Photo Credit: Scott Spitzer

• Abby Covert’s “Design Systems, Not Stuff “ Covert_Systems_not_Stuff
• Nick Floro’s “HTML5: Beyond the Hype” Floro_HTML5_Beyond_the_Hype_1-100 & Floro_HTML5_Beyond_the_Hype_101-192
• Jessica Ivins’  ”Useful, Usable & Desirable: Designing for Users” Ivins_Designing_for_Users
• Mat Shaffer’s “Making it Rain: The Cloud from a user’s perspective” Shaffer_Automating_the_Cloud
• Matthew Soldo’s “Understanding Platform-as-a-Service” Soldo_Heroku

Our keynote will be an interview of Steve Wozniak, technology pioneer, conducted by Kevin Werbach. Werbach is an Associate Professor of Legal Studies at The Wharton School. He organizes Supernova, a well known executive technology conference, co-led the review of the FCC for the Obama-Biden Transition Project, and is an acknowledged expert in gamification (he’ll be teaching a free gamification course via Coursera this summer). Woz and Werbach will have a free ranging conversation that’s sure to cover topics from beginnings of the personal computing revolution to the rise of smartphones and tablets.

We’ve also added an additional track to the conference devoted to the Cloud. You can’t talk about the Cloud without mentioning Amazon’s offerings, and we have Amazon’s Chief Solutions Architect, Mark Ryland, to walk people through using AWS Cloud Storage. Platform as a Service (PaaS) fans will be happy to hear that Matthew Soldo, Director of Product Management for Heroku, will be covering what PaaS is and how you can fit it into your plans. Finally, Alex Hillman, co-founder of IndyHall, the Philly coworking space and community, and founder of Postmark and Brendan McCorkle, founder of CloudMine, will talk about using the cloud as part of a real world product.

After the conference stick around for the happy hour and WWC Tech Expo featuring a slate of topics that we just couldn’t fit into the conference schedule. Gamification, augmented reality, and small cooperative unmanned robots are just some of the topics you’ll be able to learn about at the WWC Tech Expo, which is open to all registered attendees.

Register now to make sure you don’t miss this great event.

In what we’re expecting to be a sort of “You got your chocolate in my peanut butter” situation, the tech expo will run alongside the post-conference happy hour.  It’ll be a less formal and not as detailed as the conference proper and we hope to have a least one thing you’ll walk away from thinking “That was really cool.” We’ll have tables scattered throughout the happy hour area that you can stop by to see talk directly to our happy hour presenters. We’re also having a lineup of 15 minutes presentations in an adjacent space.  All of this is happening while you overlook the city of Philadelphia on the eight floor of Huntsman Hall.

The Wharton Web Conference tech expo: fun and interesting things you can learn about with a beer in one hand and a plate of food in the other. We hope you can join us for this great event which is included in your ticket price!

Haven’t signed up yet? Sign up today!

Update! We just extended our Happy Hour Showcase event by an hour. Happy hour will now run from 4:45 until 7pm! But you can’t join us unless you’ve signed up.

Woz has had a far ranging career starting as an engineer for HP, co-founding Apple Computer, founding the US Festival, and founding the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Since Woz left Apple in 1985, he has devoted himself to improving education. He has “adopted” the Los Gatos School District and provides both hands-on teaching and donations of state-of-the-art technology.

Woz received the National Medal of Technology, the highest honor bestowed on America’s leading innovator, in 1985 for his contributions to technology. In 2000, he was inducted into the Inventors Hall of Fame and was awarded the prestigious Heinz Award for Technology, The Economy and Employment for single-handedly designing the first personal computer and for then redirecting his lifelong passion for mathematics and electronics toward lighting the fires of excitement for education in grade school students and their teachers.

Wozniak currently serves as Chief Scientist for Fusion-IO.

The Wharton Web Conference takes place on July 10th in Jon Huntsman Hall on the campus of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. The conference brings together programmers, designers, project managers, and other IT professionals in Higher Education who are concerned about improving the experience for their users.

Check out the full schedule of the conference for a list of all the over sessions taking place over the course of the day.

1. Experts: All of our speakers are experts in their fields, and you just aren’t exposed to these kinds of people everyday. While you’re at the Wharton Web Conference you’ll have the opportunity to get the speaker’s input about whatever problem you might be facing. Sure, you can pick up a book about any of the topics on our schedule, but just try asking that book a specific question about your Web site deployment.

Here are some speaker highlights:

• Stephanie Sullivan Rewis on HTML5
• Patrick Haney on Designing for Change
• Whitney Hess on Universal Design Principles
• Derek Featherstone on Coding for Accessibility

Not to mention our two keynote speakers: Barry Schwartz and Molly Holzschlag and a day of workshops before the conference begins. Check out the full schedule for more information.

1. The conference within a conference: The Wharton Web Conference is actually two conferences in one: the first is the actual conference composed of the scheduled workshops and sessions. The second is the chance conversations you have with fellow attendees in the hallways, before/after sessions, and during lunch. There hasn’t been a technology invented yet that can replicate the informal networking that happens during the Wharton Web Conference.

In addition to time between sessions, and during lunch, you’ll have a chance to network with your fellow attendees during a number of optional dinners we’re planning for Wednesday evening.

1. Breaking your routine: Getting out of the office is a great way to recharge your creativity, and spending time with other web professionals learning new things will supercharge you. You’ll go back to your work with a fresh perspective and new knowledge to overcome challenging projects (or start brand new ones that never occurred to you before). Not to mention the collegiate atmosphere of Penn’s beautiful urban campus fosters big ideas and deep thinking.

The Wharton Web Conference is well worth the time, and money, required to attend.

For all those pondering whether or not you should register for this year’s Wharton Web conference, here’s the answer: you should.

But you don’t have to take my word for it. Check out this video featuring several attendees from last year’s conference talking about what a great experience they had, and how much they learned.

If that isn’t enough to make you click register, then check out the two keynotes from the conference last year. Cory Ondrekja and Don Norman were big hits, and this year people will be talking about Barry Schwartz and Molly E. Holzschlag’s keynotes just as much.

Barry Schwartz: bestselling author, TED Talker (three times over), professor of psychology at Swarthmore, and…the first keynote presenter of this year’s Wharton Web Conference.

In his bestselling book “The Paradox of Choice,” Schwartz posits, contrary to popular belief, more choice does not necessarily equal more happiness. In fact, an overwhelming amount of choice can cause more problems than it solves though coming to the Wharton Web Conference is certainly a great choice.
With his most recent book “Practical Wisdom” Schwartz, and co-author Kenneth Sharpe, hope to awaken and engage an Aristotelian trait that is often in short supply: wisdom.

Barry Schwartz’s keynote takes place on Wednesday, July 13th at 9am, check out the posted schedule for the full list of workshops and sessions taking place at the Wharton Web Conference from July 12-14th in Philadelphia, PA.