May 20th, 2008 by Mathew | 1 Comment

For anyone who was looking forward to the mesh keynote by Pirate’s Dilemma author Matt Mason (and that includes all of us on the mesh organizing team) we got some bad news over the weekend. Unfortunately, Matt has run into some visa problems in the United States, and he won’t be able to make it to mesh. While we are disappointed that we couldn’t work things out in time — as is Matt — we do have a top-notch replacement for him as the society keynote: Dr. Michael Geist, the University of Ottawa law professor and copyright expert.

Dr. Geist was originally scheduled to do a presentation Wednesday afternoon about how Facebook and other social media tools are being used for grassroots lobbying and advocacy purposes, building on his experience in setting up a Facebook group opposed to Ottawa’s anticipated copyright legislation. In Matt Mason’s absence, we have asked Dr. Geist to adapt his presentation as the keynote for the society stream, which will take place at 10:40 a.m. on Wednesday. Taking the place of his original presentation Wednesday afternoon will be a panel discussion on “Managing the Mozilla Way” with Mic Berman, John Resig and Mike Shaver, moderated by Michael McDerment.

For more information, please see the mesh schedule at www.meshconference.com/schedule2008.

Tags: Geist, keynote, Mason, mesh2008

Posted in mesh news, mesh08 news | 1 Comment

April 14th, 2008 by Mathew | No Comments

A quick update to let everyone know that Garrett Camp, one of the founders of StumbleUpon, is coming to mesh 2008 as our keynote speaker for the business stream (you can see the other keynotes here, as well as some of the other great speakers and panelists we have lined up). We’re pretty excited to be able to bring one of Canada’s leading Web entrepreneurs to Toronto for one of mesh’s “keynote conversations.”

Garrett co-founded StumbleUpon in 2001 with several university friends while he was finishing his degree in software engineering at the University of Calgary. He and a couple of the other members of the StumbleUpon team later moved to San Francisco after getting venture financing, and last year the company was acquired by eBay for $75-million. Garrett is still responsible for StumbleUpon’s product design and strategy, and the service has more than 3.5M members.

mesh on!

Tags: keynote, mesh, mesh08

Posted in mesh news, mesh08 news | No Comments