A Preview: This Year’s Web 2 Program (Newly Added Speakers!)

I may have been “on vacation” over much of the past month, but as usual, I was working, and part of my work was framing out and filling in the program for the sixth annual Web 2 Summit. Tim O’Reilly and I had a very hard job trying to top last year’s program, given it featured Lance Armstrong, Al Gore, Edgar Bronfman, John Doerr, Jerry Yang, and so many more.  

But I think we’ve managed to top it. Pasted below is a note we sent out recently with an overview of the program. But even since then, we’ve had a couple of pretty major new additions, both from the world of government and policy:

– Aneesh Chopra –  America’s first ever appointed CTO will join us this year, in conversation with Tim O’Reilly (for Tim’s take and a video of Chopra, click here). A charasmatic figure and proven leader, Chopra is charged with developing national strategies for technology investments – overseeing the U.S. Government’s $150 billion R&D budget.

– Austan Goolsbee – Chief U.S. Economist, member of the Council of Economic Advisers, serving the executive office as staff director on the President’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board (PERAB) – an outfit established within the Department of Treasury charged with analyzing and understanding the state of our financial markets, banking and commerce systems in order to inform decision making around economic policy. Between the CEA and PERAB, Austan is working to fix America’s economic standing both domestically and internationally. No small feat. (See his interview with Jon Stewart here).

More on the rest of the program:

Day one covers broad ground — opening with an in-depth conversation with Brian Roberts, Chairman and CEO of Comcast — and moving into a series of powerful High Order Bits and discussions around government policy and healthcare. Then Jeff Immelt, Chairman and CEO of GE, will share his thoughts before our dinner Q&A session with maverick Mark Cuban, hosted by ModernMom CEO and Dancing with the Stars champion Brooke Burke (Mark had his own stint on Dancing With the Stars, as you may recall…).

After kicking off with morning workshops, day two features insightful one-on-one conversations with Carol Bartz, CEO of Yahoo!, and Qi Lu, President at Microsoft, who’s leading the recently announced partnership between the two companies. Later in the day, media gurus will discuss the future of their industry, including Chairman Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. of the New York Times, CEO Dan Rosensweig of RedOctane, and CEO Richard Rosenblatt of Demand Media.

Mid-day we’ll check in with Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg, then launch our new High Order Ignite program — a session of dynamic, rapid-fire presentations that highlight ground-breaking and viable technologies that may well change the world. After a focused session on sensor and augmented reality applications, we’ll wrap up the day with Twitter CEO Evan Williams.

Last, but definitely not least, our third day will include conversations with the CEOs of Intel, Adobe, AOL, and Jon Miller, head of digital for Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation. We’re also bringing back our famed Teen Panel, where we’ll hear from the generation that will most shape the future success or failure of our industry’s efforts. And in a manner more fitting than we could have planned, we’ll close our conference with the man who started it all — Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web.

And those are just the highlights. Let’s not forget the slew of new speakers we’ve added including:

Erin McKean, CEO of Wordnik. (An API for language? Why not?!)

Sundar Pichai, VP at Google. (Responsible for Chrome OS, Google’s pointed response to Windows.)

Steve Schneider, Program Director at WestEd. (Walking the talk, Steve has plans to launch the first-ever standard for technology literacy across the U.S. by 2012.)

Cynthia Warner, President of Sapphire Energy. (If Sapphire’s biofuel plans scale, we have reason for hope in the world of energy.)

If you’d like to come to the Web 2.0 Summit, let us know by requesting an invite. I have discounts for Searchblog and Twitter readers (ping me here or jbat at battellemedia dot com), and I really look forward to seeing you October 20-22 at the Westin San Francisco!