Future of Forums: The 1 & 5 Year Outlook

Format: Panel Discussion
Many refer to forums as the "original social network" -- they were bringing individuals together en masse long before Facebook, MySpace or Twitter did.  In a space that has already covered so much ground, what's next?  In this panel four forum & community experts will discuss the trends they anticipate sticking, which will likely subside and the overall direction they see the forum space moving in.

Steve Dodd

VP Business Development, Effyis / Boardreader
Steve has been leading the business development efforts for emerging technology companies for many years with a focus on Marketing and CRM applications. Social Media and more specifically Social Community / Forum applications have been a passion since first introduced to this market in 2004.

Jamie Vondruska

Founder & CEO, Vortex Media Group
Jamie has been involved in building forum communities for more than 13 years and is the founder of VWvortex, one of the largest and longest running automotive discussion forums. Jamie has been involved in the creation of a vast number of websites including VWvortex.com, Fourtitude.com, Swedespeed.com and Kilometermagazine.com.

Patrick Clinger

Founder & CEO, ProBoards
Designing and hosting forums since 1998, Patrick Clinger has been involved with forum software for more than a decade.  Patrick founded ProBoards in 2000 after coding his own custom forum system.  Now 11 years running, ProBoards is the largest free forum host with over 3 million forums created and 15 million monthly unique visitors.  Patrick is currently overseeing the development of ProBoards' next generation forum software: ProBoards Version 5, which promises to introduce a whole host of new functionality and features that provide the true Web 2.0 experience.

Yumio Saneyoshi

VP of Product, Lithium
Yumio is the VP of Product at Lithium, a company whose products power many Fortune 500 companies' customer forums and communities (including Sephora, Best Buy, Verizon, and Home Depot).  Prior to Lithium, Yumio served as VP of Product at Fixya (a 20 million user community focused on repairing electronics and cars) and was one of the "founders" of Yahoo! Answers, one of the biggest Q&A forums in the world.  He has a PhD in Economics from Harvard, where he studied incentive theory.

Mark O'Sullivan

Founder & CEO, Vanilla Forums
Mark O'Sullivan is an entrepreneur and a developer. Mark created Vanilla, one of the most popular open source discussion forum packages on the web. Vanilla has been used to help grow community by over 400,000 sites around the world.