The Emerging Technologies Conference in Philly has some good speakers

Brian Barr is the co-founder and managing partner of AgileTrailblazers – a company founded to enable organizations to rapidly realize continuous business value delivery through use of lean and agile principles. Brian has over 25 years of experience driving other leaders and global teams in the creation of large-scale software solutions with a passion for quality, timeliness, and agile methodologies. He has influenced and led company-wide agile transformations in traditionally change-resistant organizations such as medical and financial services industries. Brian has a BSE in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania.

Doug leads the development, design and IT teams at Movitas where he gets to work with a great group of engineers and designers who are working on new location based solutions for the destination and hospitality spaces. In this position, Doug has had experience with architecting, designing and developing scalable, integrated, cross platform systems and applications in both the web and mobile spaces for his clients and their guests. Doug has an undergraduate degree from RIT and a Masters in Technology Management from Drexel. Doug has also been active in the startup community serving as a past management and board member for Philly Startup Leaders.

Arlo does a little bit of everything, but what he really does is inspire courage. He has gone back and forth several times between management and in-the-trenches development on technically sophisticated products. He challenges every assumption he can find, and helps people learn to change always and continuously. He has been involved in Agile since 1999. Yet in the middle of that period he worked for 2 years in a rigorous, effective, and pro-people Waterfall development shop. He’s a strong believer in discipline and the agility that comes from it, in punctuated continuity, and in change as the only constant. Don’t do anything he says, but learn why he says it and come up with something better. The best compliment he’s recently received was when a co-worker termed him the Company Jester because Arlo always has permission to laugh at the King.

Anna Bloom recently completed a fellowship program with Code for America, a nonprofit dedicated to designing technologies that help make city governments more open, participatory and efficient. During the fellowship, Anna worked with the city of Philadelphia to build Change by Us, an online marketplace for community projects. Anna graduated from UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism and has previously worked for YouTube, The New York Times, MSNBC.com and Hot Studio, an experience design company in San Francisco.

Core member of the Grails development team, Jeff Brown, is a Senior Software Engineer with SpringSource. Jeff has been involved in designing and building object oriented systems for over 15 years. Jeff’s areas of expertise include web development with Groovy & Grails, Java and agile development

Sean Brown is the Sr. Director of Advanced Applications Engineering at Comcast Interactive Media (CIM), a division of Comcast Corporation. He leads the engineering team developing the XFINITY TV app for iOS and Android. Prior to leading mobile application development for CIM he led the development of XfinityTV.com.