The Web 2.0 Expo is coming!  If you are in the San Francisco area the week of April 21st, 2008, make sure you ping me and come check out the Web 2.0 Expo.  The Web 2.0 expo is a combined conference and tradeshow.  Last year’s event drew over 8,500 people.  This years event promises to be even bigger.

There are nine different tracks you can choose from in the conference including:

• Strategy and Business Models
  Marketing and Community
  Design and User Experience
  Fundamentals
  Development
  Focus on Mobile Web
  Focus on Web Operations
  Focus on Social Platforms
  Sponsored Sessions

What really sets this expo apart besides all the different tracks, is the level of interaction you can have with everyone at the event.  It also has vendors and companies from all different platforms, which makes this conference so appealing.

You can check out all the speakers, join the facebook group, join the crowdvine, and download the Web 2.0 Expo San Francisco Brochure.

Conference Speakers I Will Not Miss!

Marc Andreessen – A Conversation

Multi-millionaire software engineer and Silicon Valley “whiz kid” entrepreneur best known as co-author of Mosaic, the first widely-used web browser, and co-founder of Netscape Communications Corporation. He was the chair of Opsware, a software company he founded originally as Loudcloud, when it was acquired by Hewlett-Packard. He is also a cofounder of Ning, a company which provides a platform for social-networking websites.

Max Levchin – A Conversation

Max is the visionary behind Slide, the largest social software company in the world. He is also renowned as the co-founder of PayPal, an expert in combating online fraud and one of the hardest working entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley. Before starting Slide, he incubated several other start-ups, including Yelp, where he currently sits as Chairman of the Board. Max started PayPal in 1998, immediately after graduating from college, and sold it four years later to eBay for more than $1.5 billion at the age of 26. Originally from Kiev, Ukraine (then part of the Soviet Union), Max moved to Chicago at the age of 16 and later received his Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Max sits on the board of several other companies and trains for triathlons when he’s not obsessing over Slide’s business.

Rob Bagby – Building a Microsoft RIA from the ground up

A Developer Evangelist for Microsoft. Rob works with customers, as well as delivers presentations at numerous regional and national conferences, to illustrate how to take advantage of Microsoft’s developer technologies to deliver performance and secure applications faster. Rob bases his discussions on over 10 years of consulting experience, along with a Masters Degree in International Business from Thunderbird.

Mitchell Baker – Opening the mobile Web

Chairman of the Mozilla Foundation and Chairman and former Chief Executive Officer of the Mozilla Corporation, a subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation that coordinates development of the open source Mozilla Internet applications, including the Mozilla Firefox web browser and the Mozilla Thunderbird email client. Trained as a lawyer, Baker coordinates business and policy issues and sits on both the Mozilla Foundation Board of Directors and the Mozilla Corporation Board of Directors. In 2005, Time magazine included her in its annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world and she has been affectionately given the title of “Chief Lizard Wrangler” at the Mozilla Corporation.

Dan Lyons aka Fake Steve Jobs

Dan Lyons is a senior editor at Forbes and the author of the The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs. In the persona of Fake Steve he authored “Options: The Secret Life of Steve Jobs,” a novel. He has published two previous works of fiction, a novel and a collection of short stories. Dan joined Forbes in 1998 and before that wrote for various computer trade publications including CRN and VARBUSINESS. He’s been a journalist for 25 years and has a master’s degree in fine arts from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

Tim O’Reilly – O`Reilly Radar

Tim O’Reilly is the founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media, Inc., thought by many to be the best computer book publisher in the world. O’Reilly Media also publishes online through the O’Reilly Network and hosts conferences on technology topics, including the O’Reilly Open Source Convention, the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, and the Web 2.0 Conference. Tim’s blog, the O’Reilly Radar “watches the alpha geeks” to determine emerging technology trends, and serves as a platform for advocacy about issues of importance to the technical community. Tim is on the boards of MySQL, CollabNet, Safari Books Online, Wesabe, and ValuesOfN, and is a partner in O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures.

John Allspaw

John has worked in systems operations for over ten years in biotech, government and online media. He started out tuning parallel clusters running vehicle crash simulations for the U.S. government, and then moved on to the Internet in 1997. He built the backing infrastructures at Salon.com, InfoWorld.com, Friendster.com and Flickr.com, where he currently manages the Operations Engineering group.

Ari Balogh – Yahoo! and Open Platforms

Aristotle “Ari” Balogh is currently Chief Technology Officer at Yahoo!. He is responsible for company-wide product development which includes optimizing resources, speeding innovation, and ensuring the quality of Yahoo!’s products and services. He is focused on establishing a common architecture and building blocks to drive development aligned with corporate strategy and on improving the overall effectiveness of Yahoo!’s engineering efforts. All of Yahoo!’s engineering functions, including technical operations, infrastructure, and internal IT support groups, report into Balogh.

Blaine Cook – Building the Real-time Web

Blaine Cook is the Architect at Twitter. He is currently building and maintaining Twitter’s Jabber-based real-time backend infrastructure that tracks and distributes millions of updates every day to users on the Web, instant messaging, and SMS.