Monetate Open Source Prize

Jay Adelson

Jay is the current CEO of SimpleGeo, which he joined in November 2010. He is best known as the co-founder and CEO of Digg, a social-voting news site. He is also the co-founder of Revsion3, a Web video studio that produces Diggnation, Tekzilla, and many others.

In 2008, Jay was selected by Time Magazine as one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World. In 2003, he testified before the U.S. House of Representatives Select Committee on Homeland Security Subcommittee on Cybersecurity, Science and Research & Development, as part of an industry panel on "The Private Sector's Role in Keeping America's Cyberspace Secure."

Alex Payne

Alex is co-founder and CTO of BankSimple, a startup working to improve personal banking through better design, customer service, and technology. Previously, Alex was Platform Lead at Twitter, where he worked on their API and backend systems. He's a longtime blogger on technology topics and a frequent speaker at conferences. Alex is the co-author of "Programming Scala" (O'Reilly, 2009) and the organizer of the annual Emerging Languages event, which is now an official track at OSCON.

Gabe Weinberg

Gabe is the founder and principal engineer of DuckDuckGo, a zero-click search engine launched in 2009. The MIT graduate successfully built his company on open source and has been an active member of Philadelphia’s venture capital community, having launched Hacker Angels, a group of “hacker” angel investors.

For local groups, he also started a hackathon group for Philly Startups (http://www.groupomatic.com/haqsm3vj) and what he refers to as a FOSS tithing movement (http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/11/help-me-start-a-foss-tithing...)

Don Coleman

Don is Director of Consulting with Chariot Solutions, a consulting firm that builds custom software. He loves technology and uses open source software whenever possible. Lately he has been concentrating on building software for mobile devices.

Aaron Feng

Aaron is well connected in the Philly tech community. He spends a lot of time going to different tech events like local conferences and user groups. He runs a few groups himself including PhillyLambda, PhillyAWS, and occasionally, Philly Startup Hackathons. Aaron is currently the Principal Software Engineer at Algorithmics, Inc, a leading provider of risk solutions for financial organizations from around the world. Personally, he enjoys face-to-face networking with like-minded individuals and also learning various technologies from passionate people.

Alexey Komissarouk

Alexey is currently a CS Junior at Penn. In his short career, he has found time to co-found fbDevDir.com creating a Facebook Application development shop that provided marketing agencies, enterprise IT and startups with resources to design and develop Facebook applications. He then joined Facebook where he helped produce a framework to track user data access for the recently announced Application Dashboard.

For PennApps 2010 and PennApps 2011 Mobile, Alexey organized a 48-hour hackathon, the first of its kind at UPenn. Alexey also took first prize at CobolOnRails for creating an alternate UI for Penn’s existing Course Review System.

Here is what Alexey had to say about open source projects in the Philly area, “I think open source is an awesome way for developers to collaborate on shared problems in an open and meritocratic way that is fundamentally more interesting than any other profession. Philly has a fast-growing tech scene. Supporting, growing and enabling the Philly tech community is a net win for all sides involved.”

Tom Janofsky

Tom is the Director of Engineering at Monetate, the leading independent provider of testing, targeting, and personalization for websites. At Monetate he enjoys working on web and data problems at scale. He is an active participant in the Philadelphia area technology and startup community. Prior to Monetate he started and ran a software consulting business.

Jeffrey Persch

Jeff has engineered products for numerous Philadelphia and San Francisco startups. As the Director of Architecture at Monetate, which serves up millions of customized web pages every day for companies like QVC and Urban Outfitters, he enjoys the challenge of large-scale, cloud-based data management systems. Prior to joining Monetate as the company's first engineer, Jeff was a software architect at Probaris, a leading provider of trusted identity software and services.