Be sure to check back often as we continue to add more interesting speakers!
Aral Balkan founded and coordinates OSFlash, is the author of the widely-used RIA framework, Arp and the creator of SWX, the native data format for Flash. Aral is a published author and has contributed to several books and magazine articles. He is the author of the Adobe Flex 2 QuickStart Guides and has written six courses of his own that cover topics ranging from introductory Flash and ActionScript 2 to Flex 2, ActionScript 3, best practices, and open source development. When he's not flying around the world consulting, he can be found enjoying Life, the Internet and Everything in the lovely seaside town of Brighton, in the United Kingdom. Aral blogs on aralbalkan.com.
Session at MAX:
INSPIRE: Rediscovering Fun
Carlo Blatz, founder and CEO of Powerflasher, started his business already back in 1997 at the dawn of Flash and is therefore often called a flash pioneer. His world-wide reputation is built on his expertise on this technology. Over the last ten years he gathered extraordinary flash-developers, graphic artists and animators to guarantee the company's constant growth. By now Powerflasher is one of the leading multimedia agencies of Europe with a long list of respectable recurring clients such as almost every German TV station, LG electronics, Deutsche Telekom, etc. or well-known agencies like Jung von Matt, DeepBlue, etc.
Powerflasher's intension with every project is to rock the world with stunning solutions made in flash and flex. In numerous international lectures and speeches on Flash and its best use and by writing the first German book about Flash, Carlo Blatz passes on his knowledge. For more information visit: www.powerflasher.com
Session at MAX:
INSPIRE: Web 2.0: Flash vs. AJAX - Best of both worlds
Peter Elst is an Adobe Community Expert and certified Flash instructor. As a freelance Flash platform consultant, and a respected member of the online community, Peter has spoken at various international industry events and published his work in leading journals. Most recently, Peter was the lead author of Object-Oriented ActionScript 3.0 (Friends of ED, 2007).
Session at MAX:
Best Practices for Developing with ActionScript 3.0
Ben Forta is the Adobe senior product evangelist and the author of numerous books, including ColdFusion Web Application Construction Kit and its sequel Advanced ColdFusion Application Development, as well as books on SQL, JavaServer Pages, WAP, Windows development, and more. Ben co-authored the official ColdFusion training material, the certification tests and Macromedia Press study guides for those tests, and now spends a considerable amount of time lecturing, speaking, and writing about application development worldwide.
Session at MAX:
Hands On: Building ColdFusion Powered Ajax Applications
Mario Klingemann is a computational artisan who explores the grey area that is located somewhere in between code, design and art. Whilst the focuses of his research are the secrets of computer-generated beauty and artificial creativity, Mario also provides solutions to real-world challenges, especially if they are related to Flash or Processing — and publishes his findings on Quasimondo.com. Mario is a regular speaker at international technology and design conferences and official ambassador of vuvox.com.
Session at MAX:
INSPIRE: The Blind Sketchmaker - exploring evolutionary and generative art with Flash
Giorgio Natili is an Adobe community expert, a W3C member and a UG manager. He is head of his own company, which has been operating in the web development filed for the past six years. His field of expertise focuses on Adobe Flash, Fireworks, Dreamweaver, ColdFusion, Flash Media Server, Flex and their integration, as well as accessibility both in html and Flash. More recently his interests have broadened to include developing mobile applications and e-learning tools. He also works on various education initiatives to spread awareness on accessibility issues, especially to flash developers.
Session at MAX:
FlashLite and integration with C++
Erik Natzke is an interactive designer who is constantly trying to blur the lines between design and technology. With a keen awareness for how and where to push the limits of the medium without isolating the audience, Erik is a consistent risk-taker. Crediting his success with having the willingness to fail and the stubbornness not to give up, Natzke's work ethic has pushed the boundaries of what previously had been considered possible. Imagination, adventure, and a desire to amaze as much as entertain are all part of the driving forces behind his work. Named one of the Top 10 Young Designers by HOW magazine, Natzke's commercial, as well as personal, works have received numerous awards within the fields of both design and advertising.
Session at MAX:
INSPIRE: Beyond the Knowledge; The Art of Playing
Duane Nickull works as Senior Technology Evangelist for Adobe. He participates in many architectural and developer forums on various subjects including Web Services, SOA, Ontology and Computational Intelligence as well as writing frequent trade publications on Web 2.0. He is currently the chair of the OASIS SOA Reference Model TC and has worked on previous technology architectures for W3C (Web Services Architecture) and the United Nations. He is also in the process of writing a book on Web 2.0 for O'Reilly Media and Publishing.
Session at MAX:
Documents 2.0: The Next Generation of Document Collaboration
Forms Gone Wild
Stefan Richter is an Adobe Certified Instructor for Flash Media Server and a long-standing Flash Platform developer. He currently holds the position of VP of Application Development at Dallas based POPview and also provides consultancy and development services to his own clients. He's the co-author of the Hands-on Guide to Flash Video and maintains one of the largest online resources on the subject at FlashcomGuru.com.
Sessions at MAX:
Integrating Flex and Video
Securing your Video delivery with Flash Media Server
Grant Skinner is the CEO and chief architect of gskinner.com, a Flash development and consulting company. He works with leading new media agencies and progressive corporate clients to create cutting-edge applications, games, and multimedia pieces. His expertise in fusing coding with interface design, usability, marketing, and business logic has garnered him international acclaim and resulted in a number of prestigious industry awards, including Best Canadian Developer at FITC 2005. Grant maintains an active blog at gskinner.com/blog/ and an exhibit of his experimental work at incomplet.org.
Session at MAX:
Building Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) Applications Using Flash CS3
Stephanie Sullivan is founder and principal of a web standards redesign company, W3Conversions. Stephanie is a Dreamweaver, accessibility, CSS and XHTML expert, whose services are in demand by top firms across the United States. She's the top gun that companies go to for troubleshooting problems, or to work behind-the-scenes transforming their in-house designs into functioning standard-based websites. She serves as a member of the influential Web Standards Project (WaSP) Dreamweaver Task Force, sits on the International Advisory Board for the Web Developer's and Designer's Journal and is a partner at Community MX — a site offering over 2000 tutorials to web developers seeking to increase their skills.
Session at MAX:
Hands On: CSS Part 2: Designing CSS-Based Layouts with Dreamweaver CS3
Rick Treitman is President and CEO of Virtual Ubiquity. He founded the company on the belief that web-based applications will create new channels of collaboration and that a great word processor has yet to be built. Rick has been in the high tech field for over 30 years. As President and co-owner of Softpro Books, he built one of the country's leading computer and technical bookstores. For the past 15 years it has been a mainstay resource for IT professionals, programmers and system designers. Prior to Softpro Books, Rick held several management positions at Lotus Development Corporation. He was Director Document Products, where he managed the Manuscript team and Director of Marketing for the Engineering and Scientific Products division. He was Manager of Lotus Books, Lotus' in-house publisher of training and technical materials to support Lotus' product offerings. Prior to Lotus, he created, designed and developed the Polaroid Education Project for Polaroid Corporation. This project leveraged Polaroid's instant photography technology for the classroom. He has also held marketing positions at International Data Corporation and Electronics for Medicine.
Session at MAX:
INSPIRE: Making Buzzword
Dr. Woohoo (translation: Serious Fun), is a New Mexico based artist, designer and developer, who works as a Visual Engineer at Etsy.com. Working with digital media since 1993, Woohoo's professional projects are available at http://www.drwoohoo.com. His personal projects include In The Mod: Color Analytics (ITM), http://www.inthemod.com, a site which analyzes, finds relationships between and includes downloadable color palettes from (in)famous paintings and After Effects, Flash Scripts and Extensions.
Session at MAX:
INSPIRE: swf Panels in AI CS3!
