Joshua Auerbach heads Time Warner's Strategic Planning group. Josh and
his team support senior management in developing Time Warner's corporate
strategy, including identifying and acting on domestic and international
growth opportunities for the company. Josh reports to Olaf Olafsson,
Executive Vice President.

Previously, he was the Vice President of Alliances and Technology
Strategy at Time Warner. In that role, he worked with technology
executives from across Time Warner to help the company anticipate and
profit from changes in the digital media landscape. He was additionally
the primary point of contact for Time Warner's corporate relationships
with its alliance partners, working with them to drive development of
new technologies and business models for the media and entertainment
industry.

Before moving to a corporate role at Time Warner, Josh was Vice
President, Advanced Services at America Online, where he managed a range
of new product- and business-development activities, including helping
formulate AOL's strategy for developing compelling services in a
broadband era.

Josh joined America Online from GreenPoint Financial Corp., where he was
Senior Vice President, Corporate Development. Reporting to the CEO, he
led GreenPoint's corporate-strategy and mergers-and-acquisitions
functions. He previously led GreenPoint's Planning and MIS department,
where he supervised budgeting and financial forecasting for the company
and managed its credit-risk modeling and reporting team. Prior to
joining GreenPoint, Josh was an Associate at Oliver, Wyman & Company, a
strategy-consulting firm serving the financial services industry.

Josh received a bachelor's degree in Economics from Harvard College.

Jim Baller is a Senior Principal of the Baller Herbst Law Group, a national law firm based in Washington, DC, and Minneapolis, MN. The Firm specializes in representing local governments and public power utilities in matters involving telecommunications, cable television, high-speed data communications, Internet access, wireless communications, right-of-way management, pole and conduit attachments, barriers to the public-sector entry into communications, bankruptcy, and antitrust. His clients include the American Public Power Association (APPA), the National Association of Telecommunications Officers and Advisors (NATOA), regional and state utility associations and municipal leagues, numerous other public and private entities in more than 35 states. He is also a founder and spokesman of the Community Broadband Coalition, a broad consortium of associations, consumer groups, and high technology companies that support community broadband initiatives.

In 2001, NATOA named Mr. Baller its Member of the Year. In 2006, MuniWireless honored him with its first "Esme Award." The Fiber to the Home Council and Public Technologies Institute have both recognized him as "the nation's most experienced and knowledgeable attorney on public broadband matters." Muniwireless has called him "the foremost legal expert on U.S. public broadband matters."

As a litigator, Mr. Baller has had first-chair responsibility in numerous cases involving complex factual, legal and policy issues, multiple parties, and large amounts in controversy. These include successful challenges to Virginia's and Missouri's barriers to municipal entry into telecommunications (subsequently reversed by the U.S. Supreme Court) and important victories in a case involving the meaning of "level playing field" in the context of cable franchising and in a case in which a federal jury determined that a major cable operator's anticompetitive practices violated the state's unfair and deceptive trade practice laws.

Working regularly with multi-disciplinary teams of legal, financial, accounting, engineering and other technical experts, Mr. Baller also assists government entities in making comprehensive telecommunications plans, developing state-of-the-art telecommunications systems, searching for strategic partners, and integrating right-of-way and zoning ordinances, franchises, licenses, pole-attachment agreements, contracts, forms, permits and other related documents.

Mr. Baller is a frequent speaker and author on communications matters. Several extensive interviews are available online, including:

• WiFi News Network (7-7-06)
• Etopia News Network (12-14-05)
• Etopia News Network (8-31-05)
• Etopia News Network (8-19-05)
• Etopia News Network (1-6-05)
• Broadband Reports (7-28-04)
• Broadband Reports (5-21-03)
• CNet News (4-15-04)

Mr. Baller is a graduate of Dartmouth College ('69) and Cornell Law School ('72). He is a member of the Bars of the Supreme Court of the United States; the United States Circuit Courts of Appeal for the Federal, District of Columbia, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Eighth Circuits; and the courts of the District of Columbia. He holds Martindale-Hubbell's highest AV rating; is a member of the Board of Directors of FirstMile; and is recognized in Who's Who in America.

I joined EarthLink in 1995 and served as vice president of engineering for three years, then as CTO. Now, as the company's Distinguished Research Engineer, I pursue various research initiatives and provide strategic advisory to executive management. Prior to joining EarthLink, I founded Beckemeyer Development (BDT.COM) in 1985. BDT.COM provided general Internet consulting and design engineering services, including Intranet design and implementation, security consulting, firewalls, intruder detection and response, and Internet integration. BDT.COM had a world-wide customer base consisting of corporations, unversities, and government agencies. Out of demand from customers, in 1994, I added regional Internet access to the company's services. I met Sky Dayton in 1994 and helped him determine the technology requirements for his ISP venture. In July 1994, BDT.COM delivered, installed and configured the router, Sun servers, and 10 modems which started EarthLink Network. The company provisioned their first account that day. In 1995 EarthLink acquired Beckemeyer Development and hired me as vice president of engineering. Prior to founding BDT.COM, I was a senior software engineer at Integrated Automation, Inc. and before that, I was a software engineer at Nicolet Zeta Corporation (formerly Zeta). David has a SIP Wiki and a blog.

Daniel Berninger is a Washington, DC based technolgy analyst working for Tier1 Research. Expert in technical and regulatory aspects of the hostile takeover of telecommunications by communication applications of the Internet. Active in VoIP since 1995. Daniel worked on the original assessment of VoIP at Bell Laboratories and led early gateway deployments at Verizon , HP , and NASA after joining VocalTec Communications . He won the 1999 VON Pioneer Award as co-founder of the VON Coalition and worked on the founding of ITXC , Vonage , and Free World Dialup . Daniel gets quoted frequently on regulatory, antitrust, and VoIP matters - Business Week, WSJ, LA Times, Chicago Tribune, Bloomberg, Forbes, Associated Press, Dow Jones, Info World and trade press.

Scott Bradner has been involved in the design, operation and use of data networks at Harvard University since the early days of the ARPANET. He was involved in the design of the original Harvard data networks, the Longwood Medical Area network (LMAnet) and New England Academic and Research Network (NEARnet). He was founding chair of the technical committees of LMAnet, NEARnet and the COrporation for Research and Enterprise Network (CoREN).

Mr. Bradner served in a number of roles in the IETF.  He was the co-director of the Operational Requirements Area (1993-1997), IPng Area (1993-1996), Transport Area (1997-2003) and Sub-IP Area (2001-2003). He was a member of the IESG (1993-2003) and was an elected trustee of the Internet Society (1993-1999), where he currently serves as the Secretary to the Board of Trustees.  Scott is also a trustee of the American Registry of Internet Numbers (ARIN).

Mr. Bradner is the University Technology Security Officer in the Harvard University Office of the Provost.  He tries to help the University community deal with technology-related privacy and security issues. He also provides technical advice and guidance on issues relating to the Harvard data networks and new technologies to Harvard's CIO. He founded the Harvard Network Device Test Lab, is a frequent speaker at technical conferences, a weekly columnist for Network World, and does a bit of independent consulting on the side.

Eric Case does Developer Relations for Google's Open Source team, and Project Management for the Blogger team.

He joined Google in early 2003 (just after Blogger was acquired), and spent three years working on Blogger in a variety of roles. In 5/2006 he switched to the Open Source team to help manage and evangelize Developer Communities for Google's web APIs, open source and Code site (code.google.com). Another of his projects is helping oversee Google's corporate blogging efforts, currently composed of 33(!) blogs.

Side projects: the Biodiesel Blog - biodieselblog.com, and Ubuntu-p1510d blog - ubuntu-p1510d.blogspot.com

Eric graduated in 2001 from Miami University in Oxford, OH, USA with a degree Classics. During school he spent a year abroad at Miami's European campus, and after graduating spent a year backpacking (and meditating) around the world. He settled down in the San Francisco Bay Area and started work soon after. Though History was his chosen course of study, he's always been a passionate user and advocate of computing and Internet technology. He blogs somewhat regularly at http://vedana.net/

Robin Chase is founder and CEO of Meadow Networks, a consulting company that provides transportation solutions for the new world by applying innovative wireless technologies to solve problems of congestion, infrastructure financing, and car dependency.

She is also founder and former CEO of Zipcar, which she led to become the largest and fastest-growing car-sharing company in North America. Zipcar's use of the Internet and wireless technology enables rental cars to emulate personal cars. The company's disruptive technology facilitates secure vehicle entry and authorized payment processing of hundreds of thousands of driving transactions in real-time, giving its members on-demand access to cars by-the-hour. Robin is also known for the evangelical virtual community she created among the members.

Robin lectures widely and has been frequently featured in the major media including the Today Show, The New York Times, National Public Radio, Fast Company, Wired, and Time magazines, as well as several books on entrepreneurship. She has received many awards, including the Massachusetts Governor's Award for Entrepreneurial Spirit, InfoWorld's Top 100 Innovators of 2001, and cited as a Trendsetter by Fast Company in its 2002 Champions of Innovation awards.

Robin graduated from Wellesley College and MIT's Sloan School of Management, and was a Loeb Fellow at Harvard University.

kc claffy is principal investigator for the distributed Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA), and resident research scientist based at the University of California's San Diego Supercomputer Center. kc's research interests include Internet workload/performance data collection, analysis and visualization, particularly with respect to commercial ISP collaboration/cooperation and sharing of analysis resources. kc received her PhD in Computer Science from UCSD in 1994.

Mr. Coburn is a managing director and global technology strategist in the technology group of UBS Investment Research. Mr. Coburn is responsible for integrating the research efforts of 120 technology and telecom analysts worldwide. In 2001, UBS's global tech team ranked number two in the technology category in the Institutional Investor European Survey. Featured in both Fast Company and Barrons, Mr. Coburn was also a regular contributor to The Red Herring for three years. Prior to joining UBS, Mr. Coburn served as a portfolio manager and technology analyst at Lynch & Mayer Inc., based in New York. Mr. Coburn holds an M.B.A. from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.

Anders Comstedt is Senior Advisor and consultant in telecom issues, in particular related to deregulation, alternative shared infrastructure and business development. Trying to get away from the Nordic winters he is increasingly active in East Africa. The Nordic summers he try to spend on his yacht among the Stockholm islands, checking rural wireless.

He has the last years been a board member of a few smaller ventures, including both "VoIP" and Cabling companies. He has managed cross border sub-marine cable roll-out in Europe, to projects changing policy in developing countries. But he is more known for his early engagement as advisor to new fibre infrastructure initiatives out of being the first CEO of AB Stokab 1994 - 2002, a telecom network infrastructure provider in Stockholm, Sweden, pioneering leasing dark fibres in a large scale to all operators and end users in an area.

Affiliated to TS-Lab at KTH, The Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, he talks on telecom policy issues and engages in some of the lab's capacity building projects in developing countries, including the creation of IX:es and lately the regional research and education network, Ubuntunet Alliance, in Southern and Eastern Africa, that will grow to connect African universities in a similar way to Geant in EU and Internet 2 in the US. He is co-author on some reports on transforming laggard markets to Open Access, including one on Sub Saharan Africa, but is more interested in changing processes on the ground than writing reports.

As a former chairman of the company handling domain names in the .se domain, he has been involved in the Swedish Internet development. Prior to that he has had several executive positions in the telecoms industry. This includes subsidiaries of both Telia, and the Ericsson group. He has also been an advisor in business development and developer of industrial controls. Born 1950, he has an MSEE from Lund Institute of Technology, Sweden.

Susan Crawford is Assistant Professor of Law at Cardozo Law School, teaching cyberlaw and intellectual property law. She is also a Policy Fellow with the Center for Democracy & Technology in Washington, D.C, a Fellow with The Information Society Project at Yale Law School, and is active with the Internet Policy Project of the Aspen Institute. Ms. Crawford received her B.A. (summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa) and J.D. from Yale University. She served as a clerk for Judge Raymond J. Dearie of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York, and was a partner at Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering (Washington, D.C.) until the end of 2002, when she left that firm to enter the legal academy.

Susan's practice was focused on Internet law and policy issues, including governance, privacy, intellectual property, advertising, and defamation. She represented major online companies, startups, and joint ventures, and worked particularly closely with companies doing business in the domain name world. From 1996-1998, she taught copyright as an adjunct professor at the Georgetown Law Center, and she has spoken and written frequently about online legal issues.

Susan writes about digital copyright issues and internet governance. Her article, "The Biology of the Broadcast Flag" was published in the Hastings Communications and Entertainment Law Journal in late 2003. Upcoming pieces will be about online identity ("Who's In Charge of Who I Am," to be published in an NYU Press book), FCC jurisdiction ("Nice Work If You Can Get It: The FCC In The Digital Age," to be published in law review form), and other digital policy issues. She has also published many online essays about ICANN (most co-authored with David R. Johnson), and maintains a website and blog at www.scrawford.net.

Susan is the Chair of the Board of Directors of Innovation Network (www.innonet.org), a member of the Board of Directors of Greenwood Music Camp, and a member of the advisory boards of SquareTrade, Renovation in Music Education, Voxiva, and other groups. Susan, a violist, lives in New York City.

Dr. Crocker is CEO and co-founder of Shinkuro, Inc., a start up company focused on dynamic sharing of information across the Internet. He is also on the board of the Internet Society, and chair of ICANN's Security and Stability Advisory Committee. Dr. Crocker has been involved in the Internet since its inception. In the late 1960's and early 1970's, while he was a graduate student at UCLA, he was part of the team that developed the protocols for the Arpanet and laid the foundation for today's Internet. He organized the Network Working Group, which was the forerunner of the modern Internet Engineering Task Force and initiated the Request for Comment (RFC) series of notes through which protocol designs are documented and shared. He remained active in the Internet standards work through the IETF and IAB. For this work, Dr. Crocker was awarded the 2002 IEEE Internet Award. Dr. Crocker experience includes research management at DARPA, USC/ISI and The Aerospace Corporation, vice president of Trusted Information Systems, and co-founder of CyberCash, Inc. and Longitude Systems, Inc. Dr. Crocker earned his BA in math and PhD in computer science at UCLA, and he studied artificial intelligence at MIT.

Tim Dodd is Vice President, Technology Policy for Time Warner Cable. He is responsible for digital media distribution and digital rights management strategies and for developing, negotiating and advocating Time Warner Cable's technology policy positions in a variety of business, standards and regulatory forums.¬Ý

Prior to joining Time Warner Cable, Tim was a senior corporate attorney practicing in Manhattan.

Tim holds a Master of Laws degree from Duke University School of Law, a Bachelor of Laws (Honors) degree and a Bachelor of Arts degree in Japanese from the University of Canterbury, New Zealand.

Scott Drake is Vice President of CNBC Digital responsible for CNBC's Digital Technology and Product teams focused on the execution and strategy for CNBC Broadband, Mobile and Interactive products along with our suite of On-Air Broadcast Applications

Scott brings over 18 years of technology & software development expertise, most recently as VP & CIO of Information Technology for CNBC responsible for all real-time on-air applications and analytics. Previously, Scott was Chief Technology Officer for CNBC.com, responsible for building the technology organization for the site.

Prior to joining CNBC, Scott was Technology Manager at Bloomberg.com from 1996 to 1999, where he was responsible for Bloomberg's web development. Scott was also in charge of equity derivative software development for Bloomberg's professional services from 1990 to 1996.¬Ý Before then, Scott was an equity quantitative software analyst at Salomon Brothers Inc.

Scott holds a BS in Civil Engineering from Rutgers College of Engineering while earning 3 varsity letters in Football.

Scott, his wife Denise, and their three sons, Woodrow, Jackson, & John, resides in Alpharetta, Georgia.

Greg Elin is a research developer specializing in databases and interactive technologies. Since the early 1990's, he has helped large and small organizations articulate requirements and prototype new technologies. His experience in New York's technology community ranges from NYNEX to dot.coms to non-profits. Since 1998, he has specialized in database and technology services. Mr. Elin has extensive experience working with institutional and distributed data. He holds a Masters degree from the NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program and is currently possessed by the idea of "intimate computing" and developing a new kind of digital photo album.

Susan Estrada is called a "thinking nerd"; by her colleagues because she has a deep interest in emerging broadband technologies and making those technologies work to solve real-world problems.

As the president of the new non-profit FirstMile.US, Susan is leading the way to educate, advocate and focus the debate on the power and promise of big broadband in the United States. Her vision is that every member of the American public has access to big broadband, the 21st century pathway to a better overall quality of life.

Until March, 2005, she led CENIC's One Gigabit or Bust Initiative, and provided the vision, the managerial savvy and the technical know-how needed to bring the Initiative's multitiered goals to life. The Initiative brought together the interests of research, education, commerce, state and local government and the general public to develop an action plan for delivery of one gigabit broadband capabilities to every educational institution, business and home in California by 2010.

Under her role as president of Aldea Communications, Susan provides strategic marketing services to Internet and broadband-focused clients including services such as government relations, meeting planning, and collateral development.

Susan founded CERFnet in 1988. CERFnet was one of the original regional IP networks. It served the academic and commercial communities in California. As executive director, she took the initial NSF funding ($2.8M) and successfully commercialized the network for both the academic and private sector users, growing from 25 sites to hundreds of sites. CERFnet was later sold to TCG and is now part of AT&T. CERFnet was a particularly visible network because Ms. Estrada was able to use a small amount of resources to achieve early commercial acceptance of the Internet #8211; leading to the Interop Achievement Award in 1991. CERFnet developed a number of notable firsts for the Internet including the first deployment of dialup IP, accounting reports for customers, and high quality service.

Through her leadership and collaboration with PSInet and UUnet (now MCI), Susan helped form the interconnection enabling the first commercial Internet traffic via the Commercial Internet Exchange (CIX). Susan's high standards and attention to customer needs drove these and other developments.

Giving practical advice on getting the best Internet service, Susan wrote Connecting to the Internet, An O'Reilly Buyer's Guide, in August 1993 (a Barnes and Noble bestseller). Susan has been invited to speak on diverse subjects including education using the Internet, business on the Internet, and connecting to the Internet. She is consistently praised in evaluations for her down-to-earth presentation delivery.

As a parent of two children, Susan is strongly committed to enhancing educational programs using communications technology. Among other activities, Susan played an instrumental role by co-founding the Global Schoolhouse and organizing the California branch of Tech Corps.

Susan currently serves as a board member of the Public Interest Registry. She was an appointed member to the FCC's Technological Advisory Committee, an elected Trustee of the Internet Society, a founder of the Commercial Internet Exchange (CIX), a former area director for the Internet Engineering Software Group (IESG) and the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). She was an appointed member of SBC/Pacific Telesis' Telecommunications Consumer Advisory Panel and the former member of the U.S. Federal Networking Council's Advisory Committee (FNCAC). She is listed in the Millennium and 1998-1999 editions of Who's Who in Executives and Professionals.

Eugene Friesen is at the forefront of a new generation of musicians versed in classical, popular and world music. A graduate of the Yale School of Music, he is active as a performer, composer, teacher and recording artist.

Friesen's gift for the responsive flow of improvisatory music has been featured in concerts all over the world with the Paul Winter Consort , Trio Globo, and with poets Yevgeny Yevtushenko and Coleman Barks. He has performed as a soloist at the International Cello Festival in Manchester, England; Rencontres d'Ensembles de Violoncelles in Beauvais, France; and at the World Cello Congress in Baltimore, Maryland.

His compositional credits include four albums of original music: In The Shade Of Angels, New Friend, Arms Around You and The Song of Rivers; Grasslands, a symphony premiered on the Kansas prairie in 1997; Earth Requiem: Stories of Hope, an oratorio first performed in 1991; The Brementown Musicians with Bob Hoskins for Rabbit Ears Productions in 1992; Sabbaths, settings of poems by Wendell Berry premiered in Vermont in 1999; and numerous scores for documentary films. Eugene's music can also be heard on the recordings of Trio Globo, which he founded in 1992 with Howard Levy and Glen Velez.

Friesen was awarded a Grammy award as a member of the Paul Winter Consort for the 1994 album Spanish Angel.

Friesen was the 1999 recipient of grants from the Lila Wallace/Reader©ˆs Digest Fund and Continental Harmony to compose a symphonic setting of Carl Sandburg's PRAIRIE, which was premiered in June of 2001 in Arkansas City, Kansas.

CelloMan, his one-man show for young audiences, features a wide variety of music on solo cello: classical, jazz, blues and rock. Created in collaboration with maskmaker/choreographer Robert Faust , CelloMan has been performed widely in the United States. The CelloMan video was released in 1999.

Eugene Friesen is on the faculty of the Berklee College of Music in Boston. He lives in Vermont with his wife, Wendy, and children.

'Martin has spent the last three years working on a number of technology, product and business strategy projects for Sprint. The original reason for going to Kansas City (and there has to be a damn good one) was to define an application platform that would help Sprint escape the gaping maws of the Paradox Of The Best Network. Sadly the project was cancelled, the business unit dissolved, and the vision lost. Due to an administrative oversight Sprint forgot to include him in the 20,000 who enjoyed the subsequent benefits of headcount reduction, yet didn't actually assign him any real work. This void left him with too much time on his hands to think about stupidity and networks. The Devil always finds work for idle hands, and the result was the creation of Telepocalypse, a practitioner's view from the front line of telecom.

Prior to Sprint he lived and breathed the stupid network as an IT consultant at Oracle. Lingering on the resume are also various half-forgotten skills at programming and building big hairy IT systems for banks. Martin is also in possession of a certificate implausibly claiming he holds a degree in Mathematics and Computation from Oxford University.

Outside of work, he travels, hikes, cleans up after babies, and dreams up patentable ideas in the shower.
Martin is currently a refugee fleeing the benighted shores of telcoland, and is wondering what to do next.

As a member of Cisco's strategic Executive Thought Leadership team, Lionel Gibbons does research and analysis into the effects of networking technology, providing insight to Cisco executives, customers and partners.

Previously, he was the Director of Technology Policy, formulating and communicating positions on a variety of networking technologies with a focus on broadband access, and content protection technologies. Mr. Gibbons also served as the Director of Strategic Technology Communications in the Office of the Chief Strategy Officer, where he was responsible for articulating Cisco's strategic technology direction and policies.

Mr. Gibbons has also served as the Director of Strategic Marketing for the IOS Technologies division, where he helped define the technology strategy for the industry's leading core networking software ’Äì Cisco IOS.

Prior to joining Cisco, Mr. Gibbons was a marketing director at 3Com, where his responsibilities included Policy Based Networking technology, and Dial Access Concentrator products. Previously, he directed marketing at Eicon Technology, a leading supplier of WAN interface adapters for communication servers. Before making the switch to marketing, Mr. Gibbons was a systems software designer.

Mr. Gibbons holds a B.Sc. degree in Physics from Concordia University in Montreal.

Roxane operates a private investment strategy consultancy for high tech money managers. Because her clients manage large sums, her interest is in longer-term, sector-scale transitions, as opposed to trading ideas. In keeping with this longer-term outlook, her concerns of the past few years remain largely in place, although progress has been made since the 2000 bubble. The overall concern is how valuations are impacted by the move from isolated islands of automation and functionality, as in separate client-server departmental-level business applications separated by narrowband voice-centric communications, to a unified "end-to-end" IP-based architecture that houses object-oriented, Web services based applications along with multimedia and VoIP as an upper layer. As this consolidation takes place, entire industries as we know them will become "features". The term "service provider" is going to
change. Will they be Layer One commodity vendors, or Layer One through X (name it, Layer 3 (with MPLS and QoS), Layer 5 (Session level voice) or Layer 7 (offering entire applications in an ASP model)? What are the long-term economics of bundling? Does it just delay the inevitable price collapse? Does owning transport as well as services give rise to a new class of monopolist that kills innovation like Microsoft did on the desktop? Does separating the layers force public subsidies of a profitless "essential service"? What services "should" move to the "stupid network"? Should security go there, or does that become censorship? How do me manage digital rights in this type of environment: does the pendulum swing to the users or the originators?

On a broader scale, the growth of the Internet and is associated information transfer is having a larger impact on the economy and society. For instance, "economics" is the study of scarcity and allocation. In a high-tech world where all the costs are borne up front, with practically infinite scalability after that, the economic feedback loop gets broken. For example, Intel has to spend $2B to build a fab these days. That plant will take two years to ramp, then cost the same $1B/yr to run whether it makes a zillion chips per quarter or none. The same goes for a big IP or optical network. The same goes for software, especially open source. What happens to pricing and capital allocation when the economic feedback loop is broken in this manner? Is this a "good" or "bad" thing?

Finally, the Internet shrinks the world. We are outsourcing manufacturing to China and software development to India. What is the appropriate stance for us to take regarding our future? Does this trend signal the end of U.S. economic world dominance? Is there anything we can or should do? While admittedly scary, is this trend "good" or "bad"? What does the world look like in five years if we do nothing to alter this trend or do something to alter it?

I am the CTO of Hilllcrest Communications, a new startup working in the overlapping areas of media and telecommunications. My prior work history includes a stint as President and CTO of Broadsword Technologies, as the CTO for the NTG division at Tellabs, a Director of Portfolio Planning and Management for Tellabs corporate, an engineering manager at Bell Labs, now Lucent, and CTO/VP of Engineering at Coherent Communications (acquired by Tellabs). I'm dedicated to what might be called the 'idiot savant' network as opposed to a walled-garden "smart" network or the transport-only "stupid" network and the products I've been involved with demonstrate that.

Dewayne Hendricks is CEO, of Dandin Group, Inc., a Fremont, California based company which does research and product development in the area of broadband wired and wireless data devices and services. He is also a member of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Technological Advisory Council (TAC http://www.fcc.gov/oet/tac). Prior to that he was General Manager, Wireless Business Unit, for Com21, Inc. Before Com21, he was Co-Principal Investigator on the National Science Foundation Wireless Field Tests for Education project. He was formerly the CEO and co-founder of Tetherless Access Ltd., which was one of the first companies to develop and deploy Part 15 unlicensed wireless metropolitan area data networks which used the TCP/IP protocols. He has participated in the installation of these networks in other parts of the world such as Kenya, Tonga, Mexico, Canada and Mongolia. He has been involved with radio since his teens when he received his amateur radio operator's license. He holds official positions for several non-profit national amateur radio organizations and is a director of the Wireless Communications Alliance, an industry group which represents manufacturers in the unlicensed radio industry. Back in 1986 he ported the popular KA9Q Internet Protcol package to the Macintosh, which allows the Macintosh to be used in packet radio networks. Today, thousands of amateur radio operators worldwide use NET/Mac to participate in the global packet radio Internet which has been developed and deployed by the amateur radio service.

David Hofstatter is Founder, President & CEO of CallWave, Inc.  After many years driving the innovation process (or lack thereof) within the traditional value chain of telecom carriers and their vendors, in 1998, Mr. Hofstatter stepped outside of the old telecom world, and defined a truely customer-centered approach to telecommunications services at CallWave.  He is responsible for the experience of over 7 million on-line and 25 million offline users of CallWave's services, which provide internet-enhanced call delivery of calls which have been missed because a CallWave subscriber is on-line and their line is busy, or because they are away from the phone.  Prior to founding CallWave, Mr. Hofstatter was responsible for strategy and advanced product development at Digital Sound Corporation where he pioneered the technology behind web-based unified messaging in 1995 and made early discoveries of the significant market adoption barriers for complex "unified" services.  Prior to Digital Sound, Mr. Hofstatter began his career in 1983 with his current business partner Bob Dolan, at Mr. Dolan's first startup, ComDesign, Inc, a manufacturer of packet-based switching equipment.  Mr. Hofstatter has a degree in Economics from the University of California at Santa Barbara.

Tim is a Managing Director heading CIBC's global communication services equity research team. He joined CIBC World Markets over five years ago, and has been a communications services analyst for nine years. Tim researches a broad range of communications companies with a focus on data communications, and the migration of the industry towards horizontal segmentation. He was chosen as a Wall Street Journal All Star Analyst in 2000, 2001 and 2002. Prior to joining the company, Tim was a Senior Equity Analyst at ROBERTSON STEPHENS where he oversaw the telecommunications wireline services team. Prior to 1997, Tim was a research analyst at Smith Barney, a group that was ranked number two among wireline services teams in the 1997 Greenwich Associates Institutional Survey, and a perennial winner of the Institutional Investor analyst survey. Prior to becoming an equity analyst, Tim worked as a civil engineer on various projects in the New York area. Tim received a Bachelor of Science degree in Civil Engineering from Rutgers University in 1986 and an MBA degree in Finance, with Beta Gamma Sigma Honors, from Columbia Business School in 1994. His list of direct coverage includes BellSouth, SBC Communications, Verizon, AT&T, Qwest, Sprint, Level 3, ITXC, WebEx, Ptek, Raindance and Genesys.

David S. Isenberg spent 12 years at AT&T Bell Labs until his 1997 essay,"The Rise of the Stupid Network," was received with acclaim everywhere in the global telecommunications community with one exception -- at AT&T itself! So Isenberg left AT&T in 1998 to found isen.com, LLC (an independent telecom analysis firm based in Cos Cob, Connecticut) and to publish The SMART Letter, an open-minded commentary on the communications revolution and its enemies.

Joi Ito is the founder and CEO of Neoteny (www.neoteny.com), venture capital firm focused on personal communications and enabling technologies. He has created numerous Internet companies including PSINet Japan, Digital Garage and Infoseek Japan. In 1997 Time Magazine ranked him as a member of the CyberElite. In 2000 he was ranked among the "50 Stars of Asia" by Business Week and commended by the Japanese Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications for supporting the advancement of IT. In 2001 the World Economic Forum chose him as one of the 100 "Global Leaders of Tomorrow" for 2002.

Clegg Ivey is Co-Founder, Vice President: Strategy, Voxeo Corp. Clegg leads Voxeo's strategy to acquire competitive and complementary businesses. Clegg was previously CEO of Vogistix, where he led the development of applications that combine Voice over IP and Web technologies to solve vertical industry problems.

Prior to founding Voxeo, Clegg was an associate at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, the nation's leading technology law firm. While at Wilson, Mr. Ivey specialized in technology law and served as technology lead on several groundbreaking cases. In addition, Clegg has over 10 years experience with software design and development.

Clegg attended Tulane University where he graduated magna cum laude with a quadruple major. He also holds a law degree from the University of Chicago.

Don Jackson is Vice President of Advanced Telephony at Tellme Networks, where he works on enhancing the functionality and features of Tellme's connections to phone and data networks.  His responsibilities include the SIP version of the Tellme platform, and the development of communication applications for carriers and service providers.

Steve Kamman is an Executive Director covering Networking Equipment and Internet Infrastructure. Previously, he was part of the large cap Telecom Services research team. Before joining CIBC, Steve was in Corporate Development at MCI Telecommunications Corp. where he worked on acquisitions and new ventures with a focus on new data technologies. Steve also managed wireless strategy and spectrum auctions at Avantel, an MCI Joint Venture in Mexico. Prior to MCI, Steve worked in the Telecom and Technology practice of Andersen Consulting's strategy consulting arm in New York and Melbourne, Australia. He holds an MBA from the University of Chicago and a BA Cum Laude in both Economics and History from Yale University.

Kevin heads a Strategy and Development Group within Time Warner Cable's Advanced Technology Department in Stamford, CT. His group is responsible for the development of new technology platforms, technology policies and standards, and product development strategies.

Kevin began his career with NCTA in 1977 and joined Warner Amex Cable in 1980. During his 22 years with Warner and Time Warner, he has held various marketing positions around the country and served as Senior Vice President of Marketing from 1990 to 1999. From 1999 to 2002 he was head of the company's New Product Development department which produced digital applications including on-screen navigators, digital video recorders, enhanced TV applications, and a home networking business.

He is former Chairman of CTAM's board of directors and has served on the boards of Primestar and E! Entertainment Television.¬Ý He participates on several industry committees at NCTA, CableLabs and CTAM.

Kevin received a B.A. in Government from Colby College and an MBA from The Wharton School. He lives with his wife and three children in Wilton, Connecticut.

Andrew Maffei is a communications specialist who has worked at Woods Hole for the past nineteen years, helping innovative oceanographers and engineers to use networks of all sorts to do their research. His most recent work, NEPTUNE, is a collaborative project aimed at installing a multi-Gigabit Ethernet backbone around a tectonic plate, in 2500 meters of water off the west coast of the US and Canada. This is being done to enable the long-term (30 year), multi-disciplinary study of a single chunk of ocean. He also runs a project called SeaNet that spaoratically connects oceanographic research vessels to the Internet.

As Principal Engineer at Technorati, Kevin Marks is responsible for the spiders that make sense of the web and track millions of blogs daily. He has been inventing and innovating for over 17 years in emerging technologies where people, media and computers meet.

He put the "pod" in podcasting, brought tagging to weblogs and developed the AHAH 'AJAX without XML' utility.

Elliot Noss has been a leader in the Internet industry for nearly ten years and has been a driver in the evolution of Tucows Inc. for the last seven. Trained as a lawyer, he joined Tucows in 1997 as Vice President, Corporate Services. He was subsequently appointed president and CEO of Tucows Inc. in May 1999.

During his tenure, Tucows has grown to become a leading destination for Internet software and application downloads. In 2000, the company created the wholesale domain name registration market with the launch of the OpenSRS (shared registration services) platform. In August 2001, he helped orchestrate Tucows' merger with Infonautics, Inc., under the Tucows name. Since then, Mr. Noss has rapidly expanded Tucows wholesale services to offer digital certificates, DNS, and email services to a growing international Reseller channel.

He champions areas of vital interest to the Internet community including; privacy, ICANN reform and registrar matters, the implications of emerging technologies, and the emergence of small and medium-sized ISPs and web hosting companies as the unrecognized backbone of the Internet economy.

Mr. Noss chairs the University of Toronto's Department of Computer Science Advisory Board and is a distinguished graduate of the University of Toronto where he earned a BA. He also earned an MBA and LLB from the University of Western Ontario.

Andrew Odlyzko is Director of the interdisciplinary Digital Technology Center and an Assistant Vice President for Research at the University of Minnesota. Prior to assuming that position in 2001, he devoted 26 years to research and research management at Bell Telephone Laboratories, AT&T Bell Labs, and AT&T Labs, as that organization evolved and changed its name. He has written over 150 technical papers in computational complexity, cryptography, number theory, combinatorics, coding theory, analysis, probability theory, and related fields, and has three patents. The projects he has managed have been in diverse areas, such as security, formal verification methods, parallel and distributed computation, and auction technology. In recent years he has also been working on electronic publishing, electronic commerce, and economics of data networks, and is the author of such widely cited papers as "Tragic loss or good riddance: The impending demise of traditional scholarly journals," "The bumpy road of electronic commerce," "Paris Metro Pricing for the Internet," "Content is not king," and "The history of communications and its implications for the Internet." He has an honorary doctorate from Univ. Marne la Vallee and serves on editorial boards of over 20 technical journals, as well as on several advisory and supervisory bodies.

Jorge Ortiz is an entrepreneur involved in several startups:

RadioBus, MP3 based mass media for public transportation buses.

Vozlibre.org, (in planning) Web based citizen media

Frank Paynter is the Founder and President of Sandhill Technologies, LLC, a small consulting firm. Since opening for business in 1997, Sandhill has offered Frank as a consultant and project manager to a limited number of clients, including university, government, telco, non-profit, and financial institution executive management. Frank's focus is on appraisal of large organizations' current conditions and planning and executing change in their internal networked communications and information technology services.

Frank is working on his first book, a compilation of interviews with bloggers that he has posted on his own weblog over the last three years. It's more a social and literary effort than a technical one and reflects his interest in people, writing, and the decades long growth of the use of computing technology in personal relationships.

Frank's BA (English and Economics) and MBA are from the University of Wisconsin - Madison. His time-on-planet is a large enough number that the length of his bio could get really ridiculous.

Robert Pepper, who prefers to be called "Pepper," is senior managing director-global advanced technology policy beginning July 1. In his new job, Pepper is responsible for leading a team that will drive the policy agenda for Cisco's advanced technology policy goals in areas such as wireless, voice-over-Internet protocol, broadband services, and security. He got this job by making the right connections at BigHook, so be careful who you talk to.

Formerly, Pepper was Chief, Policy Development at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). and before that was Chief of the Office of Plans and Policy (OPP). Under Pepper's leadership, OPP is responsible for policy questions that cut across traditional industry and institutional boundaries, especially those arising from the development of new technologies. At OPP, Pepper's responsibilities have included leading teams implementing provisions of the Telecommunications Act of 1996; assessing the deployment of broadband technologies; assessing the development of the Internet and electronic commerce; developing the framework for digital television; designing and implementing the first spectrum auctions in the United States; developing more market-based spectrum policies; assessing competition in the video marketplace; and assessing the impact of the development of the Internet on traditional communications policy structures. Before joining the FCC, Pepper was Director of the Annenberg Washington Program in Communications Policy Studies. He also has been Director of Domestic Policies and Acting Associate Administrator at the National Telecommunications and Information Administration and developed a program on communications, computers, and information at the National Science Foundation. He is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he also received his doctorate.

Michael Powell is currently principal of the M. K. Powell Group, a high tech advisory firm. Formerly, Powell, served as FCC Commissioner from 1997 to 2005, chairing the Commission from 2001 to 2005.

Mr. Powell previously served as the Chief of Staff of the Antitrust Division in the Department of Justice. In that capacity, he advised the Assistant Attorney General on substantive antitrust matters, including policy development, criminal and civil investigations and mergers. Prior to joining the Antitrust Division, Mr. Powell was an associate in the Washington, D.C. office of the law firm of O'Melveny & Myers LLP, where he focused on litigation and regulatory matters involving telecommunications, antitrust and employment law. Mr. Powell graduated from the Georgetown University Law Center in 1993 following which he served as a judicial clerk to the Honorable Harry T. Edwards, Chief Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

Before attending law school, from 1988 to 1990, Mr. Powell served as a policy advisor to the Secretary of Defense on matters involving the United States-Japan security relationship. Mr. Powell's experience also includes military service as an armor officer in the United States Army. He spent the majority of his active service with the 3/2 Armored Cavalry Regiment in Amberg, Germany, serving as a cavalry platoon leader and troop executive officer. While on duty, Mr. Powell was seriously injured in a training accident and, after spending a year in the hospital, was retired from service. Mr. Powell graduated in 1985 from the College of William and Mary with a degree in Government.

Chairman Powell is married to Jane Knott Powell. They live with their two children, eight year-old Jeffrey and three year-old Bryan, in Fairfax Station, Virginia.

Perhaps best known as pianist for Lyle Lovett and Jane Siberry, Tim Ray's wide-ranging skills as a soloist and accompanist have afforded him the opportunity to perform with legendary performers from all walks of music. Appearing on over 60 recordings to date, Tim has performed in concert with an extensive list of pop music icons, notably Bonnie Raitt, Aretha Franklin, Lou Reed, Rickie Lee Jones, Willie Nelson, kd lang and Soul Asylum. He regularly performs with leading figures in the jazz world, among them Gary Burton, Scott Hamilton, Eddie Daniels, Bucky Pizzarelli, Lewis Nash and Rufus Reid, and his classical credits include solo performances and concerts with Gunther Schuller, the Boston Modern Orchestra Project and the Boston Classical Orchestra.

Tim's busy schedule has included frequent tours throughout the Americas, Canada, Mexico, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, and has included performances at Carnegie Hall, the White House, the Kennedy Center and the 1992 Presidential Inauguration. Tim has also performed repeatedly on "The Tonight Show" (Johnny Carson, Jay Leno), "Late Night with David Letterman," "The Conan O'Brien Show," "Austin City Limits" and various other national TV and radio broadcasts.

A sought-after arranger and composer, Tim has penned numerous original works for his trio Tre Corda, for solo piano, big band, string orchestra, and an extensive body of writing for jazz trio and quartet, some of which appear on Tim's own Ideas & Opinions, released in 1997 on Gunther Schuller's GM Recordings label. He received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, and taught jazz piano and improvisation while on the faculty of the Berklee College of Music. Tim has lectured and taught improvisation at Harvard University and MIT, and conducts workshops and clinics at colleges and high schools throughout the U.S. and Canada.

James Salter is founder and CEO of Atlantic Engineering Group, a design & build firm specializing in municipal utility telecommunications projects. Since its formation in 1996, Atlantic Engineering Group has been involved in 53 municipal telecommunications projects, including 12 FTTP projects. Prior to founding Atlantic, and after graduating from Georgia Tech with an Electrical Engineering degree, Mr. Salter spent 15 years in the electric utility business at American Electric Power, Walton EMC and the City of Monroe Georgia.

Mr. Salter is a former Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Fiber to the Home (FTTH) Council (www.ftthcouncil.org) an industry trade group whose mission is to promote fiber to the home as the ultimate access technology.

Doc is the Senior Editor of Linux Journal, the premier Linux monthly and one of the world's leading technology magazines. He also runs the new Doc Searls' IT Garage, an online journal published by Linux Journal's parent company, SSC.

He is co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual, a New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Business Week, Borders Books and Amazon.com bestseller. (It was Amazon's #1 sales & marketing bestseller for thirteen months and sells around the world in nine languages.)

He also writes Doc Searls Weblog. J.D. Lasica, author of Darknet, and proprietor of ourmedia calls Doc "one of the deep thinkers in the blog movement." Doc's blog is consistently listed among the top few blogs, out of millions ’Äî by Technorati, Blogstreet and others.

In August, 2005, Doc recieved the fist annual Google O'Reilly Open Source Award for Best Communicator.

In 2006, Doc was named a Visiting Scholar at the Center for Information Technology and Society at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and a Fellow with the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University.

Steve serves as the Chief Scientist of Lavalife, Inc., a leading mobile, voice, and internet dating company. His role is to research and integrate advanced IT technologies into the company's consumer products and IT systems. Steve previously served as the company's CTO from 2000 - 2002, directing the technical efforts of an 100-person department and successfully guiding the company through a complete rearchitecture of all of its voice and internet product platforms as well as its call center and backend systems. He recently migrated the company's high volume voice platforms onto an all VoIP platform, and is nominated as a finalist for the CIPA award for this project.

Aaron Swartz (born 1986) is a writer, web developer, and entrepreneur. At age 14 he was a co-author of the RSS 1.0 specification. Since then he has become a member of the W3C's RDF Core Working Group, co-designed the formatting language Markdown with John Gruber, and been very involved in many other projects.

Aaron was the founder of Infogami, a startup that was part of Y Combinator's first Summer Founders Program. Previously, he attended Stanford University for a year, before leaving to work on his company full-time. Infogami joined reddit, another company that was involved with Y Combinator's inaugural session, and both products are now part of not a bug. Infogami is well short of its full functionality, and has not been updated since May 2006 when Swartz apparently discontinued its Google Ads service.

Dr. Tongia is a Senior Systems Scientist in the School of Computer Science (ISRI) and the Dept. of Engineering and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University. He is interested in issues of infrastructure in emerging economies, especially the role of technology choices for improving deployment and penetration. Using quantitative policy and decision analysis, he has focused on the energy and telecom domains. In addition to engineering-economic analyses, his work also deals with broader policy issues such as security, international collaboration (especially US-India), and technology and analysis transfer.

Much of this is driven by the question as to whether developing countries can (or should) follow in the same steps as developed countries. Part of his research involves developing models for identifying current technology and policy environments, and examining the role of public and private intervention. Specific areas of interest include the digital divide, ICT (information and communications technology) for Sustainable Development, and leap-frogging in telecom infrastructure.

Emy Tseng is Project Manager for TechConnect, the municipal wireless program in the Department of Telecommunications and Information Services of the City and County of San Francisco. Previously, she worked at the Ford Foundation on issues of information and communications policy. She has consulted on technology policy and strategy for Consumers Union and for several community networking projects including NYCwireless. Emy has twelve years experience in the software industry as an engineer, project manager and software architect. Emy received a Master of Science degree from MIT's Technology and Policy Program (TPP) and a Bachelor of Science degree in Math/Physics from Brown University

Barbara van Schewick is a Senior Researcher at the Telecommunication Networks Group (Chair: Prof. Dr. Adam Wolisz) at the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Technical University Berlin, Germany, and a Non-Residential Fellow at the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School. A lawyer and computer scientist by training, she explores the economic, regulatory and strategic implications of communication networks. In particular, her research focuses on the economic, regulatory and strategic implications of network architecture, the regulation of broadband networks and spectrum policy. She works with the German Institute of Economic Research ("Deutsches Institut fur Wirtschaftsforschung") to advise the German Ministry of Education and Research on technology and innovation policy in the telecommunication sector. She also develops input to an Electronic Communications Committee Project Team on spectrum policy for the German Federal Network Agency ("Bundesnetzagentur"), the Germany regulatory agency responsible for telecommunications.

Barbara van Schewick studied law at the Free University Berlin and computer science at the Technical University Berlin. After graduating from Law School, she worked as a management consultant for Coopers and Lybrand, UK (now PriceWaterhouseCoopers, UK) on a SAP/R3 implementation project in Dublin. From 1998 to 2000, she was a law clerk ("Referendarin") at the Higher Regional Court ("Kammergericht") Berlin, performing the mandatory legal clerkship preceding the bar exam. Following the bar exam, she was the first Residential Fellow at the newly founded Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School, where she conducted research on the economic and policy implications of network architecture and organized the conference "The Policy Implications of End-to-End" in December 2000 (with Lawrence Lessig); she later returned to Stanford for a shorter stay from April to June 2003. Her dissertation "Architecture and Innovation: The Role of the End-to-End Arguments in the Original Internet", which won the Scientific Award 2005 of the German Foundation for Law and Computer Science, integrates insights from economics, management strategy, law, computer science and engineering to develop a general framework that can be used to assess the impact of architecture on the economic system and applies this framework to determine the impact of the original architecture of the Internet on innovation.

Barbara van Schewick received a Ph.D. ("Dr.-Ing."), summa cum laude, in computer science from the Technical University Berlin in 2004, the Bar Exam ("Zweites Staatsexamen"), summa cum laude, from the Higher Regional Court ("Kammergericht") Berlin in 2000 and a J.D. ("Erstes Staatsexamen"), summa cum laude, from the Free University Berlin in 1997. She also holds a M.Sc. ("Diplom"), summa cum laude, (1999) and B.Sc. ("Vordiplom"), summa cum laude, (1995) in computer science from the Technical University Berlin. She received scholarships for her university studies and her doctoral studies from the German National Academic Foundation ("Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes") and a research fellowship from the Gottlieb Daimler- and Karl Benz-Foundation.

Richard S. Whitt is President of NetsEdge Consulting, LLC, a telecommunications and Internet consulting practice based in Washington, D.C. Prior to founding NetsEdge in February 2006, Rick served as Vice President for Federal Law and Policy with MCI, Inc. In that capacity, he oversaw all of MCI's public policy and regulatory matters before the U.S. Federal Communications Commission. In addition, Rick developed and coordinated MCI's advocacy before the Executive Branch, U.S. Congress, and other governmental bodies, with an emphasis on advanced telecommunications services and the Internet.

During his twelve years with MCI, Rick played an instrumental role in developing and implementing strategies that helped gain important public policy outcomes. Most recently he led the MCI team of attorneys responsible for securing timely FCC approval of the proposed merger with Verizon, while earlier he guided the company through contentious bankruptcy-related proceedings at the FCC. Rick also founded and headed for six years MCI's internal team of attorneys dedicated to promoting the "unregulation" of UUNET, the company's Internet connectivity business. In 2004, Rick conceived and authored several influential white papers advocating a new legal framework based on IP network "layers" concepts. Rick represented MCI on the boards of directors for the Information Technology Association of America (ITAA), the United States Internet Service Provider Association (USISPA), the VON Coalition, and the Global IP Alliance (GIPA). He made numerous speaking appearances on behalf of MCI at public conferences, forums, and panels.

Prior to joining MCI in 1994, Rick practiced telecommunications law as an associate attorney with the Washington, D.C. law firms of Sutherland Asbill & Brennan (1990-1994) and Bishop Cook Purcell & Reynolds (1988-1990). He graduated cum laude from Georgetown University Law Center in 1988, and magna cum laude from James Madison University in 1984. He has been an active member of the Federal Communications Bar Association (FCBA) for seventeen years, holding many leadership positions.