Dan Catt

Dan spent 4 years working for Flickr during which time he learnt quite a bit about scaling, passionate user communities, what makes a 4 Billion photo website tick and even a bit about photography.

He's returned to the UK as a developer for the Guardian newspaper splitting his time between Shrewsbury and London. With the decline in print sales and increase in online media all of the national newspapers have to change to stay afloat. The Guardian newspaper is no exception.

Katy Cowan

Katy is a former broadcast journalist who studied Journalism at University of Central Lancashire, graduating in 2000. She started her career working for Signal Radio in Stoke-on-Trent before moving on to Saga Radio in Birmingham. After five years of reading the news live on the airwaves - and interviewing big names like Will Smith and various politians - Katy needed a fresh challenge and went into the world of public relations, securing a job at the North West's leading PR agencies, Citypress. After three fantastic years in Manchester , a niggling health problem forced Katy to go freelance and she started her own business, Boomerang PR in August 2007. Up until March 2009, business was booming. But then the recession hit and Katy lost many clients.

That was when Katy came up with the idea of Creative Boom, an online magazine for the creative industries throughout the UK. She wanted to raise her profile, attract new business and network while helping other freelancers to do the same.

Zach Beauvais

Zach has written for ReadWriteWeb and ZDNet, and is most interested in the potential of Linked Data to change the way the web is done. He edits the Semantic Web's community magazine, Nodalities, and works as Talis' Platform Evangelist.

With a background in linguistics, Zach is interested in semantics first, and the web second; seeing the advantage of building with machine-readable data. RDF is fascinating, as it's a way to model what we know in a way which is not only extremely expressive (almost linguistic) but, like a language, also extensible.

Tying together Open Data with the Semantic Web is one of the most important ares of online innovation. With web standards, like RDF and HTTP, the web can give the wider community access to knowledge of increasing granularity and complexity; and it's at the joins that we see interesting innovation. So, to this end, Zach has been writing more about the Semantic Web at Talis, and works with the Platform team to host events, raise awareness, and train up innovators. He's also a drummer...