Arturo Toledo UX Technical Product Manager, Microsoft

Arturo Toledo UX Technical Product Manager, Microsoft

description Arturo Toledo is the UX Technical Product Manager at Redmond. He is responsible for producing UX and Designer training resources for customers and field as well as helping the training partner ecosystem grow. Arturo studied architecture at La Salle University in Mexico City, did additional media and visualization studies at the University of Arizona. Post graduation, Arturo applied his multimedia design and development skills and founded Milton Frank Studio, a boutique interactive development studio.

Beau Ambur CEO and Founder of Metaliq

Beau Ambur CEO and Founder of Metaliq

Beau Ambur is the CEO and Founder of Metaliq, headquartered in San Francisco and engaged in cutting edge design and development for a number of global clients and next generation initiatives. For over 10 years Beau has been highly involved in emerging technology that has continued to reach an ever growing audience both thru offering expanded capabilities and by coinciding with the proliferation of the Internet. Over the years he has been part of a number of start-ups as well as consultant to large organizations such as AtomFilms, Ford, AOL, Salesforce, Adobe, eBay, Yahoo, Mozilla, Cisco, Warner Brothers, SAP, Red Bull and Microsoft to name a few.

While coming from a more technical background, the ever changing software industry has presented unique and expanding challenges to keep up with, this is a big part of what drives Beau’s dedication to continually learning as much as possible to stay out in front of the next big thing. The continued emergence of interactivity has also broadened his appreciation for aesthetics expressed both thru visual design and rich media such as video. By working in an environment comprised of exceptional developers and designers, he can confidently lead in to new territory bringing both innovation and experience.

Carrie Longson User Experience Evangelist, Microsoft EMEA

Carrie Longson User Experience Evangelist, Microsoft EMEA

Carrie Longson is the User Experience Evangelist covering EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa). Prior to moving to this role Carrie worked within Microsoft Consulting as a UXP consultant, producing many of the WPF demos. Carrie has been working with the Expression Studio since the start, delivering presentations and training within the UK.

Catherine Heller Technical Evangelist, Microsoft

Catherine Heller Technical Evangelist, Microsoft

Catherine Heller is a Technical Evangelist in Redmond where she works with early adopters to ensure their success on pre-released versions of Microsoft technologies. For the past 10 months, she has been working with ISVs that are developing for Windows Vista. Catherine initially joined the evangelism team in 2003 to work with early adopters of Visual Studio 2005 and VSTO 2005. Prior to moving to Redmond, she spent three years working for Microsoft Services in Spain, where as a Senior Consultant she assisted enterprise customers with Web Services, COM+ and other middle-tier technologies. Catherine has worked with Microsoft developer technologies for over 15 years.

Christian Schormann

Christian Schormann

Dave Webster Developer Evangelist, Microsoft EMEA

Dave Webster Developer Evangelist, Microsoft EMEA

Dave Webster is a Developer Evangelist for Microsoft EMEA. He worked on many development projects in the New England area as a Microsoft Principal Consultant for enterprise customers and ISVs before returning to the UK in 2003. His projects have been primarily in C++ and latterly C# and VB.Net and have used most of the platform technologies from Microsoft including Biztalk, Exchange, COM/DCOM amd MTS/COM+. He has a particular passion for working with ISVs and was part of the first dedicated ISV team in Microsoft Consulting Services in the US. Dave has contributed to many conferences including Dev Days and TechEd Europe and South Africa.

Ernie Booth

Ernie Booth

Forest Key Director of the core Web/Client UX Platform & Tools Microsoft

Forest Key Director of the core Web/Client UX Platform & Tools Microsoft

Forest Key is the director of the core Web/Client UX Platform & Tools team at Microsoft Corp. Prior to joining Microsoft, Forest worked as a product manager for a number of companies developing creative tools for the professional designer, such as Macromedia, Avid, and Pinnacle Systems. Forest was the founder and CEO of Puffin Design, a successful start-up developing high end tools for the TV, film and effects industries. Before entering the software industry, Forest worked as a professional film editor and visual effects animator including a stint at George Lucas' Industry Light and Magic. During his time at Industry Light and Magic, Forest worked on Star Wars, Mission Impossible, Men in Black and numerous TV commercials.

George Moore General Manager Windows Live Platform Microsoft

George Moore General Manager Windows Live Platform Microsoft

George Moore is the General Manager of the Windows Live Platform responsible for the development and the delivery the APIs, unified SDKs, and developer community programs for all Windows Live services. This provides a platform for developers to reach over 400 million active consumers with API access to over 8 billion photos, 500 million address books, 30 billion contacts, 17 petabytes of maps, 5 billion searchable web documents and over 1 terabit/second available for streaming video. George joined Microsoft in 1988 and spent 12 years as a senior technical contributor, leading teams to ship all consumer versions of Microsoft Windows between 1990 and 2002. Most recently he lead an advanced development group focused on the development of concurrent and asynchronous programming models for decentralized systems. He has considerable expertise in operating system development and loosely-coupled architectures.

John Case

John Case

Keith Smith Group Product Manager for the Web/Client User Experience Platform & Tools

Keith Smith Group Product Manager for the Web/Client User Experience Platform & Tools

Keith Smith is a Group Product Manager for the Web/Client User Experience Platform & Tools team at Microsoft in Redmond, WA. Keith joined Microsoft in 1998 as a software engineer on Microsoft Visual J++ where he was responsible for the Windows Foundation Classes Dynamic HTML controls. Keith then worked on ASP.NET 1.0 as a member of the team responsible for the core ASP.NET controls and led the team responsible for ASP.NET performance and stress testing. Keith later managed the Visual Web Developer 2005 Express quality assurance team. Following the release of Visual Studio 2005 and ASP.NET 2.0, Keith moved to the Developer Marketing group at Microsoft. Today, he manages the product marketing team responsible for outbound communications, field engagement, community strategy and PR/AR for Expression Studio, Visual Studio for Web development, Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), “WPF/E,” ASP.NET, ASP.NET AJAX and Internet Information Services (IIS).

Koji Kato

Koji Kato

Molly Holzschlag Web standards advocate, instructor, and author

Molly Holzschlag Web standards advocate, instructor, and author

Molly E. Holzschlag is a well-known Web standards advocate, instructor, and author. Molly works to educate designers and developers on using Web technologies in practical ways to create highly sustainable, maintainable, accessible, interactive and beautiful Web sites for the global community.

Among her thirty-four (34) books is the The Zen of CSS Design, co-authored with Dave Shea. The book artfully showcases the most progressive csszengarden.com designs. A popular and colorful individual, Molly has a particular passion for people, blogs, and the use of technology for social progress. Molly keeps a personal blog at, where else? http://molly.com/.

Paul Dawson Experience Director, Conchango

Paul Dawson Experience Director, Conchango

Conchango was rated the leading European web design agency last year by Forrester Research, and Paul is responsible for interactive design and branding, customer experience and digital strategy for Conchango’s clients. This involves leading a team of experts on everything from brand and customer experience, product to kiosk design and from ergonomics to cognitive psychology.

Paul has spent much time in the last year in developing advanced design concepts with the new rich interface technologies, developing everything from immersive experiences to new approaches to finding flights.

Paul joined Conchango in 1999, having already been in the internet and multimedia industry since 1995. His vision was to create a single team capable of both design and build, as his belief was that only by understanding both can you create experiences that truly delight.

Now, he believes that this is truer than ever, and because of changing online demographics and different user experiences, it is more important than ever to be able to use different user interface paradigms and different development toolkits in ways that meet user and business needs.

Paul works at a strategic level with companies like Virgin Atlantic, Tesco, Nectar, Virgin Mobile, News International and Associated Newspapers.

Pete LePage Product Manager, Microsoft Corporation

Pete LePage Product Manager, Microsoft Corporation

Pete LePage is a Product Manager for Web Tooling at the Microsoft Corporation. He is responsible for ensuring Internet Explorer, Visual Web Developer and Expression Web meet the needs of customers.

With over five years at Microsoft, LePage has been designing websites since his early days in high school, evolving from the <font> tags and GeoCities to properly styled CSS managed hosting websites. Prior to joining the product management team, LePage was a tester on Microsoft’s Visual Web Developer where he steered much of the web design experience.

In addition to his career at Microsoft, LePage is an avid film photographer and teaches and studies at the prestigious Photographic Center Northwest in Seattle. LePage keeps a regular blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/petel.

Sascha P. Corti Developer Evangelist, Microsoft Switzerland

Sascha P. Corti Developer Evangelist, Microsoft Switzerland

Sascha P. Corti works for Microsoft Switzerland as a Systems Engineer focusing on the Microsoft developer tools and enterprise platform. Since the announcement of the Microsoft .NET vision and platform in the year 2000, he has been showing the possibilities of the .NET framework to the Swiss developer community. Starting in 2004, his audience widened to the IT architect who specializes in securing, managing and deploying .NET based, distributed systems. He studies involved Computer Science at ETH Zurich and Information Management at the University of Zurich.

Scott Guthrie General Manager, Microsoft Corp.

Scott Guthrie General Manager, Microsoft Corp.

Scott Guthrie is a General Manager within Microsoft's Developer Division. He runs the development teams that build: CLR, ASP.NET, WPF, WPF/e, Windows Forms, IIS 7.0, Commerce Server, .NET Compact Framework, and the Visual Studio Web and Client Development Tools.

Steve Marx

Steve Marx

Tim Sneath Group Manager Client Platform Evangelism, Microsoft

Tim Sneath Group Manager Client Platform Evangelism, Microsoft

Tim Sneath is the group manager for the Silverlight and WPF technical evangelism team, based out of Microsoft’s corporate headquarters. His mission is to see developers create stunning applications built on the Microsoft platform, and to persuade his mother that computers aren’t out to get her. Amongst other strange obsessions, Tim collects vintage releases of Windows, and has a near-complete set of shrink-wrapped copies that date back to the late 80s, as well as a “museum” of Virtual PC images from Windows 1.0 to the present. Tim spent the first thirty years of his life in the UK, and his occasional attempts to speak English with an American accent for ease of comprehension cause much hilarity amongst his colleagues. His popular blog covers client platform technologies, and can be found at http://blogs.msdn.com/tims

Wayne Smith Group Product Manager, Microsoft Expression

Wayne Smith Group Product Manager, Microsoft Expression

Wayne joined Microsoft in July 2005 and is now a Group Product Manager in Redmond on the Expression range of products for professional designers. Wayne is currently focusing on developing and launching the Expression Studio product to the market.

Prior to joining Microsoft, Wayne was MD and Principle Consultant on separate occasions for The Multimedia Mix, specialising in high quality websites and multimedia presentations using Macromedia products.

Wayne also spent five years with Macromedia Europe in technical product manager positions responsible for a wide range of tools products across the EMEA region.

Wayne has held multimedia managerial and consultancy positions at Computers Unlimited, Frost Design Associates and Menhir Consultancy Ltd.

Wayne started his career at British Telecom where he spent four years in engineering and computing roles. He then joined Northern Telecom as a development engineer.

Wayne has also served in the Royal Air Force and spent over 10 years with the Territorial Army.

Outside of work Wayne enjoys spending time with his wife and four children. He is also a keen walker and plays a range of musical instruments.