Maker Cities

Peter Hirshberg serves as an innovation advisor to cities and companies. He has created two centers of urban innovation from scratch: City Innovate Foundation, an organization formed with The San Francisco Mayor’s office, UC Berkeley, and the MIT Media Lab; and Gray Area Foundation for the Arts, one of San Francisco’s most vibrant and civic-minded arts organizations, a center for digital media education, incubation, performance, and exhibition. He is CEO and founder of the Re:Imagine Group helping brands with strategy and marketing in a world of empowered connected audiences. He’s worked with executive teams at Best Buy, Sony, IBM, Verizon, Time Warner, Unilever, GE, Estee Lauder, Telefonica, and many others on their innovation and digital growth strategies. Previously, Hirshberg was Chairman of Technorati, the pioneering social media search engine and advertising network with over a billion monthly page views. During his nine-year tenure at Apple Computer, Hirshberg headed Enterprise Marketing, where he grew Apple’s large business and government revenue to $1 billion annually. His board and advisor positions have included Active Video Networks, Technorati, Build Public, The Computer History Museum, and Gray Area Foundation for the Arts. He is a Senior Fellow at the USC Annenberg Center on Communication Leadership Policy and a Henry Crown Fellow of the Aspen Institute. He is co-author of The Maker City: A Practical Guide To the Reinvention of our Cities.

Dale Dougherty is the founder and CEO of Maker Media, Inc. in Sebastopol, CA. Maker Media produces MAKE: Magazine, which launched in 2005, and the Maker Faire, which was held first in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2006. One-hundred Faires all over the world drew 550,000 attendees in 2013. In the spring of 2014, the White House hosted its first Maker Faire. In 2011 Dougherty was honored at the White House as a “Champion of Change” through an initiative that honors Americans who are “doing extraordinary things in their communities to out-innovate, out-educate and out-build the rest of the world.” At the 2014 White House Maker Faire he was introduced by President Obama as an American innovator making significant contributions to the fields of education and business.

Xanthe Matychak is the Assistant Director of the Hardware Accelerator at REV Ithaca, where she helps inventors become entrepreneurs. She also teaches design studio in Ithaca College’s Department of Environmental Science and Wells College’s Center for Business and Entrepreneurship. Xanthe collaborates with Wicked Device, an electronics company in Ithaca, NY, makers of Air Quality Egg, a web-connected air quality monitor. Xanthe is an Infy Maker Award winner. She holds an MFA in Industrial Design from Rochester Institute of Technology.

Leah Gilliam has channeled her life-long fascination with systems and how things work into a diverse career with a focus on how people create and invent through technology. As the VP for Education, Strategy & Innovation at Girls Who Code, Gilliam leverages her experience working at the intersection of learning, creativity, and technology to help close the achievement and gender gaps in computer science fields.

Noreen O’Loughlin, the Program Director for Made in NYC, is an integrated marketing executive with a branding and marketing career of over thirty years in public radio and commercial media organizations. Noreen leads Made in NYC for the Pratt Center, a marketing initiative and industry network created to help New York City’s manufacturers capitalize on the extraordinary strength of the city’s brand to increase sales and create jobs. She is working to significantly increase public awareness of MINYC, expand services and grow engagement with consumers and businesses. Noreen coordinates the support of Pratt faculty and students to provide marketing and advertising assistance to individual NYC manufacturers to improve their marketing capacity. Prior to joining the Pratt Center, Noreen served as VP, Integrated Marketing and General Manager for the Jerome L. Greene Performance Space at New York Public Radio. She was instrumental in creating a new brand identity that embraced emerging digital, traditional media and live event platforms and created new revenue streams for the non-profit organization.