Facebook joins Dublin Web Summit lineup

With seven weeks to go until October’s Dublin Web Summit, a major keynote speaker from Facebook has been announced; Ethan Beard. Ethan is one of eight speakers announced this week, with over 60 speakers planned for October’s event.

Ethan Beard resigned as Google’s Director of Social Media in March 2008 to join Facebook, where is now serves as Director of the Facebook Developer Network, overseeing developer relations and marketing for Facebook Platform and Facebook Connect. Paddy Cosgrave, the events main organiser, stated that as a senior executive at Facebook in Palo Alto, it’s “great to have him in Dublin”.

Other speakers announced include;

• Ben Parr: Ben Parr, Mashable’s editor, spoke at a previous summit in March 2011, addressing issues like the tech bubble and where the next Silicon Valley may be.
• Cindy Gallop: Cindy is founder and CEO of IfWeRanTheWorld.com, a “real-world experiment in tapping good intentions and turning them into tangible, do-able microactions”. Cindy is also the former Chair of ad agency Bartie Bogle Hegarty in New York.
• Maz Nadjm: Maz is head of Social Media at Ogilvy, one of the largest marketing communications networks in the world. Maz is responsible for developing and helping to deliver further social media growth opportunities for agencies and their clients.
• Werner Vogels: Werner is the CTO (Chief Technology Officer) and Vice President of Amazon.com, the world’s largest online retailer.
• Colm Lyon: Founder of Realex Payments, payment processors of over €10 billion per annum for thousands of businesses in Ireland and Europe.
• Niall McEntegart: Niall is Yahoo!’s Director of Datacentre Operations in EMEA (Europe, the Middle East and Africa). Since joining Yahoo! in 2006, Niall has seen their datacentre operating footprint increase ten-fold.
• Christian Belady: Christian is General Manager for Datacentre Advanced Development at Microsoft. He is responsible for driving research and development of technologies that allow Microsoft to achieve broad-scale adoption in their datacentres.
• Eachan Fletcher: Eachan is Vice President of Technology at travel website Expedia. Eachan has previously worked at Chief Architect and leading development teams at Betfair, and also as CIO (Chief Information Officer) at Sporting Index.

You can read about the summit’s other previously announced speakers Jawed Karim, Eric Ly, Michael Birch, Liam Casey and Chris Horn here and here.

The seventh Dublin Web Summit is really beginning to take shape, with a list of hundreds of attendees published on the official website. The Dublin Web Summit team have also published some photos of the Pub Summit held earlier this week on their Facebook page.

Along with official media partners Bloomberg, TechCrunch and Wired, RTÉ has announced that they’ll be officially covering the event. Of course, we’ll also be there on both days to cover all of the event’s proceedings.