynch, Wild Divine, DreamQuest, The Video Station and Boulder Weekly. She has also represented SONY, Capital Records and Budweiser, yet prefers to work with and find solutions for smaller companies. Connect with her @UniqueThink
Hal Stern
Hal Stern is a co-author of “Professional WordPress” and has been using WordPress to write about hockey, baseball, golf, loud music, spicy food and life in NJ for the past five years. After more than 20 years with Sun Microsystems, he’s now a technology free agent, thinking about big data, security, cloud computing, content management and building technical communities. Find him @freeholdhal or snowmanonfire.com
Chris Scott
Chris joined the cnp_studio team in October 2008 and since transitioned to the Voce team. Chris now maintains custom application development on the PlayStation.Blog and PlatinumGames websites, among others. Chris is a lead application developer for the Platforms team. A Marketing graduate from the University of Central Florida, Chris realized his true passion was in web development and hosting. Chris loves open source and brings PHP, Django, jQuery, JavaScript, CSS, MySQL and *nix skills to the Voce team.
Dave Taylor
Dave Taylor has been involved with the Internet and its predecessors for thirty years now, starting out as a user of USENET and ARPANET. He’s been blogging since 2003 and now runs four popular weblogs: AskDaveTaylor.com, DaveOnFilm.com, The Attachment Parenting Blog and The Business Blog at Intuitive.com. He is a frequent conference speaker and host and is known for his wry sense of humor.
Jim Turner
Jim is head of One By One Media, which he began in 2004. He is a respected social media consultant and professional blogger who is well-connected in advertising, public relations, marketing and other business circles, consulting with Fortune 500 companies, large agencies and startup companies. More than 20 years of working in the law gave Jim the management and leadership skills needed to successfully guide companies through the Web 2.0 business space. He also serves on the advisory boards of several companies, helping them adapt to the new social media environment. Jim lives in Colorado with his wife and four children.
Jane Wells
Jane is the user experience lead for WordPress, and has worked in the web industry for 10 years. She is often on the road, meeting WordPress users to incorporate their feedback into each new version. In between WordCamps, she tries to find time to restore her 1968 Austin-Healey Sprite. Jane is a former Denver resident. Her first computer was a Commodore Vic-20.
