Meet the speakers of WordCamp Toronto 2012!
Al Davis
Al Davis has more than 15 years’ experience working with individuals and small business owners who need help getting their ventures online. First, as a Hosting Product Manager for several major telcos, he worked behind the scenes delivering the features and functionality everyone wanted. Then, as a web developer himself, he worked with clients to sort through what they really wanted as opposed to what they thought they wanted.
Finally, as a teacher of both introductory and developer-level WordPress classes at Toronto’s George Brown College, he continues to be faced with the good, bad, and (very!) ugly that is created when businesses leap from website idea to website reality.
Al has been a featured speaker at WordCamps across North America. He is also a co-organizer of WordCamp Toronto and of WordCamp Developers Toronto. He is the founder and sole operator of WPTeach.com.
Bradley Munro
Bradley Munro is the principal of the RS4 Marketing Group, a Toronto based consulting firm specializing in marketing strategy & product development for small and mid-sized companies. Brad is a marketing professional with over 20 years of experience in the consumer packaged goods and telecommunications/ICT industries. He has held progressively senior management roles with top Canadian customer focused organizations including Kraft Foods, Molson Breweries, Rogers Communications and Bell Canada/Mobility. For the past four years he has been teaching marketing and brand management at McMaster University, Seneca College and the Schulich School of Business.
Christopher Ross
Christopher has spoken at WordCamp events in Toronto and Montreal in the past, taught community college courses in web design, and run a successful WordPress based consulting business since 2005.
For the past three years, he has been focussed on delivering network based WordPress communities using WordPress multisite and WordPress VIP based solutions for business and government organizations.
Most recently he developed the blogging solution for the Montreal Gazette, Ottawa Citizen, Edmonton Journal, Vancouver Sun, and Calgary Herald for Postmedia, before that the blogging network for StockTwits (voted one of the most influential websites in finance by FastCompany) and the CNN Money bloggers network.
These days, he focuses exclusively on developing newspaper-based WordPress websites for companies in Canada, the US, and Latin America.
Dale Mugford
Co-Founder of BraveNewCode, Dale Mugford, has been working with the web since 1994 and WordPress since 1.0. His company BraveNewCode has been building WordPress-only websites and plugins for the past 5 years. BraveNewCode has become a leader in the WordPress community demonstrating the awesomeness of WordPress and how to build a business on it.
Dawn Comber
Dawn Comber has been writing business and marketing materials for small businesses and non-profits for over 10 years. Recognizing the growing importance of the web, Dawn added web copy writing to her tool kit. Now she spends much of her time creating search engine optimized web content for WordPress sites. When she isn’t writing, she pretends she’s farming (aka veggie gardening). You can learn more about her at dawncomber.com and follow her on Twitter @dawncomber
Digital Duncan
Since 2001 Duncan has been helping people, companies and organizations of all sizes in the Durham Region promote their products, services and unique ideas through his company Digital Deceptions’ unique brand of graphics, website designs and marketing.
By keeping up to date with the latest technologies he is able to find innovative ways to achieve his clients desired results by combining creative thinking with strategic design at the same time empowering them to easily publish their own content to their website by utilizing such tools as WordPress and social media networks Facebook and Twitter with the ability to measure results.
Duncan’s skills are a great complement to help you visually get your message across, includes a built in delivery system with tools to see who’s watching, where they come from, how they got there and how long they stayed. What is your story?
Erick Hitter
Erick Hitter is a Design Engineer with Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, Gravatar, PollDaddy, and more. As part of Team Custom, Erick helps create awesome features that let WordPress.com users tailor sites to their personalities with more than just a great theme.
Joe Rozsa
An award winning creative director, designer and owner of Trailer Trash Design, Joe thumbs his nose at the stuffed-shirt, smoke and mirrors approach to providing creative communication services. Operating under the sometimes unheard of adage that work can be fun, Joe, with his off-the-cuff approach, offers his clients full service creative consulting, graphic design, advertising and production for print media collateral, websites, internet marketing and multi-media presentations.
Jonathan Davis
Jonathan is the lead developer of the Shopp e-commerce plugin for WordPress and owner of Ingenesis Limited. He is a designer of code solutions. He enjoys typography, good design, UX, solving e-commerce problems and helping people with WordPress. Back in Ohio, he helps organize WordPress meetups and WordCamp Columbus.
Jordan Quintal
Jordan Quintal is a seasoned web developer with 15 years of experience. His ever-growing web development company thegenius.ca specializes in WordPress-based websites, plugins, and a variety online/offline services. Jordan handles business management, project management, and some development work when needed.
Kathryn Presner
Kathryn Presner is a web designer turned Automattic Happiness Engineer, who gets to meld her background in crafting WordPress sites with a love of helping people and troubleshooting. She gives back to the open-source community by answering questions as a volunteer WordPress.org support-forum moderator and presenting at events like WordCamp, Podcamp, and Girl Geek Dinners. Non-web pastimes include cooking healthy and delicious food, cavorting with her three cats, and marvelling at her first crop of homegrown organic garlic. Follow @zoonini on Twitter.
Marilyn Kay
“Marilyn Kay, CCP, is the founder of Triskele Consulting. She is an active user of all major social platforms, including Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, Pinterest, YouTube and blogging.
She is a a trainer, workshop leader and speaker about social media.
An award-winning corporate communicator with over 30 years of experience, she has also launched and managed corporate internets and intranets.
Her company, Triskele Consulting, helps businesses go social, well beyond setting up social media tools and campaigns. Instead, the focus is on how best to integrate the social web into your marketing and business processes. “
Mo Jangda
I wrangle code and VIPs at WordPress.com. I enjoy ice cream and other sugary things.
Paul Bearne
Paul Bearne is a coder and team-leader at a Toronto start-up called Enginuity Group. He has been working with WordPress for 10 years, during which time he has created a number of themes and plug-ins. Paul is the maintainer of the Author Avatar list plugin and the creator of the theme used on the Hirshhorn Museum website.
Richard Martin
Richard Martin is an online entrepreneur. He created and manages a site that provides health services to clients and continuing education training for health professionals. Before going online he did product marketing in Silicon Valley with several companies including Apple, Cisco and Broadcom. Richard now lives in Ottawa. Follow Richard on Twitter.
Rick Radko
Rick Radko is a creative, artistic, and entrepreneurial engineer with a passion for finding solutions to difficult design problems. He is the owner of R-Cubed Design Forge, where he develops custom web applications, social networking and team collaboration solutions for businesses. Rick specializes in custom application development and multilingual WordPress sites. He is co-leader, and a frequent presenter at the Ottawa WordPress Group.
Ruth Maude
Ruth Maude of Dandelion Web Design has been designing and building websites since the late 1990’s. Now Ruth works primarily in WordPress. She loves WordPress because it’s open source, user-friendly and so good for SEO. You can connect with her on Twitter @dandelionweb.
Sean Nilsson
Sean Nilsson has been providing online marketing consulting for 3 years with a client list that includes IMAX Theatres, Museums and the Grand Canyon National Geographic Visitor Center. Before going out on his own he spent 10+ years at IMAX Corporation overseeing online marketing and creative services. Sean has been building web sites for 15+ years and loves the collaborative community that surrounds WordPress. When Sean isn’t working on the Web he can be found strumming his guitar and fronting the indie folk band Sheltered in Sound.
Shannon Smith
Shannon Smith is the founder of Café Noir Design, a boutique Montreal web design company specializing in multilingual web development. She builds beautiful, functional websites that her clients can update themselves and that are easy for search engines to find. She support things like making the web accessible for everyone, using open source software, helping organizations find greener more sustainable ways to operate through online technology and helping non-profits with online community organizing. Also foodie and mother of four. twitter | google+ | blog
Shanta Nathwani
Shanta Nathwani is an Instructor at Sheridan College and an Independent IT and Social Media Consultant in the GTA. Her background includes teaching at post-secondary institutions as well as coaching small businesses in technology. Check out Shanta’s blog and follow her on Twitter.
Victor Granic
Victor Granic is part owner of a WordPress development, hosting and training company called SwitchWP. He built and manages their hosting environment as well as helping with the development of customer websites. SwitchWP places a strong emphasis on content strategy and gets a real kick out of helping people organize and manage their data which leads to easy to use, intuitive websites.