How many of you are going to the AJAX Seminar?

AJAX seems to have a lot of momenutm going for it (at least it seems so or maybe there are a lot of people ready to exploit it to make a few bucks..only time shalt tell!)

But in any case, looks like we are already having the FIRST Ajax Seminar in NYC on March 13 and San Jose on April 24.

Here is a list of some of the speakers that are scheduled to speak at the seminar:

Jesse James GarrettFather of AJAX
Jesse James Garrett is the Director of User Experience Strategy and a founding partner of Adaptive Path, the world's premier user experience consulting company. He is author of The Elements of User Experience (New Riders), and is recognized as a pioneer in the field of information architecture. Jesse's clients include AT&T, Intel, Crayola, Hewlett-Packard, Motorola, and National Public Radio. Since starting in the Internet industry in 1995, Jesse has had a hands-on role in almost every aspect of Web development, from interface design and programming to content development and high-level strategy. Today, information architects around the world depend on the tools and concepts he has developed, including the widely acclaimed "Elements of User Experience" model. He is co-founder of the Information Architecture Institute, the only professional organization dedicated to information architecture. He is also a frequent speaker and writer whose work has appeared in numerous publications, including New Architect, Digital Web, and Boxes and Arrows.


Scott DietzenOne of the Fathers of WebLogic and J2EEPh.D.,

President and CTO, Zimbra Prior to Zimbra, Scott was CTO of BEA Systems where he was the principal architect of the technology strategy for the WebLogic, which drove the company from $61 million in revenue for the year prior to WebLogic's acquisition to over $1 billion. He was also one of BEA's top spokespersons. He is widely credited with helping put together the J2EE standard, launching the Web application server category, launching the Java Community Process, and driving the web services collaboration with Microsoft and IBM. Prior to WebLogic, Scott was Principal Technologist for Transarc (acquired by IBM), a developer of distributed transaction and information sharing systems. In addition to working on Internet infrastructure since 1991, Scott has managed teams focused on sales, marketing, product management, and standards. He earned his Ph.D. and M.S. in Computer Science and B.S. in Applied Mathematics and Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University.

Bill Scott AJAX Evangelist of Yahoo!: Bill Scott, one of the top AJAX experts in the country, is an Interaction Designer and Ajax Evangelist at Yahoo! He is part of the newly formed Design and Practices Team working with teams throughout Yahoo! to create a rich experience on the web. Before joining Yahoo! Bill founded the User Experience Team at Sabre Airline Solutions, part of Sabre Holdings. During that stint he also co-founded Rico, an open source JavaScript framework for creating Ajax & DHTML web applications. Over the past 20 years Bill has been involved in designing and creating user interfaces for video games, military war games, 3d graphics, oil and gas research, software development environments, supply chain planning, and various other scientific and business domains. He posts his musings about user experience on his blog.

David Heinemeier HanssonCreator of Ruby on Rails
US-based since November, David Heinemeier Hansson is the development lead of Rails, also known as Ruby on Rails, which the official Ruby on Rails website irreverently describes as "a full-stack, open-source web framework in Ruby for writing real-world applications with joy and less code than most frameworks spend doing XML sit-ups." He has had help from a lot of contributors. David is the creator of applications like Instiki, Basecamp, and Ta-da, and has now joined the Chicago-based team of 37signals.com, a privately-held company founded in 1999 and committed to building the best web-based software products possible with the least number of features necessary. David will give his first presentation on “AJAX in Rails” at the “Real-World AJAX” one-day seminar.

There are plenty of other speakers as well and the list looks impressive.

The cost varies from about $1000 to about $1300 (a bit expensive considering it's only for 1 day)