Advisors

Cory Doctorow is an activist, a writer, a blogger, a public speaker, and a technology person.

He is on the mastheads at magazines like Wired, Popular Science and MAKE, and is co-editor of Boing Boing, a very popular weblog about technology, culture, and politics. From 2002-2006 he was the Director of European Affairs for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a technology advocacy nonprofit that works to upload liberty in technology law, policy and standards. He also writes science fiction novels, with three published to date (Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, 2003, Eastern Standard Tribe, 2004, Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, 2005), and a short story collection (A Place So Foreign and Eight More, 2003).

 

Trent Hamm writes for "those of us who need both cents and sense" on his blog, The Simple Dollar.

In April 2006, Trent Hamm went through a complete financial meltdown (read his “financial biography” here). He threw himself head first into trying to figure out every nuance of fixing his financial situation, and after a few months, he began to get the picture. Within eight months, he had paid off all of his credit card debt, paid off his vehicle, and also established an emergency fund. Since he has a passion for writing and he had learned so much about how personal finance really works, he established The Simple Dollar near the end of 2006 to tell the world about what he had learned and help people who were struggling with the same things.

 

J. D. Roth shares stories about debt elimination, saving money, and practical investing at his blog, Get Rich Slowly.

When J.D. Roth found himself overwhelmingly in debt, he hoped that reading personal finance books would help solve the problem quickly. Instead, he discovered that few people get rich quickly, but almost anyone can get rich slowly. His blog is devoted to sensible personal finance. It was recently named most inspiring money blog by Money magazine. Roth describes his blog this way: “You will not find any get-rich-quick schemes here. Nor will you find multi-level marketing fads or hot stock tips. I am not pitching any product or book. Instead, you’ll find daily information about personal finance and related topics.”.

 

Ramit Sethi is the founder and author of IWillTeachYouToBeRich.com, a blog on personal finance and personal entrepreneurship.

His blog hosts over 250,000 readers per month and has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and NPR. In addition to his blog, he speaks on personal finance and entrepreneurship across the country. His book, I Will Teach You To Be Rich, a 6-week personal finance program for 20-to-35-year-olds, was published by Workman Publishing on March 23, 2009 and was an immediate #1 Amazon bestseller. A completely practical approach, it is based around the four pillars of personal finance: banking, saving, budgeting, and investing — and the wealth-building ideas of personal entrepreneurship. Ramit is also the co-founder and vice president of community marketing for PBwiki, a venture-backed Silicon Valley startup.

 

Clay Shirky divides his time between consulting, teaching, and writing on the social and economic effects of Internet technologies.

His consulting practice is focused on the rise of decentralized technologies such as peer-to-peer, web services, and wireless networks that provide alternatives to the wired client/server infrastructure that characterizes the Web. Current clients include Nokia, GBN, the Library of Congress, the Highlands Forum, the Markle Foundation, and the BBC.

In addition to his consulting work, he is an adjunct professor in NYU’s graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP), where he teaches courses on the interrelated effects of social and technological network topology – how our networks shape culture and vice-versa. His current course, Social Weather, examines the cues we use to understand group dynamics in online spaces and the possible ways of improving user interaction by redesigning our social software to better reflect the emergent properties of groups.

 

Kathy Sierra is the author of the very popular blog “Creating Passionate Users ”.

She has been interested in the brain and artificial intelligence since her days as a game developer (Virgin, Amblin’, MGM). She is the co-creator of the bestselling Head First series (finalist for a Jolt Software Development award in 2003, and named to the Amazon Top Ten Editors Choice Computer Books for 2003 and 2004). She is also the founder of one of the largest community web sites in the world, javaranch.com. Kathy’s passions are skiing, running, her Icelandic horse, gravity, and her latest favorite thing – Dance Dance Revolution.