We have an amazing pool of speakers to choose from and we’re in the middle confirming them all. Check back to this page often as it will be updated regularly over the course of the next week!
Nathan Hutchinson
Nathan is the Web Coding & CMS Specialist at eHawaii.gov. Starting his professional career in print advertising, he eventually moved on to the wonders of website design. He is passionate about making user friendly web sites and accessibility for all. Outside of work, Nathan is a certified rescue diver and loves to hike. If it is the weekend, he’s probably outside away from a computer.
Ben Lobaugh
Mendel Kurland
As an outdoor enthusiast, Mendel loves backpacking, camping, gourmet coffee, and prototyping new web apps. From scrappy beginnings as an entrepreneur and Web consultant for local businesses, he found his way to corporate America as a developer, marketer, and inventor. As a GoDaddy Evangelist, he spends his time hanging out with developers, designers, entrepreneurs, and web pros around the world and making sure their opinions and suggestions are heard.
Jake Goldman
Jake is the President of 10up, a full service digital agency that makes web publishing and content management simple and fun. At 10up, he serves name brand clients like TechCrunch, ESPN, Consumer Reports, NBC Universal, and Google. In just 4 years, Jake built 10up from 1 to more than 100 full time employees. Jake has been quoted on publications like c|net, written for Smashing Magazine, taught at Boston University, and presented at conferences around the country. He is a core contributor to WordPress, maintains some highly rated WordPress plug-ins, and co-organizes the Sacramento WordPress Meetup.
Adelle Lennox
Adelle loves media, publications, and technology. She fell in love with computers as a teenager and began building websites in 1999. Her love affair with WordPress began in the spring of 2008. Adelle is a trained journalist and small business owner who enjoys helping others navigate websites and online technology. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Advertising and “actually uses it.” Her skills include: graphic design, writing, research, website building, SEO, content development, photography, and social media marketing.
Rosie Warfield
Rosie Warfield is the Manager of eGovernment services at eHawaii.gov. Starting with the company in October 2005 in tech support and working her way through the ranks, she has happily landed in the world of website building and design. You’ll never find Rosie indoors. She spends most of her free time in the mountains or traveling to as many corners of the world as she can fit in to her schedule. Her favorite thing to do is run 100 mile ultra-marathons.
Kevin Bates
Kevin is a traffic and conversion specialist, author of traffic courses, and marketer for WooThemes. After spending 5 years as a traffic consultant he’s now moved into the realm of paid advertising and sales funnel optimization, helping businesses acquire new customers and achieve positive ROI.
Tamara Olson
Prior to starting Tamara Olson Designs, Tamara spent several years at Google as a design lead. She has also crafted user experiences for Apple, numerous startups, media companies, and countless small business websites. A hybrid designer/developer, Tamara has been building websites for nearly 17 years and lives in New York City.
Chris Norberg
Project Manager of Maui’s own Hawaii Web Group (@maui), Chris has admittedly been riding the internet roller coaster with some success and much failure. Providing exposure for Hawaii businesses to visitors before arriving on island, Hawaii Web Group builds and promotes their own high-traffic websites and concentrates on community development and social media engagement. Largely due to viral posts, last year their sites reached over 1 million users and enjoyed over 156 million impressions socially.
Travis Totz
Part designer, part aspiring astronaut reaching for the cosmos, part business owner at Westwerk. Travis is all about connections – with travel, with people and with design. What started out as a combination of all three – a trip to Hawaii, some good friends and brilliant design – has since become a thriving WordPress business known as Westwerk. Most recently, Travis led the acquisition of WordPress theme creative house, Press75 and now heads Westwerk’s product division of the same name.
Jack Lenox
Jack Lenox is a Design Engineer on the Theme Generation team at Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com. He has been building websites since 1998, and building them with WordPress since 2008. In 2011 he set up writing community jottify.com, powered by WordPress. He lives in the north of England where he enjoys mountain biking, skiing, visiting Roman ruins, appreciating great design and drinking good coffee.
Tammie Lister
I am a theme wrangler at Automattic. This means I am lucky enough to spend my days arm deep in themes. I get to not only work on WordPress.com with themes, but also as part of the theme review team for WordPress.org. When I’m not themeing, I like to spend time with my husband and two dogs around the beach we live by. I like to balance the time spent online with offline crafts, yoga and photography.
Arlen Nagata
Tracy Apps
Tracy (or @tapps) is a graphic designer, a front-end web developer, a photographer, a drummer, a crossfitter and lifelong Milwaukean. She has been creating for the web since 1996, and started developing with WordPress before it was WordPress. As a continual student, Tracy enjoys breaking things and pushing the limits in web design whenever she can. She also could probably deadlift you.
Kimanzi Constable
Kirk Wight
Kirk works as a Theme Wrangler at Automattic, the makers of WordPress.com. He lives in Vancouver, BC, and co-organizes WordCamp Vancouver. Lover, not a fighter.
Gregg Franklin
Gregg Franklin is a WordPress Developer and team member over at ServerPress LLC., the creators of DesktopServer. Loves to help in any way he can solving WordPress problems.
He also can be found co-facilitating the Inland Empire WordPress meetup group and loves to travel with his wife.
John Hawkins
John was an early adopter of WordPress. He moved his blog to the brand new platform a few short months after it was released and never looked back. After doing countless updates to his own site and those of a few dozen friends, John co-founded 9seeds.com to focus full time on WordPress development. In his spare time, John is the lead organizer of the Las Vegas WordPress meetup, blogs at vegasgeek.com and recently became addicted to CrossFit.
Ben Howard
Ben Howard has been building websites longer than most people have surfed the Internet. He was working with business websites back in 1995, and was one of the tester/developers for the original edition of Adobe Flash. He has worked with many WordPress sites over the years, even building custom plug-ins and themes. He has taught Internet Development at UH Maui for more than fifteen years, and has spent the last seventeen years building a reputation as an experienced teacher and programmer on Maui. He would much rather be painting and sculpting, but its easier to make a living with code.
Kathryn Presner
Kathryn thrives on helping people get the most out of WordPress. After a career designing and building websites for clients, she joined Automattic as a Happiness Engineer in
2012 and is a member of the Theme Team, where she help folks with all types of theme-related issues on both WordPress.com and self-hosted sites. She enjoys spreading her
passion for WordPress at WordCamps, Girl Geeks, Ladies Learning Code, and other grassroots events. Non-WordPress hours are spent collecting vintage Pyrex mixing bowls, growing organic garlic, and cavorting with her three felines.
David Morgan
David Morgan is the co-founder, designer and developer of Invulu, Inc., the company responsible for Organic Themes, Kahuna Host and more. He co-founded Invulu with Jeff Milone in 2009 on the Hawaiian island of Maui. David enjoys surfing, swimming, golfing and creating new web applications and products.
Jeff Milone
Jeff is Co-founder of Invulu – a web software, service, and application company known for the popular brands Organic Themes, KahunaHost, and more. He started Invulu on Maui with David Morgan in 2009. Jeff also contributes time as an advisor to several nonprofit organizations. An avid globetrotter, Jeff enjoys traveling to WordCamps around the world.
Vladimir Prelovac
Successfully bootstrapped a company in eastern Europe, reaching over $1mn in revenue in the first year. Won EY Emerging Entrepreneur of the Year 2013 award. Ranked among top 100 most influential people on Social Media in the world in 2012.
Karim Marucchi
Karim Marucchi is the Founder and Chairman of the VeloMedia Group, the parent of several boutique professional service firms around the world. Over the last twenty years he’s run startups, taken companies public, managed mergers and acquisitions, and led professional service organizations across the globe. Today he is also the CEO of Crowd Favorite, which continues to grow beyond its current offices in Los Angeles, Denver, Bucharest, Las Vegas, New York, and Rome due to its unique blend of localized project management and high quality digital solutions. As the first premiere WordPress agency for the Fortune 500, National Geographic, DirectTV, Lexus, the Dallas Mavericks and major entertainment studios count among the company’s client roster.
Sam Hotchkiss
Sam was the founder of BruteProtect, a distributed brute force attack protection tool which was acquired by Automattic in August 2014. Sam is now hard at work on integrating BruteProtect into Jetpack, and exploring the future as an Automattician.
Sam travels with his wife, Becky (and, quite often, their three dogs, Barkley, Izzy and Stanley) to WordCamps around the world. He presents on topics ranging from security to building web apps to building and managing large blog networks to the future of WordPress and the internet.
Syed Balkhi
Syed Balkhi is the founder of WPBeginner and List25 an extremely popular entertainment site with over 1.2 million subscribers and 200 Million video views. Syed’s work has been featured in NYTimes, HuffingtonPost, Yahoo Small Business, Wired, Mashable, and countless other well-reputed online magazines.
Adam Silver
Owns and operates A Silver Lining Productions based in Redondo Beach and teaches a WP101 course at the local adult school. He also runs the SouthBay WordPress Meetup and creates a weekly podcast over at kitchensinkwp.com.
Chris Lema
Chris Lema is the CTO and Chief Strategist at Crowd Favorite. He’s also a daily blogger, a public speaker, and product strategist. He helps companies leverage WordPress, and helps WordPress companies find leverage.
For twenty years Chris has developed and managed high performing engineers to build software products – particularly SaaS products in a variety of B2B vertical markets. He’s also spent the last ten years coaching startups on product development & marketing strategies.