Search Summit - Australia

Chris Sherman is Executive Editor of SearchEngineLand.com and President of Searchwise LLC, a Boulder Colorado based Web consulting firm.

With over 25 years experience in interactive technologies, he is frequently quoted in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Business Week, USA Today and other publications, and has appeared on CNN, NPR, CBS and other television and radio networks.

Chris is a Web Search University faculty member, and is an honorary inductee of the Internet Librarian Hall of Fame. He is the author of “Google Power: Unleash the Full Power of Google” from McGraw-Hill. His previous books include “The Invisible Web: Uncovering Information Sources Search Engines Can’t See” (with Gary Price) from CyberAge Books; The McGraw-Hill CD ROM Handbook, and The Elements of Basic, The Elements of Cobol and The Elements of Pascal from John Wiley & Sons.

Chris has written about search and search engines since 1994. His clients have included International Data Corporation, Accenture, Motorola, Levi-Strauss, Nokia, Ortho Biotech, Porsche, United Technologies, and the Scripps Clinic. From 2001 through 2006, Chris was Executive Editor of SearchEngineWatch.com and Conference Chair of the international Search Engine Strategies events in Canada, China, France, Italy, Sweden and the U.K. From 1998 to 2001, he was the Web Search Guide for About.com.

Chris holds a master’s degree in Interactive Educational Technology from Stanford University and a bachelor’s degree in Visual Arts and Communications from the University of California, San Diego. Chris has been unsuccessful in his attempts to persuade Stanford to strip his degree so he can join the founders of Yahoo and Google in boasting about *not* graduating from the university.

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Gavin Appel is the Senior Vice President of Product Development at Hitwise Inc. He is responsible for setting the strategic direction and commercialization strategy for Hitwise’s research and development projects, including managing the product development lifecycle.

With more than 10 years experience working with leading and innovative IT companies, Gavin is an expert on search engine marketing and technologies. In his previous roles at Hitwise, Gavin was head of Hitwise Search Solutions, where he designed and managed the development of the Hitwise Search Intelligence™ suite of competitive intelligence tools. He also held the position of General Manager of Hitwise Search Marketing Services, Australia’s first Search Engine Optimization company. In this role, his successes included establishing strategic partnerships with local and global search engines for the delivery of premium search marketing services to a diverse client base.

Gavin began his online career with the Beam Group of Companies, Australia’s largest developer of software and multimedia. While at Beam, he developed a range of highly successful Search Engine Optimization strategies to support and drive sales through each business unit.

In 1998, Gavin co-founded Lifelounge, a branded content and marketing agency, which connects corporate partners with young adult consumers.

Gavin is a regular speaker at industry conferences in North America and Asia Pacific, including Search Engine Strategies.

Following college graduation, Maile worked as a system integrator for content management applications. She believes that beauty can be fostered through collaboration and accessible information and that it’s important data be organized and usable.

Her corporate CMS experience led her to become a Technical Solutions Engineer supporting the Google Search Appliance. After over a year with Google Enterprise (a team she loves!), she joined another wonderful Google family in Webmaster Central.

Maile is based at Google’s Mountain View, California campus. She grew up only fifteen minutes away, and remains able to enjoy barbecues with her family, as well as celebrate and share life with her childhood girlfriends.

Maile monitors the “Google Webmaster Help > Sitemap Protocol Group.” She truly appreciates the helpful assistance, feedback, and personality of the members and hopes to see you there!

Danny Sullivan recently mentioned Maile as one of the fantastic alternatives to Google Superstar Matt Cutts.

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Leigh Terry joined OMD Australia in October 2005 as Executive Director of Digital and manages the dedicated digital and direct team of over 25 people.

Before joining OMD Australia he was most recently Head of OMD Digital, Direct and Data in London. Leigh is one of London’s foremost talents in the world of digital and as head of the UK Digital offering he headed up one of the largest Digital operations in London with over 30 digital specialists in the OMD UK group.

After roles in account management and traditional media planning, Leigh became the joint Head of Media at BMP Interaction in London on secondment from OMD in 2000, growing the media team from 5 to 17 people within a year. He was responsible for Sony’s first pan-European digital strategy which won Interactive Campaign of the Year at the Media Week Awards in 2000. He returned to OMD UK in 2001 to launch OMD Digital building the team from scratch. It was short listed for Agency of the Year at Revolution Awards 2003 and won multiple industry awards for its activity on Vodafone, Sony (AIWA) and Rimmel.

He was a member of OMD UK’s revised Operations Board with a management team of 8 running OMD UK and over 150 staff in total.

In 2004, Leigh created OMD’s Direct and Data offering while retaining overall responsibility for Digital. Internally referred to as 3D, this became an integral part of the future of media – data driven, accountable and joined up across multiple channels.

Leigh moved to Australia to perform a similar role: setting up 3D out of OMD Sydney.

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Dan taught himself to program back in 1981, when 16K was a mind-bogglingly large amount of RAM and high capacity storage was a cassette player “borrowed” from his sister.

Since then he’s acquired a degree in Computer Science and a PhD in Machine Learning from the University of Leeds in the UK and has spent the last 15 years building software systems.

He was at Apple for four years working on QuickTime, HyperCard and the first Java virtual machine for Mac OS X. He later lead the engineering team at startup Verb which developed an intelligent search engine for B2B transactions - back when “B2B” was a trendy buzzword.

He then spent three years at Guru.com - later Unicru - as Chief Scientist and Chief Architect creating an award winning resume search engine.

In 2006 Dan joined Google’s New York office where he is Product Manager for crawl systems. He spends his time figuring out how to extend the range and quality of the content Google crawls, as well as championing the use of robots.txt.

Dan holds five patents for his work in user interface and intelligent search engines.

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Peeyush manages multiple search related projects at Google, including Webmaster Central.

Prior to Google, Peeyush directed the engineering team at Consera Software, a Seattle area startup in the field of grid computing.

Consera Software was later acquired by HP and the technology was integrated into HP’s datacenter management products. Before that, Peeyush was the Product Unit Manager for the wireless platform group at Infospace where he oversaw its growth to 88% of the US market.

He has also worked in Microsoft’s Windows Operating System Division and contributed to the successful release of Windows 2000 and Windows 98 SE. Peeyush holds a B.S. in Computer Science from Indian Institute of Technology, M.S. in Computer Science from Purdue University, and an MBA in Technology Management from University of Washington.

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Scott’s current role is Web Technology Strategist at News Digital Media in Sydney.

His main focus is exploring new techniques for search engine optimisation and emerging technologies. He has converted the current News network to standards compliant, accessible and search engine friendly websites.

Scott implements, evangelises and educates on both the development and business benefits of web standards and Search Engine Optimisation to management, marketing, editorial, developers, designers and anyone else that plays a role in creating the network websites.

Scott’s online home is www.standardzilla.com where he blogs about SEO, standards and the Australian web development industry.

Carl is responsible for overseeing operations and managing the team of SEO engineers and Marketers at SEO Australia.

He is a Search Engine Marketing specialist with a strong focus on Web Analytics and site conversion; also responsible for handling major accounts across the region.

Carl is an entrepreneur with extensive experience in interactive and online media, he is passionate about the Internet and the freedom of information it has brought the global community.

Prior to joining SEO, Carl worked at RedSheriff specialising in Web Analytics as Technical Account Director South Asia, responsible for maintaining and growing revenue for the region and managing key accounts.

Before that he was CTO and co-founder of GIV Direct the local reseller of Akamai edge delivery services and specialist in online delivery of video and audio.

He has also managed his own Web development business and prior to the WWW going public Carl worked in Multi-media and the Music business.

Russ Weakley has worked in the design field for over 20 years.

During the last nine years Russ has focused on web design through his own business, Max Design.

He is also the web designer for the Australian Museum [1], Russ co-chairs the Web Standards Group [2] which was set up to assist web developers learn about new technologies and accessibility issues.

Russ has produced a series of widely acclaimed CSS-based tutorials [3] including Listamatic, Listamatic2, Listutorial, Floatutorial, Selectutorial.

Russ is also internationally recognized for his presentations and workshops on web development, standards and accessibility.

  
At the end of 1999 Paul McCarney co-founded premier search marketing agency, Decide Interactive.

At Decide, Paul oversaw search marketing strategies for some of the world’s largest companies, growing the business internationally, with offices in Sydney, London and San Francisco. In August 2004, Decide Interactive was sold to the NASDAQ listed, 24/7 Real Media.

Paul has spoken at conferences around the world on ROI optimisation for various methods of Search Engine Marketing, and has published numerous articles on IT and Internet marketing.

Prior to founding Decide, Paul consulted on Internet and Marketing strategies to technology companies like Real Networks, Ericsson, Eicon, EDS Canada and Computer Associates.

Paul has a B.Comm (Marketing) from UWS.