Jewish High Tech Community

Each of our speakers will open with a list of important events, tools or understandings on, about or for The Web that they think will likely happen in 2007 and then discuss them with each other and the members attending.

About the Speakers

Jason Hoffman is CTO of Joyent and was a co-founder, with Dean Allen, of TextDrive. Joyent Inc is a platform software and utility computing company that has a number of online applications and provides infrastructure to a wide range of other projects and companies. Jason has a BS and MS from UCLA, a PhD from UCSD and has backgrounds in cancer biology, bioinformatics, grid computing and collaborative applications.

Anil Dash is Vice President of Six Apart, Ltd. Dash is a recognized expert on blogging and web technology, having founded one of the earliest and most popular weblogs on the Internet, and been named as one of MSNBC's Best of Blogs. A frequent speaker, Dash has given presentations about the future of the social communication online, the relationship between blogs and traditional media, and business blogging, including a well-received keynote at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention. His work has been featured in the New York Times, Wired, MSNBC, CNN, ABC News, on television, radio and print around the world, and in the New Museum of Contemporary Art. Prior to joining Six Apart as its first employee, Dash worked in online communications and technology development for the publishing and music industries. Dash is a New Yorker who lives in San Francisco with his favorite dog, cat, and human.

Evelyn Rodriguez happened to be vacationing in the island of Phi Phi, Thailand when a wall of water rose up from the Andaman Sea and engulfed her. It was much later before she learned it was a tsunami. Thus she was thrust into being an accidental "citizen journalist" through her blog in the days that followed December 26, 2004. Before that wake up call, she'd been advising clients on their word-of-mouth, participatory (and customer-centric) marketing strategies encompassing the conception, design and market delivery phases via social media (think Web 2.0, social media, blogs, wikis, RSS) and had previously focused on companies and industries that are affected by the digitization of everything -- and thus fall somewhere in the blurring computing, media and communications landscape. Evelyn is currently writing a book akin to Thoreau's Walden Pond set within my own Silicon Valley neighborhood (yep, this area is often called an officepark wasteland but if you are present to everything I can smell and taste the orchards too) that delves into a slice of life from forty days of her life this spring, woven together with a fictional journal from Vittoria Colonna, a Renaissance poet, noblewoman, salon hostess (intended for church reform) and confidant of Michelangelo.

Chad Dickerson is a Senior Director at Yahoo! where he runs the Yahoo! Developer Network. He was CTO at InfoWorld from 2001-2005. Before that, I was CTO at Salon.com from 1998-2001, worked at CNN.com and CNNSI.com prior to that (1996-1998), and spent some time at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (1995-1996) and News & Observer (Raleigh, NC) (1993-1995). Chad graduated from Duke University.

Where and When

Our meetings are held at the fabulous facilities of Fenwick and West in Mountain View. We start gathering at 6:30 and begin the presentation at 7:00, running until between 8:30 and 9:00 depending on the speakers, the audience and everyone's interest.

We hope to see you there, bring your friends and/or loved ones, and please RSVP if possible. JHTC meetings are open to people of all faiths.