Confirmed speakers

Bios for Heather Ford, Justin Stanford, David Bausola and Neil Blakey-Milner soon.

Additional speakers will be announced in the coming weeks.

Andy Budd

Andy Budd is an interaction designer and web standards developer from Brighton, England. As the user experience lead at Clearleft, Andy spends his time helping clients improve their customers online experience.

Andy is a regular speaker at international design events such as SXSW, An Event Apart and Web Design World. He also runs the popular dConstruct conference, which takes place in Brighton every year. Andy has helped judge several international design awards and currently sits on the advisory board for .Net magazine. Andy wrote the best selling book, CSS Mastery and blogs at andybudd.com.

Never happier than when he's diving some remote tropical atoll, Andy is a qualified PADI dive instructor and retired shark wrangler.

He's interested in:

Andy Hadfield

An expert in the design and implementation of innovative Enterprise 2.0 and Web 2.0 systems, Andy Hadfield is internationally recognised as a pioneer in content portals and hosted applications.

Andy's groundbreaking work has led to numerous accolades, including being identified as a future South African leader by Common Purpose International and Brightest Young Minds and featuring on various television programmes, as well as representing South Africa as a Business/IT ambassador in both Hong Kong and South America.

Andy's IT career began early when he successfully launched a national student website getALife while still studying at the University of Cape Town. The site soon began to revolutionise the way corporate South Africa interacted with youth brands and helped companies understand and unlock the potential of the internet as a viable and measurable media channel.

As Chief Operating Officer (COO) for The Virtual Works, his unique approach to strategy, system architecture and technological development is integral to the trademark originality and innovation evident in the company's systems, such as the groundbreaking V3 management system.

Andy describes himself as a 'new media evangelist' and 'almost a geek', but only almost…

Find his personal musings on www.andyhadfield.com or visit The Virtual Works at www.virtualworks.co.za

Andrew Turner

Andrew is co-Founder of Mapufacture, where he works developing open-standards and building tools to make it easy for people to create customized dynamic maps using complex geospatial tools. This helps in communication and understanding of communities and organizations through collaborative mapping. He also actively participates in the open-source community and develops several mapping tools such as Mapstraction and GeoPress.

Prior to starting Mapufacture, Andrew developed high-fidelity retitleime vehicle simulation software at Retitleime Technologies and designed spacecraft algorithms and sensor systems at EADS Astrium.

Andrew writes for O'Reilly and published the shortcut "Introduction to Neogeography" and "Trends in Where2.0" business report in Spring 2008. He also publishes in MacTech and Make magazine on his home-automation development.

He's interested in:

Andrew can be found at: http://highearthorbit.com and http://mapufacture.com.

He lives in Washington, DC, USA.

Dave Duarte

Dave Duarte is an internet and mobile marketing consultant, entrepreneur and educator. He holds several senior positions in the academic, commercial, and non-profit sectors.

He runs Huddlemind Labs, a company which provides corporations with social software to help facilitate and embed organizational learning.

Dave is founder and programme director of two Executive Education courses: Nomadic Marketing and Mobile Marketing at the University of Cape Town (UCT) Graduate School of Business. The courses are being run by the UCT GSB’s Executive Education unit, which has a global top ten rating from the Economist Intelligence Unit.

He is Public Lead for Creative Commons (CC) South Africa. CC is a non-profit organization devoted to expanding the range of creative works available for others to legally build upon and share.

Dave co-owns Muti.co.za, South Africa’s most popular social-bookmarking site, which has grown on virtually no budget to serving over 1 million pages a month to over 50 000 users, and has remained an ad-free service.In 2005 Dave started hosting gatherings for techies and geeks in Cape Town. These turned into the 27dinner (co-founded with Mike Stopforth) a very popular event, held on the 27th of each month, for 100 new-media enthusiasts to come together and share ideas. It is free to attend, held in a different South African city each month, and is co-ordinated on a wiki maintained by loyal attendees.

Dave also lectures and has compiled modules for Evidence Based Management, a compulsory undergraduate commerce course offered at UCT. Each term he teaches over 900 students, his topics are Attention Economics, Social Media, Web Marketing, Innovation and Globalization.

Dave is also a fellow of iCommons, and Advisory Board Member of Ikineo.

In 2007 he was runner-up in the Forge Ahead African ICT Achiever awards for Young African ICT Innovator of the Year.

He's interested in:

Dave can be found at: http://www.daveduarte.co.za/ and his favourite web app is Twitter.

He lives in Cape Town, South Africa.

Eric Edelstein

Eric Edelstein has been involved in Internet Start-up's for 10 Years, and co-founded incuBeta.com, Clicks2Customers.com, TrafficSynergy.com, and many other well known Internet companies. He also co-founded the eSquared clothing stores. His latest venture is social media eCommerce site springleap.com

Eric spends large amounts of time testing out new Internet Marketing strategies and is passionate about Search Marketing, both SEO and Pay Per Click.

When not behind his laptop, springleaping or Facebooking, Eric speaks @ Internet conferences, does corporate training on 2.0 and Internet Marketing strategy, and invests in Internet Start-up's.

He's interested in:

Find out more about Eric and get in contact with him at http://www.EricEdelstein.com or http://www.springleap.com.
His favourite web apps are Skype and Twitter.

He lives in South Africa, Cape Town.

Eric Osiakwan

Eric M.K Osiakwan is the Executive Secretary both of the African Internet Service Providers Association (AfrISPA) and the Ghana Internet Service Providers Association (GISPA, www.gispa.org.gh). He is also a Visiting Fellow and Scholar at the Stanford University and Reuters Foundation Digital Vision Program @ http://rdvp.org/fellows/2004-2005/erik-osiakwan/, Project Co-ordinator for UC Berkeley TIER Group in Ghana @ http://tier.cs.berkeley.edu and affiliate of the Berkman Centre for Internet and Society at the Harvard Law School @ http://cyber.law.harvard.edu

During the past five years, he has been involved in a number of information and communication technology (ICT) related projects and initiatives in the US, Europe and Africa for a number of Governments, companies, NGOs, and international agencies. He is currently a Consultant to the WorldBank’s Information for Development program on Open Access for Africa (InfoDev, www.infodev.org). He is also a consultant to BusyInternet (www.busyinternet.com), UNDP Ghana and OSIWA (www.osiwa.org).

Eric was invited by the Royal African Society to contributed ideas to Prime Minister Tony Blairs’ Commission for Africa @ http://www.commissionforafrica.org/english/consultation/bob_geldofs_seminars/african-letters/Eric_Osiakwan.pdf. He self published a research document on Ghana’s Internet Industry (GII). Co-authored “The Internet in Ghana” with the Mosaic group using the GDI methodology @ http://www.fosterandbrahm.com/GhanaGDI.pdf and also co-authored the Ghana chapter of Negotiating The Net (NTN) – the Politics of Internet Diffusion in Africa @ http://www.cidcm.umd.edu/ntn/ghana/ghana_7-01-04.doc.

He is an associate of Spintrack AB, Sweden (www.spintrack.com), Balancing Act, UK (www.balancingact-africa.com) and African Analysis CC, S.A (www.africaanalysis.co.za). He is also a director of InHand ltd (www.inhand.co.ke) and PenPlusBytes (www.penplusbytes.net). He co-founded the Ghana New Ventures Competition (GNVC, www.gnvc.org).

He is a member of a number of professional bodies including::

He's interested in the growth of Internet Infrastructure in Africa, and his favourite web app is Ungana.

He lives in Accra, Ghana.

Emeka Okafor

Emeka Okafor is an entrepreneur, he is a partner in Caranda Fine Foods, a manufacturer of gourmet beverages developed and produced in several African countries and distributed globally. He was the Director of TED Global 2007, Africa: The Next Chapter and is currently TED's Africa Director. Mr Okafor is also a principal at the Makeda Fund,a private equity fund focused on the development of women-owned and women-managed Small and Medium Scaled enterprises in Africa. Passionately committed to the issues and ideas that are guiding Africa's future and sharing those ideas with the world, he is the founder and author of the publicly acclaimed blog Timbuktu Chronicles, which covers the confluence of entrepreneurship, science and technology in Africa and amongst Africans.He also publishes Africa Unchained, a blog examining issues that include governance, policy, education, and institution building in Africa.He is the director of research for the Direct Expatriate Nationals Investment initiative(DENI), a Poverty Reduction and External Resource Mobilization Program for countries that have received massive debt cancellation from the HIPC Program. Mr. Okafor is a founding member of the IPEGroup, a volunteer initiative established to promote the role of private enterprise and capital markets in catalyzing economic development and facilitate collaboration and the sharing of resources on international projects.

Emeka also sits on the advisory board of Market for Change an outsourcing startup.Emeka also sits on the advisory board for the X-prize entrepreneurship prize.Mr. Okafor is also a member of the the global advisory board for Students for the Advancement of Global Entrepreneurship (SAGE), an organization that seeks to advance youth entrepreneurship and community service around the world.Mr Okafor sits on the advisory board of Market for Change a startup which seeks to harness the world's untapped talent through socially responsible outsourcing.

His writing includes a contribution to the book: Worldchanging: A Users Guide for the 21st Century.

Mr Okafor was born in the United Kingdom, grew up in Canada and Nigeria and currently lives and works in New York City.

He was educated at the University of Nigeria and graduated with a degree in Architecture.

Joe Stump

Joe Stump is the Lead Architect of digg in San Francisco, California. He's responsible for making sure the applications built at digg will scale into infinity and beyond. For the last 10 years he's specialized in building highly scalable LAMP solutions. When not working on digg he spends time maintaining a number of PEAR projects and explores San Francisco.

He's interested in:

Joe can be found at: joestump.net and digg, and his favourite web apps are digg, facebook, Twitter.

He lives in San Francisco, CA.

Josiah Mugambi

Josiah is involved in Stockskenya, and Skunkworks.

He's interested in:

He can be found at blog.josiahmugambi.com, and his favourite web app is Google Maps.

He lives in Nairobi, Kenya.

Malcolm Hall

Born and raised in Cape Town, South Africa, Malcolm was a founder member of a successful start-up (The World On Line) focused on Microsoft Great Plains—a mid-market ERP package—in the 1990's.

Upon moving to the UK in 1998, Malcolm, as a member of the Deloitte (UK) and then e2i (UK) management teams, managed consultancy teams in the London, Central and Northern regions of the United Kingdom. Malcolm has extensive hands-on technical experience and has also programme managed IT projects across the UK, Germany, France, Spain, The Netherlands and the US.

Since founding Open Box Software, a bespoke .Net software development company, Malcolm has divided his time between US, UK and South Africa overseeing operations and project delivery. He is also responsible for developing further relationships with prospective and current clients, as well as partners and suppliers.

Malcolm holds BComm and BSocSci degrees from the University of Cape Town and the University of South Africa.

Matthew Buckland

Matthew somewhat of an online maniac. He has worked in the online medium all his working life literally from its inception in South Africa.

He is the former GM of the Mail & Guardian Online and co-founder of award-winning blog aggregator amatomu.com and editorial blog Thought Leader (a 2008 Webby Honoree). Matthew has spoken around the world on online media issues, including New York, Germany, Kenya and London and is a regular media commentator on radio and TV. He was one of the first new media graduates out of Rhodes University and has previously worked for iafrica.com, Carte Blanche (Interactive), Johncom (e-media) and the BBC Online (beeb.com) in the UK. He is a computer fundi and has had one since the age of 7 (ZX Spectrum 48k), where he spent most of his time creating computer games in BASIC.

Matthew is a prominent blogger at matthewbuckland.com. One of his proudest moments was when some of the world's biggest blogs -- including Techcrunch, Mashable, his favourite site, Wired.com, and technology site Techmeme -- tried to break his servers by linking to his blog. Miraculously, they stayed up. His next proudest moment was when his blog scooped "best business blog" at the 2008 SA blog awards. He was also proud to share the stage with Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales in a talk on "Future Web Trends" in 2007.

He is currently the GM of publishing and social media at 24.com.

He's interested in:

Malcolm can be found at: matthewbuckland.com, and his favourite web apps gmail, twitter and the underrated google bookmarks, and enjoys eating marie biscuits, with butter inbetween. Yum.

He lives between Joburg and Cape Town at the moment, in RS of A.

Michelle Acton-Bond

I have worked as an independent consultant for the previous eight years, disrupting, building and changing brands. I have had the fortune in this time to work with a number of Blue Chip clients including Hamleys, Eurostar, Virgin, BAA and Early Learning Centre. More recently I have been working with start up businesses in their infancy and helped them with their entire to market strategy from their name to their product offering.

I specialise in the digital space whilst working on branding, marketing, acquisition, and product. I sit on the board of a number of start ups as brand, marketing and product director. I often work with venture capitalist firms as the first port of call once investment has been released. My role within each business varies dramatically, but my role is always to disrupt, challenge, re-focus and value add. I am a prominent member of the on line community and am often asked to provide support and inspiration to entrepreneurs and established brands alike at all stages of the business cycle. I often speak at on line events and unlike most consultants am completely accepted as part of the technology scene!

I have a passion to understand both peoples and business needs with every business I work with, be them an established brand or a start up. My main strength and what I am most well known for is my ability to understand the commercial and social needs of a business and translate them effectively into technical and creative solutions that deliver incredible results!

She's interested in:

Michelle can be found at: www.projectyourself.co.uk, and her favourite web app is far too hard a question....

She lives in London, England.

Mike Stopforth

Mike Stopforth is an entrepreneur, writer and speaker who helps companies extract real value from Web 2.0 trends and technologies to create smarter, more profitable businesses.

Mike writes a weekly column for the Citizen newspaper and is a technology commentator for popular business and marketing websites. He lectures at the Vega School of Branding and features as a guest lecturer on executive programs at the Graduate School of Business in Cape Town, and the Gordon Institute of Business Science in Johannesburg. He is a popular feature on the local and international business-to-business speaking circuit.

Mike co-founded Web startup Afrigator, Africa’s social media aggregator, and the 27dinner social networking movement.

He's interested in:

Mike can be found at: www.mikestopforth.com, www.cerebra.co.za, www.afrigator.com and www.27dinner.com. His favourite web app is del.icio.us.

He lives in Johannesburg, South Africa.

Mikel Maron

Mikel Maron is founder of Mapufacture, and web developer for hire, specializing in Open Geospatial and Wiki tech. He’s been active in the standardization of GeoRSS and in the OpenStreetMap collaborative mapping project, and several open source projects. He’s developed two of the first Wikis in use at the UN. Previously, Mikel worked as senior developer of My Yahoo! and researched evolutionary models of ecosystems for an MSc at the University of Sussex.

He's interested in:

Mikel can be found at: http://mapufacture.com/, http://brainoff.com/, http://openstreetmap.org/, and his favourite web apps are Tiddlywiki and Trulia Hindsight.

He lives in San Francisco, CA, USA.

Nii Simmonds

Nii Simmonds is a recognized speaker, consultant, and sustainable evangelist on African entrepreneurship. Mr. Simmonds is the founder of NAFRICOM a non-profit trade association for IT Software and Technology Services industry for Africa. Mr. Simmonds is also a Co-founder of EmergingictGroup, a global ICT research, training, and advisory/consultancy. Mr. Simmonds blogs about African business, sustainable technology, venture capital, and social entrepreneurship on his blog Nubian Cheetah.

Mr. Simmonds frequently speaks and presents on entrepreneurship, ICT, sustainable technology, elearning, pharmaceuticals, conglomerates, globalization, and outsourcing market in Africa and other emerging markets. Professionally Mr. Simmonds is a consultant who has experience in corporate finance, supply chain management, competitive intelligence, corporate strategy and outsourcing.

Mr. Simmonds has been acknowledged for his research in globalization and offshore market by Mckinsey, IBM Global Services, AT Kearney, Keane, Wharton School, Harvard, Government of Ghana, Ghana embassy, Smeal College of Business, Harvard Business School NeoIT, ITESA, Summit Circuit, Bloomberg News, Wall Street Journal, Avaya, Affiliated Computer Services (ACS), Data Management International and many others.

Mr. Simmonds got his B.S. in Management/Finance from Smeal College of Business at Pennsylvania State University and a minor in Information Systems and Statistical Analysis. Mr. Simmonds holds a Business Process Outsourcing Master Certificate from the Wharton School.

Rob Stokes

Rob Stokes is the founder and Group CEO of Quirk eMarketing, Africa's largest full service online marketing agency. Quirk was founded in 1999 as Rob was nearing the end of his Business Science Marketing Honours Degree at the University of Cape Town. Today, he is the guiding force in an ever-growing agency with a loyal client base that includes big names like Google, BMW and South African Tourism. Quirk is headquartered in Cape Town and also has offices in Johannesburg and London; evidence that Rob has built a South African business with a strong international presence. Driven by his love of technology and constant search for innovative and fresh ideas, he has truly found his niche; both as a charismatic leader and a team player. A regular local and international speaker, Rob has entertained audiences in many countries, sharing his knowledge and expertise on a wide array of eMarketing topics. He is also the co-author of a soon to be published eMarketing Textbook aimed at Marketing students at universities and other tertiary institutions all over the world.

He's interested in:

Ryan Shen-Hoover

Ryan Shen-Hoover set up www.InvestinginAfrica.net to help raise awareness of Africa’s capital markets. The monthly Investing in Africa newsletter is read by a growing number of global asset managers. A certified market addict, Ryan also co-founded Kivuno Capital Advisors, where he manages an Africa-focused hedge fund. He is interested in systems that help close Africa’s financial data gaps.

He's interested in:

He can be found at www.InvestinginAfrica.net, and his favourite web app is caps.fool.com.

As a former resident of Lesotho now living in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, Ryan relishes every opportunity he gets to travel back to the continent.

Sarah Lacy

Sarah Lacy has reported on startups and venture capital in Silicon Valley for nearly a decade. Lacy is the author of Once You're Lucky, Twice You're Good: The Rebirth of Silicon Valley and Rise of Web 2.0, which has been called the definitive story of the modern Web and one of the most intimate portraits of startup life. She writes Valley Girl, a biweekly column for BusinessWeek and co-hosts Tech Ticker on Yahoo! Finance.

She can be found at sarahlacy.com

She lives in San Francisco, USA.

Soyapi Mumba

Soyapi Mumba develops applications for Firefox, Twitter and Facebook Platforms by night, and a system for managing prescription and delivery of ART for HIV/AIDS patients in Malawi by day, despite challenges faced in poor countries like Malawi. Some these applications are used daily by thousands of users world wide.

During the conference, he will share his experiences and lessons learned developing web-related applications in Africa.

He's interested in:

Projects include:

Soyapi can be found at: his blog and http://baobabhealth.org/. His favourite web app is Twitter.

He lives in Lilongwe, Malawi.

Stafford Masie

Stafford Masie has been in the IT industry for more than 15 years and has assumed numerous roles throughout his career. After completing his tertiary computer science studies in Israel in the early 90's, he returned to South Africa. Upon his return he has worked for numerous companies, namely; Telkom and Dimension Data. Thereafter Stafford started his own consulting and engineering services company which was later acquired. He then joined a multinational enterprise software and services company called Novell and after 9 months in South Africa he moved to the USA where he spent 6 and a half years working at their corporate head office in Utah. Stafford was responsible for global partnerships and corporate technology strategy and had responsibility for numerous international territories - namely; Latin America (Brazil, Argentina, Venezuala), Middle East, Sub Saharan Africa and Southern Europe.

Stafford played a significant role in the open source software arena in the USA and returned to South Africa in December 2003 to assume the role of country manager for Novell South Africa. Stafford has since joined Google and is currently the country manager for Google South Africa. Besides being a technology enthusiast, Stafford is equally passionate about flying Microlights and single prop aircraft whenever he can.

Vinny Lingham

Vinny Lingham is the CEO and founder of SynthaSite, a Web 2.0 startup that provides free Web site building, publishing and hosting services. He also serves on the Yahoo and Commission Junction affiliate advisory boards.

Before assuming the role of CEO of SynthaSite, Vinny was the founder & CEO of incuBeta, a holding company that consisted of his previous startup, Clicks2Customers a leader in PPC Search Engine marketing. Clicks2Customers is one of the premier global Performance Search Marketing agencies, generating more than $100 million annually in client revenue. Under Vinny’s leadership, incuBeta garnered South Africa’s Top Technology Company award in 2006. Vinny was also honored as the Top Young IT Entrepreneur in Africa Award in 2006.

Vinny is a popular and seasoned speaker. He has appeared at various industry events both in the U.S., UK and South Africa including the Affiliate Summit, Search Engine Strategies, A4U, Webmaster World, Office 2.0 Conference and Mobile & Web New Media Marketing.

He's interested in:

Vinny can be found at: his blog and http://www.synthasite.com/. His favourite web apps are Gmail, Pandora, SynthaSite, Google Docs.

He lives in San Francisco, CA.