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Jennifer Bove

The Secret Life of Booze: A Cocktail History

Jennifer started her multifaceted career in tangible and interaction design at the circus—quite literally—at Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey. In the last 13 years, she has created multi-platform products and services for myriad clients including Nokia, Yahoo!, BBC, Gucci and American Express. Her design management background includes the Prada Epicenter store in New York, which inaugurated a new paradigm of tangible retail experiences. Jenn is fluent in French and Italian, and has lived and worked in the UK, France, Italy, and Germany. Before Kicker, Jenn was VP of User Experience at HUGE and at Schematic, and is on the faculty at New York’s School of Visual Arts MFA in Interaction Design. Her work has been exhibited throughout Europe, including the Victoria & Albert Museum in London.

Matthew Buchanan

Map Local and other works of Staggering Genius

Matthew built his first website — for the All Blacks — over fifteen years ago. He has a background in publication design and 3D animation, and has worked full-time designing websites for the past decade.

Matthew is a co-founder of Cactuslab, a boutique web and iPhone development studio in Auckland, whose clients include 95bFM, Amplifier, ACP Media, NZ Winegrowers, Mighty River Power, the Ministry of Health and the NZ Music Commission.

Anne Galloway

iPads Are For Ladies: A Brief History of Feminine Hygiene Products

As a social scientist and design researcher, Anne is fascinated by how objects, images and stories shape--and are shaped by--people's personal relationships, social activities and cultural values. In practice, she tries to understand the role of new technologies in everyday life by studying what people make, say and do. Anne regularly lectures on these topics to academic, industry and government audiences and her work has been internationally published in books, journals, magazines and newspapers. In late 2009 she relocated from Ottawa, Canada to take up a position as Senior Lecturer in the School of Design, Victoria University of Wellington.

When not teaching or doing research, Anne enjoys hanging out with her cat and reading comics. Her website is http://www.purselipsquarejaw.org/.

John Hart

A Foo Lamb named Baa - one delicious lamb's journey across the country

John Hart did stints as an engineer and a suit in the IT industry for 15 years before redirecting his life into a career in sustainable food production. He currently farms about 50 acres in the beautiful Wairarapa with his wife. They produce "beyond organic" beef, lamb and pork as well as enough vegetables to mostly keep the pantry full.

Selling the fruits of their labour directly to consumers allows their small farm to pay its way and gives John a direct route to win over customer after customer to their way of production.

Alongside his passion for producing good food, John is a staunch advocate of healthy local food economies. He manages the Wairarapa Farmers' Market and does what he can to promote better eating and farming choices nationally.

Matthew Magain

Here's one thing you probably don't know about Google Analytics

Matthew is the Creative Director for SitePoint, a Melbourne-based community dedicated to helping web developers get better at what they do. When not designing exciting new projects for SitePoint, he can be found regularly neglecting his personal blog, http://magain.com.

Greer McDonald

Why geeks make the best lovers: The Dr Sheldon Lee Cooper theory, By Greer McDonald

Greer McDonald is a journalist, blogger and the social media editor for New Zealand’s largest news website Stuff.co.nz.

A reformed dating blogger (after finally accepting the title as Wellington’s resident singleton), Greer now spends her days trawling Twitter, blogging about her finances as Lady in the Red and writing witty bios for events such as this.

With a background in newspaper reporting, Greer is now based in the digital world — often revealing far much more information than anyone really ever needs (or wants) to know.

She also has a penchant for chips and dip, jandals and trashy TV.

Kathryn Ryan

“You're mad, this is mad, you've gone too far...” — A meditation on freediving

Kathryn Ryan grew up in Dunedin and has also lived in Christchurch, Napier and Wellington.

She took a circuitous route into journalism, which included completing a BA degree in History and Education, two years teacher training, and six years running a sports and recreation centre, before completing Canterbury University's post-graduate journalism course at the age of 27.

Over the last decade (and a half!) Kathryn has had wide-ranging journalism and broadcasting experience in the print, radio and television industries.

She joined RNZ in 1999 and spent six years reporting on Parliament in Radio New Zealand's Press Gallery office, the last three as Radio New Zealand's political editor, before taking up the Nine to Noon role in May 2006. She has also been a regular commentator on TVNZ's 'Agenda' current affairs programme.

Kathryn is an avid reader of fiction and non-fiction, and enjoys writing. Her other interests include movies, good food and wine, the great outdoors, walking and sea swimming.

She is gradually overcoming a shamefully technophobic past, and is enjoying doing so, though still can't load her ipod without help.

Darren Wood

Get Excited and Make Things

Darren started his career in the late 90s resetting modems for the ISP his parents owned in South Africa. This spawned an incurable desire to be connected to the internet all the time which took him to London to experience the dotcom crash and then brought him out to New Zealand.

By day, Darren Wood is an interface designer-developer at Marker where he has designed and/or built websites and iPhone applications for clients in Australia and New Zealand. By night, Darren is known as a web geek and/or “Mr Microformats”. At any time you can be sure that he is an advocate of web standards, HTML5, chili and single malt whisky.

Charles Bird Esq *

Sub-prime: a post-mortem on the irrational exuberance of the real estate market and its effects on the global economy

Charles Bird is Webstock’s Director of International Markets and Business Development and a member of the company’s Executive Council. Bird, 4, oversees the company’s international affairs and has leadership responsibilities for 20 Webstock in-country operations throughout the world.

He remains the only member of the Webstock team to have been Boing-Boinged.

* The particpation of Charles is, as always, subject to his whim.