Planning hasn’t has just begun for WordCampLA 2010, if you are interested in presenting please use our contact form, or leave a response below.
Otherwise stand by as we populate our list. See the list of our first speakers below!
- Shira Lazar
Blair Williams- Josh Highland
- Michael Dorausch
- Esther Tseng
- Marty Thornley
Shira Lazar is an EMMY nominated TV and Web Personality. She covers the latest in socials trends and pop culture on her blog ON THE SCENE on CBSNews.com and is a correspondent on THE TOMORROW SHOW WITH MO ROCCA. She is also the host of THIS WEEK IN YOUTUBE, a contributor on The Huffington Post and the host for Live Earth Video bringing people information and news about the global water crisis. Read more »
Previously, Shira hosted Yahoo!’s daily What’s So Funny, NBC’s 1ST LOOK and OPEN HOUSE, DirecTV’s HAVOC ON THE 101, was a correspondent on CourtTV’s HOLLYWOOD HEAT, Reelz Channel’s daily movies news show, DAILIES and a journalist on Travel Channel’s CONFESSIONS OF A TRAVEL WRITER. Online, she has developed and hosted video content for Condenast’s travel blog Jaunted, Movies.com, Hollywood.com, Mania! TV, Verizon VCAST and more. She was the red carpet host for the 2009 Webby Awards and the first ever Streamy Awards, official video blogger of Internet Week NY and was named a “Social Media Maven” when she won Ashton Kutcher’s 24 HOURS AT SUNDANCE. Shira has also appeared on Fox News Channel, CBS, and CNN.
An authority in the new media space, Shira also appears, MC’s and speaks at events around the world including: Mashable’s Social Good Conference, Twiistup, WITI’s 20th Anniversary Hall of Fame Awards, Banff’s NEXT Media Conference, 140 Conference, Digital Family Reunion, Extreme Entrepreneurship Tour, Big Omaha Conference, SXSW, Girls In Tech Catalyst Conference and Media Leaders among many others.
As a crossover personality and hybrid journalist, Shira Lazar continues to bridge the gap between traditional and new media and be a voice for the digital age.
Blair Williams has been working as a Software Engineer, Internet Marketer and New Media Consultant for over a decade. He specializes in leveraging and writing Software to automate Internet Marketing to drive explosive growth and sales in Businesses of all sizes. He’s an expert in WordPress, Ruby on Rails, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Pay Per Click (PPC) Marketing, Website Strategy and New Media. Read more »
Blair is the author of the Pretty Link and Mingle plugins for WordPress. Pretty Link has been downloaded over 100,000 times and is one of the most popular plugins for WordPress. Blair has also released the Pretty Link Pro plugin for WordPress — providing a ton of useful features and premium support on top of Pretty Link.
Josh Highland is an internet aficionado entrepreneur, developer, community builder, and lover of all things tech. With a strong background in Computer Science, he believes in the power of WordPress and the community surrounding it. For several years he has been helping his clients make the switch to WordPress. Along with his social media obsession, Josh creates iPhone applications and teaches iPhone development courses. Read more »
Michael Dorausch is a WordPress enthusiast. His first WordPress install was in 2006 and he’s personally performed more than 500 installs to date. A serial domainer, Michael finds WordPress the perfect platform for bringing a domain to life.
Esther, referred to as e*star, works with money by day and cats by night. And food. And cocktails. And music. And nightlife. And fashion. Let’s say Los Angeles events, food and fun, shall we? Get a live feed of all this craziness through her Twitter. Hailing from suburban Milwaukee, Wisconsin, she is a Midwestern girl at heart having sought the bright city lights of Los Angeles for about the past twelve years. Five of those, she qualifies with the fact that she didn’t have a car and was busy finding herself inside the college bubble that is Westwood, California. Read more »
E*star’s addictions include snowboarding, Anusara yoga, driving her convertible Mini Cooper S above 2000 RPM’s, ramen and twitter. She personifies her most prized possessions by naming them. Her home mountain is Mammoth to which she has a season pass. e*star is part of the Mosaic community. She loves professional football, particularly the Green Bay Packers.
Marty is a freelance designer and developer who works 100% in WordPress. In addition to designing and building custom blogs, supporting and customizing existing ones, Marty has been the lead developer for design and branding company Identity Kitchen for the last year, with a focus on custom websites and pushing the limits of WordPress as CMS. Read more »
Most recently Marty has co-founded and is preparing to launch PhotographyBlogSites.com to enable customizable yet affordable WordPress based portfolio sites for photographers, developed in MU and ready for the new 3.0 abilities.
In addition to the custom themes, Marty has developed several plugins including SEO Image Galleries, and the PhotoBlog Image Fixer – both developed as part of PhotographyBlogSites.com. He has also built his own custom CMS from the ground up, just to see what would happen.
Allison Day is a software engineer and web developer. Since graduating from UC Irvine, where she first discovered her passion for programming, she has done a significant amount of freelance web development, and has also been the lead web developer with Blue Sun Studio, Inc./Sirius Graphix since its inception. All the websites she has done for clients are based on WordPress, and she also writes a weekly tutorial about coding for beginners on the Sirius Graphix blog. Read more »
She has been blogging professionally for four years, starting with Sushi Day, her blog all about sushi, and later expanding to several other blogs, including a general food blog called Fridgg and a blog about dance that draws upon her lifetime of dance and performing experience. All of her blogs are based on WordPress, and she has developed many different WordPress themes from scratch. In addition to developing websites, she has developed several web and software applications utilizing PHP, Java, and SQL in the back-end, and HTML, CSS, PHP, and JavaScript on the user-side of the applications.
Thom graduated with a BFA in Graphic Design from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. He then became an Art Director at the design firm Looking in El Segundo working on projects for Warner Bros., SONY, and Los Angeles Public Library. Currently he is a contract designer for the Los Angeles Times Magazine, working on their print and online magazine as well as collaborating on projects with other Los Angeles based designers on projects for Edmunds.com and RE/MAX.com. Read more »
He is also a partner of an internet marketing firm and oversees all of design and technology; he coordinates with Videographers, Photographers, Graphic Designers, and Web Programmers.
He is on the AIGA Los Angeles Interactive Committee.
Born and raised in Alabama, TJ is a technology enthusiast, BBQ lover and self-proclaimed geek, now residing in sunny Southern California. In his current role at Los Angeles based hosting company (mt) Media Temple, TJ manages a dedicated team of senior support gurus. In addition to this team, he contributes to the company’s social media efforts and public communications through the (mt) status blog. Read more »
Prior to joining (mt) Media Temple, TJ received his B.A. in Communication from Flagler College. Soon after, he became the online content manager for the St. Augustine Record Newspaper. During his time in online publishing, TJ specialized in building WordPress-based websites and has continued working with WordPress for over 5 years.
Luke is a software architect and entrepreneur with just over a decade in the San Diego tech start up scene. He’s been a part of two acquisitions in the last five years and in two different companies on the SDBJ’s fastest growing list. He’s currently the CEO of the angel backed development firm Mobiah, and regularly fields questions from investors, clients, and developers about how GPL applies to what their building. Read more »
Luke’s expertise surround multi-platform mobile development, creative media design & testing and other marketing strategies of digital enterprises.
I am User Experience / Usability Guru who has a love for all things open source, WordPress and Amazon AWS platform.
Austin Passy is a freelance web designer and WordPress developer. He’s built a few WP centric sites like “WPCult” which he sold this year. He’s also been known to build a few WordPress plugins. He was the Organizer of last years WordCamp in LA and is planning this one. Read more »
Austin is currently working on a super secret WordPress project with a few other awesome WP rockstars and may be making an announcement at WordCampLA..
Alana Joy is a new media marketing strategist with a passion for subculture brands and all things tech. She also provides web/graphic design services with a flair for WordPress customizations. She was the mastermind behind Facebook Protest, which gained national media attention raising awareness about the importance of privacy and transparency online. Read more »
When she’s not writing lyrics she’s blogging on any one of her numerous websites and does the occasional tech post for LA Weekly. She won an LA Web Award for being “LA’s Best Most Shameless Self-Promoter”: and she finds that just as amusing as you do.
Matthew Lawson is a new media designer / developer with a passion for WordPress and web video. While attending the Rochester Institute of Technology, Matthew formulated his own AAS degree in New Media Design, Internet Marketing, and Mass Media Communications. Currently designing / developing WordPress websites and web promotions for several businesses in the entertainment industry. Read more »
Matthew also shoots and produces web segments for celebrity red carpet events and comedy sketches.
Brandon is an “official” WordPress fanboy who enjoys bending the platform with his Jedi mind tricks. He’s a plugin and theme developer for Pixel Jar, a WordPress focused development firm based in Orange County. Brandon has attended WordCamps throughout the United States and organized Orange County’s first WordCamp earlier this year. Read more »
Brandon has recently stumbled on the key to making the core plugin concept work. Come check out his talk on “The Pluggable Plugin”.
Kristin Falkner is a freelance designer and developer who specializes in WordPress. With experience designing and building completely custom WordPress themes from the ground up, she is well-versed in the vast possibilities that exist when using WordPress as a CMS from both a design and development standpoint. Read more »
Working with many entertainment-related clients, she has had the privilege of being involved on projects for artists on record labels such as Sony, RCA, Jive and Vanguard Records. Her work has also been featured in the WordPress Showcase.
Bill is a web developer and a designer. His specialty is in front-end web development – HTML, CSS, JavaScript; and also works with PHP and Rails. By day, he works for a large ecommerce provider serving enterprise software companies developing on Java and .Net frameworks. By night he codes with a combination of web standards, PHP or Rails. Much of his freelance work is done using WordPress as a content management solution.
Founder and creator of news blog MostMost. The site is managed with a WordPress custom theme that I built himself after first spending a good year learning HTML & CSS. My presentation will be very focused on the early stages of building out your fist site. You’ve decided (Google told you) WordPress is for you, and you determined (your friend has been raving about the WordPress site she put together for months) the you’d like to build a custom theme, so you are now left with the question of “What Next?” Read more »
MostMost is poised for growth (one day, possibly even explosive growth!) but today in addition to allowing me to be a bit of a “know it all” the site is also a great digital sandbox allowed me to be very conversant in my day job, working as a freelance consultant focused on digital strategy and social media marketing. Prior, I worked as a television producer focused on primetime scripted programming.