Jeffrey has spent nearly a decade as a consultant, developer, and writer. He has managed platform businesses and developer relations for two iconic internet businesses, eBay and Yahoo!. He was eBay's first technology evangelist and led eBay's platform evangelism team from 2003 to 2005 when eBay was opening its web services platform to third parties. He also championed new technologies within the company, such as corporate blogging, RSS, wikis and open source, creating eBay's first open source developer community.
Jeffrey co-founded and led the Yahoo! Developer Network team, which opened Yahoo! properties to innovation by third-party developers and established the company as a platform leader in less than a year's time. He and his team also created Yahoo! Gallery, a site that enables third-party developers to share their applications and mash-ups with Yahoo! users.
Jeffrey has also served as a product manager and developer relations specialist at startups such as Kenamea. He has written or co-written six books on technology including the best-selling Database Access with Visual Basic series. He frequently speaks to corporate groups on both strategic and tactical issues pertaining to emerging technologies. As a consultant, he has engaged with stealth-mode startups, established small businesses, local and federal government agencies, and Fortune 500 companies such as Bank of America, Dell, Intel, Eli Lilly, Duke Energy, Pfizer, SBC, Sears Roebuck, and many others.
He has taught technology for several universities including University of Victoria and the Minneapolis College of Art & Design. His undergraduate degree is from the University of California, Santa Barbara; he is currently in the Master's in Computer Science program at Colorado State University.
Ernie is a front-end engineer who has worked for a number of Web startups. Previously, he was a Developer Evangelist at internet start-up Ning, as well a front-end engineer for Yahoo! and its product development incubator, Yahoo! Brickhouse.
Along with his development work, Ernie is a well-known blogger: He's the founder and Editor-in-Chief of 8Asians.com, a community blog for Asian Americans and for over ten years blogged about his personal life on his award-winning weblog Little, Yellow, Different. Ernie holds a B.S. in Computer Science Engineering from University of California Davis.
Carole has managed and advised some of the most successful communities on the Web, including BabyCenter, TechTV.com, and the 100,000,000 member Yahoo! Groups community. Her past clients also include E*TRADE, Edmunds.com, HBO.com, CBS Sportsline, Oncology.com and AllBusiness.
As Director of Community Product Management at MarketTools, Carole led a team of developers, designers and producers to build the Idea Network platform. Idea Networks help companies like Frito-Lay foster product innovation using the wisdom of the community. Carole also oversaw the complete redesign of ZoomPanel Moms, where companies like Sylvan Learning and Disney gather insight from moms across the United States.
Prior to joining MarketTools, Carole was the community manager for Yahoo! 360 and Yahoo! Groups. Her team introduced Moderator Central, a resource for Yahoo! Groups moderators worldwide. Carole wrote the product blogs for Yahoo! Groups and Yahoo! 360, and served as a member advocate with the product and engineering teams. While working in the Search & Marketplace team, Carole was the project manager for community integration initiatives on Yahoo! Autos, Yahoo! Travel, Yahoo! Shopping and Yahoo! Local.
At BabyCenter, Carole managed the largest community of new and expectant mothers on the Web. She was part of the team that designed and launched a new BBS in 2003. At TechTV she managed the Interact Department, which provided community features for all of TechTV.com's program portals, including the late, lamented "Screen Savers".
Carole earned a Master of Arts in Education from the University of San Francisco, focusing on distance learning and educational technology. She has a BA from San Diego State University.
