Jason Shankel is a game developer currently working with Will Wright on the next generation of social gaming. Shankel worked with Wright at Maxis from 1994 to 2008 where he was a programmer on the SimCity, Sims and Spore franchises. Jason Shankel is also a writer and public speaker, having been published in Dr. Dobbs Journal, IO9 and the Game Programming Gems series and he has been a guest lecturer at the Sonoma State Computer Science Colloquium since 1997....
Avi Bar-Zeev has spent the last 20 years working in real-time simulation, human-computer-interaction and internet scale applications on projects as diverse as load-balancing routers, robotic parachutes, and natural user interfaces. He co-founded Keyhole, Inc. in 1999, helped design and build the application known as Google Earth. At the time, he created the predecessor to KML and apparently invented the “Placemark,” envisioning a collaborative digital world analogous to and augmenting the real one. He was an early employee or consultant to startups like Intrinsic Graphics (3D games), F5 Networks (scalable web services), and Linden Lab, developing core technologies for Second Life, including their procedural 3D object system. Earlier in his career, he helped develop Disney’s Aladdin’s Magic Carpet VR Ride, one of the first truly real-time (60 fps) first-person immersive VR entertainment experiences, and went on to lead or influence other interactive 3D experiences for Disney and DisneyQuest, along with several R&D incubations. He most recently spent four years embedded with Microsoft, helping to pitch, design and prototype new products and experiences for Bing, Microsoft’s Startup Business Group and XBox Incubations....