meshU

When is it?

May 18/19, 2010

Where is it?

MaRS Centre, South Tower
101 College Street
Toronto, Ontario
Canada M5G 1L7

Why is it happening?

mesh is happening because the five founders (see below) believed that Toronto deserved to have a world-class conference where people with an enthusiasm for the Web could talk about how it is affecting the media, marketing, business and society as a whole. Join us at mesh 2010 and help us connect, share and inspire.

Who is running it?

Mark Evans

Mark runs his own digital marketing, communications and social media consulting firm, ME Consulting, that provides strategic and tactical services to fast-growing companies, including many start-ups. This work ranges from Web site content and marketing collateral to media/public relations and social media strategy and tactics. He blogs at markevanstech.com and twitterrati.com. Before starting his own business, Mark spent more than 10 years as a technology reporter with the National Post, Globe & Mail and Bloomberg News. He has also worked with three startups – Blanketware, b5media and PlanetEye. When not working or blogging, Mark stays busy with family and playing hockey.

Mathew Ingram

I’m a senior writer with GigaOm, one of the leading technology blog networks. Prior to 2010, I was a journalist with The Globe and Mail, where I wrote a column and a blog about technology both for the newspaper and the website.. In 2008, I became the Globe’s first online “communities editor,” a job that involved thinking about all the ways in which the paper interacts with readers — blogs, comments, wikis, Facebook, Twitter, etc. — and developing new and better ways of doing that. I’ve been working online for the Globe since the site was re-launched as a breaking news site in 2000, and been living and writing online since the early 1990s when a 9600-baud dial-up modem was the hot-rod of the Internet. I have a personal blog at mathewingram.com/work where I write about Web 2.0 ideas and the intersection of the media and the Internet. I think that the kind of interactivity and dialogue that blogs and other Web 2.0 tools provide is already having — and will continue to have — a profound effect on the media industry and many other industries, and that’s why I wanted to be part of this conference.

Mike McDerment

I’m an entrepreneur, I guess. You can find my infrequent postings at michaelmcderment.com and on FreshThinking. I’m currently running FreshBooks, a rapidly growing online invoicing, time and expense tracking application. It’s a business that grew out of work we did for ourselves at a web design agency I used to run, and now over 600,000 people use FreshBooks for their own businesses. Organizing this conference was something I couldn’t pass up. It’s been a treat to work with these guys over the years and share our enthusiasm for the issues mesh addresses. Looking forward to seeing you all in May.

Rob Hyndman

I’m a Toronto technology business lawyer – my clients are technology companies and their customers. My firm is Hyndman | Law, a boutique law practice that provides legal counsel to technology businesses on a wide variety of business law needs. I’m an unabashed life-long geek who got his start more than 30 years ago as the vice-president of a two-member computer club in high school. I’m passionate about helping grow the Toronto Web 2.0 community and evangelizing the opportunities for connection, sharing and inspiration that the Web has given us. I blog at robhyndman.com, and have been described by Canadian Lawyer magazine as “one of Canada’s most prolific blawggers”. I wish that were cooler than it sounds.

Stuart MacDonald

I’m the CEO and Founder of Tripharbour Limited, operator of Tripharbor.com and Tripharbour.ca, two new, online cruise vacation ecommerce and community sites. We are making it easier for North Americans to find the perfect cruise holiday. As for me, I’m your basic online business geek. My fate was sealed way back when I sat in my apartment marveling at the glory that was eAAsy SABRE on 2400 baud dial-up. I remember watching as flight details, obtuse airport codes and impossible-to-understand pricing come up on my screen one character at a time. I felt like I had just landed on this big secret. I thought “This is going to be big.” Several years later, I brought Expedia to Canada and started Expedia.ca in my spare room. I ended up moving to Seattle as SVP/chief marketing officer for Expedia.com, as well as running the US packages business. Now back in Toronto, I’m a blogger, passionate about what Web 2.0 means for business and society, and very proud to be part of creating mesh.