Carrie Longson

Microsoft Corp

Carrie Longson is passionate about design, in her role as a User Experience Evangelist, she enjoys working with design agencies across the globe in creating new and interesting designs. Prior to moving to this role Carrie worked within Microsoft Consulting as a Design Consultant, producing many of the WPF and Silverlight demos. Carrie has been working with the Expression Studio since the start, delivering presentations and training globally.

Blaise Aguera y Arcas

Microsoft Corp

In 2004 Blaise founded a software company originally named (rather opaquely) Sand Codex LLC, later Seadragon, Inc., to develop ideas in scalable architectures and user interfaces for interacting with large volumes of visual information, potentially over a narrow-bandwidth connection. He wrote software, raised angel and VC funding, hired the initial engineering and management team, and was the principal author of the company's IP portfolio. Microsoft bought Seadragon at the beginning of 2006, in an acquisition driven by Technical Fellow and Live Labs founder Gary Flake. Since joining Microsoft, Blaise has become the architect for Photosynth and as well as Seadragon. These technologies should be reaching the Web as products in the next year.

Outside Microsoft, Blaise has applied computational techniques in a variety of fields, including neuroscience and history. In 2001 he received worldwide press coverage for his discovery, using computational methods, of the printing technology used by Johann Gutenberg, considered the inventor of printing from movable type in the West. This technology differs markedly from later printing technologies, suggesting a reassessment of Gutenberg's traditional historical role. Blaise's work on early printing was the subject of a BBC Open University documentary, entitled What Did Gutenberg Invent? (http://www.open2.net/renaissance2/doing/gutenberg.html).

Blaise's wife and occasional coauthor, Adrienne Fairhall (http://depts.washington.edu/pbiopage/people_fac_page.php?fac_ID=10), is a computational neuroscientist and professor at the University of Washington in Physiology and Biophysics.

Samer Chidiac

Microsoft Corp

Samer Chidiac is the Developer Evangelist Covering Eastern Mediterranean for Microsoft Corporation, working closely with Partners, Community, Academia & Influencers in the region.

Samer is formerly the General Manager of HBPRO How To Be Professional SARL (http://www.hbpro.net), a Media & E-Business Solutions Provider, where his main role was to manage overseas contracts along with following up on day to day tasks with Designers, Developers, Media Analysts and other roles inside the company.

Winner of more than 7 Local & International Awards, including Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP), Golden Web Awards, International Who's Who of Professionals Award, Best Mobile Internet Business Model for the year 2002 ( By Ericsson / FTML - Lebanon), Microsoft Customer Excellence Award.

Mike Soucie | CEO and Co-founder Electric Rain, Inc

Microsoft Corp

Mike Soucie is the CEO and co-founder of Electric Rain, Inc. (www.erain.com), a Boulder, Colorado, USA-based 3D and multimedia software company with a vision of bringing easy-to-use multimedia creation tools to business and design professionals. Mike has successfully led Electric Rain to become a well known industry-leading developer of 3D Adobe Flash solutions. Now Soucie and the Electric Rain team are launching a new and innovative Windows Vista desktop presentation application called StandOut Presentation Solution. StandOut is one of the first full-featured designer and line-of-business applications built on the rich Windows Vista graphics technologies, enabling business presenters to create and deliver editable cinematic-quality presentation experiences

Sherif El Touny

Microsoft Corp

Sherif El Touny is the ISV Developer Evangelist for Microsoft Egypt. Touny enjoys working with software development houses & design agencies helping them explore the new functionalities and features in the new stack of web & design technologies provided by Microsoft.

Before joining Microsoft, Touny worked with IBM, Computer Associates, Internet Security Systems & RAYA. He also has huge passion in the (TV) media business as a hobby.

Sherif El Touny won the EMEA ISV developer evangelist award from Microsoft 2007.

Mostafa Kamel

Microsoft Corp

Mostafa Kamel is the General Manager of Technology, LINKdotNET.

Mostafa joined LINKdotNET since 1999, and had several rules since then including being MSN Arabia Technical Manager.

Today, with 8 years of experience in building, managing, and operating web portals is primarily focused on managing the research and development of new web technologies within LINKdotNET, specially Web 2.0 kind of online services, architecture and user experience.