Jesse Berst, Managing Director of The Athena Institute, is an internationally known technology and business analyst. He has authored or co-authored more than a dozen books on technology topics, written hundreds of articles for leading publications and keynoted dozens of business events in the U.S. and abroad. A former Vice President of ZDNet, he conceived and founded AnchorDesk, which reigned for many years as the largest daily email newsletter in the world. His analysis and commentary have been featured widely on national radio and television, including CNNfn, Good Morning America, ABC Nightly News, CBS Radio News, Business Talk Radio and NorthWest CableNews.

The Athena Institute is a research organization dedicated to the science of success. Using the 360 SuccessTM Methodology, the Institute creates competitive insights for companies, investors and government agencies.

Dave brings more than 21 years of operating experience in the software, Internet commerce, and wireless markets. He began his career as one of the early team members at Solectron, a $16 billion market leader in electronics manufacturing. Dave was also founder and managing partner of The Ascent Group: a strategy consult serving firms like Intel, Microsoft, Sun, Bell Atlantic, Fujitsu and Marimba. He is a co-founder at GeoTrust, and during his tenure as an OVP partner, he served on the board of @mobile prior to its acquisition by software.com.

Esther Dyson has devoted her life to discovering the inevitable and promoting the possible. As an active investor and commentator, she focuses on emerging technologies and business models (peer-to-peer, artificial intelligence, the Internet, wireless applications), emerging markets (Eastern Europe) and emerging companies (see below). In 1994, she had already explored the impact of the Net on intellectual property (among other things, why Bill Gates now plans to offer software as an online service). In 1997, she wrote a book on the impact of the Net on individuals' lives, Release 2.0: A design for living in the digital age. She remains an active player in discussions and policy-making concerning the Internet and society.

Dyson is also chairman of EDventure Holdings (www.edventure.com), which publishes the influential monthly technology-industry newsletter, Release 1.0, and sponsors two of the industry's premier annual conferences, PC (Platforms for Communication) Forum in the US (March 24 to 27, 2002) and EDventure's High-Tech Forum in Europe (October 2002). Dyson also writes a fortnightly column for the New York Times syndicate (Release 3.0), which also appears in EDventure's online newsletter, The conversation continues.

One of the IT industry's most respected analysts and consultants, Jamie Lewis has studied the technologies surrounding identity and access management for more than 15 years. Under Lewis' leadership, Burton Group has become the leading analyst and consulting firm in the identity and access management market. At Burton, Lewis is instrumental in defining the concepts relevant to enterprise directories, meta-directories, access management systems, provisioning, and other essential components of the emerging identity and access management infrastructure. With Lewis' reliable guidance, Burton continues to lead the evolution of these core technologies to support networked business models. Prominent users and vendors turn to Lewis for his keen insights into the evolution of these technologies and the markets that drive their development.

Martha Rogers, Ph.D. is an expert in the rapidly evolving fields of customer-focused strategy, customer relationships and increasing demand chain, and managing CRM and DCM ROI, and customer equity. With Don Peppers, she has co-authored five books on these subjects: The first, The One to One Future (Currency/Doubleday 1993), was named by Inc. magazine’s editor, George Gendron, as “one of the two or three most important business books of all time.” The second, Enterprise One to One, received a top 5-star rating from the Wall Street Journal. All five have been international best sellers, including the latest book, One to One B2B, which made the NY Times Business Best Seller list within a month of its May 2001 publication. The books have sold over a million copies and appear in a total of 14 languages.

Dr. Rogers is a Partner of Peppers and Rogers Group, a customer-focused strategy consulting firm based in Norwalk, CT, with 15 offices around the world. Clients include AT&T, American Skandia, Boise Cascade Office Products, Convergys, E*Trade, Ford Motor Company, Unilever, First USA Bank, KPMG, Banco Santander (South America), Winterthur (Switzerland), NTT (Japan). Hewlett Packard has built over 100 "1to1 campfires" (pilot programs) around the world, all based on 1to1 principles. At Peppers and Rogers Group, she has led several large subscription-based research studies focusing on particular aspects of CRM, such as the direct-to-consumer delivery channel. She serves on the Advisory Boards of several CRM-based companies. Dr. Rogers began her professional career as a copywriter and advertising executive, and earned her Ph.D. at the University of Tennessee as a Bickel fellow.

As an Adjunct Professor at the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University, Dr. Rogers is helping to spearhead the CRM coursework at the MBA level. She is also the co-director of the Teradata Center for Customer Relationship Management at Duke University. She is widely published in academic and trade journals, including Journal of Advertising Research, Journal of Public Policy and Marketing, Harvard Business Review, Journal of Applied Psychology and many others. She has been named International Sales and Marketing Executives Educator of the Year. With Don Peppers, she has been named Direct Marketer of the Year by DM Days New York, named to the World Technology Network, and was named by Business 2.0 as one of the nineteen most important business Gurus of all time in October of 2001. She also serves on the Advisory Board of the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University.

Doc Searls is a writer and speaker on topics that arise where technology and business meet. He is the Senior Editor of Linux Journal, one of the world's leading technology monthlies, with a paid circulation of over 100,000. He is also 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.). Doc also writes the Doc Searls Weblog. J.D. Lasica of Annenberg's Online Journalism Review calls Doc "one of the deep thinkers in the blog movement." Doc's blog has over 60,000 readers per month, and comes out on top when you look up "weblog" on Google.