The Pop!Tech Blog

Kristen Taylor

Kristen Taylor is the Digital Content and Community Manager for PopTech, and she lives in Brooklyn. Besides connecting the intelligent readers of this blog, she plans to build on her previous experience at PBS working on Engage and the Knight Foundation launching Knight Pulse for the PopTech Hub. Frequently found at farmers’ markets, she writes about food and culture on her personal blog, kthread.com, and her research focuses on niche networks of participation with food, currency, and shelter.

Michelle Riggen-Ransom

Michelle Riggen-Ransom is a writer who focuses on social media, technology, nature, parenting and increasingly, the intersection of those topics. She is also co-founder and Communications Director for BatchBlue Software, which makes online tools for small businesses. Having lived at various times in Boston, London, Rome, Florida, Los Angeles and Seattle, Michelle currently lives in Providence, Rhode Island with her husband and their two budding naturalist/techies.

Janette Crawford

Janette Crawford is a journalist, blogger and consultant in Kansas City, Mo., with varying degrees of specialty in sustainability, design, social media and social innovation. She writes for magazines, writes the ethical fashion blog FashionLovesPeople.com and manages communications campaigns for various clients, including the web startup Storenvy.com.

Sage Dilts

Sage Dilts studied at Hampshire College and Portland State University, where she focused on community development and spatial theory. After a stint in federal politics working on healthcare and economic justice legislation, she moved to Berkeley, California. Here she is developing the concept of living Mind to Mouth, an effort to use limited resources to eat and live well. Currently in blog format, mindtomouth.org will be expanding into an online collaborative toolset to renew the potential of domestic skills as a way to practically address global food insecurity and health.

Heather Fleming

Heather Fleming is a co-founder and Director of Catapult Design, a product and technology firm that serves developing world markets. Catapult Design’s clients are organizations working in impoverished communities with technology needs – including rural electrification, water purification and transport, food security, and health. Before starting Catapult, she worked more than five years as a product design consultant in Silicon Valley, designing for a diverse range of clients. She also co-founded and led a volunteer group focused on developing world design, connecting to her a variety of NGOs in developing nations.

Erik Hersman

Erik is the co-founder of Ushahidi (which means “testimony” in Swahili), a website created to map the reported incidents of violence happening during the post-election crisis in Kenya. Currently, he is working with a team of mostly-African programmers to use what they have learned from building Ushahidi to create a free and open source engine that makes it easier to crowdsource crisis information and visualize data.

Erik Hersman is also the founder of AfriGadget, a multi-author website that showcases stories of Africans solving everyday problems with little more than their creativity and ingenuity. Fascinated by micro-entrepreneurs, gadgets and improvisation, he is proving that technology is changing Africa - daily.

Raised in Sudan and Kenya, Erik brings unique energy and insight to the world of technology and innovation – bridging the gap between Africa and Silicon Valley. An avid blogger Erik writes two different technology blogs including: AfriGadget and WhiteAfrican. One dedicated to low-tech African ingenuity, and the other to high-tech mobile and web changes happening throughout Africa.

Bobbie Johnson

Bobbie Johnson is a journalist, blogger and writer based in Brighton, England. He has been technology correspondent at the Guardian since 2005, covering cutting edge research, new thinking and all aspects of the hi-tech industry. As part of his work he has interviewed luminaries including Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Sir Tim Berners-Lee. His interests include the social impact of new technologies, robotics and the history of innovation.

Tim Leberecht

Tim Leberecht is the VP of Marketing and Communications at frog design,
the global innovation firm that has helped Apple, GE, HP, Sony, and many
other leading brands create and bring to market groundbreaking products
and services. Previously, Tim was the head of corporate communications
with Mindjet Corporation, a provider of enterprise productivity
software. Prior to Mindjet, he served as press chief for the Athens 2004
International Olympic Torch Relay, in marketing communications for
Deutsche Telekom, and in an interactive marketing agency in Berlin. He
started his professional career as a musician. Tim writes the iPlot blog
and is a member of the CNET blog network. He has been published and
quoted in a number of publications and has spoken about marketing,
innovation, and design at conferences in the US, Europe, and Asia.

Alexis Madrigal

Alexis Madrigal is a newsman following energy and science at Wired.com. His work appears in Dwell, Earth2Tech, and the Sustainable Industries Journal and he’s spoken at SXSW, E3, and Webvisions. Trained as an analyst, he’s interested in defining how technology is changing human beings’ brains, consumption patterns, and environments.

Ashni Mohnot

Ashni grew up in Bombay and studied at Stanford University. She is director of education for Stanford’s Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute, which hosts the world’s largest collection of King documents. She also works for Mobile Metrix and directs Gumball University, an online portal to learn about social entrepreneurship and microfinance. She is also developing her own award-winning venture to eliminate the financial barrier to education through future income loans. Besides international development, social entrepreneurship, and fiction, she is interested in innovation, design, Silicon Valley startups, and emerging web technologies, specifically their application to advance the citizen sector.

Cordelia Newlin de Rojas

Cordelia Newlin de Rojas is PopTech’s Senior Eco-Initiatives Advisor. Cordelia brings to PopTech an eclectic background ranging from Japanese Art and Postal History auctions to pondering all manners of working life at The Work Foundation. It was during a brief stint rigging dinghies and windsurfers in Turkey, picking up yet another syringe and prophylactic washed up from a southern swell, that she heard her calling to become an advocate for issues of environmental degradation and inequality. Her background is in environmental sciences and she is passionate about water and climate change.

When not at her own desk, she can generally be found crawling under her coworkers’ desks, shutting off their power strips and pilfering their rubbish for recyclables.

Marcia Stepanek

Marcia Stepanek is Founding Editor-in-Chief of Contribute Media, a New
York-based magazine, website, and conference series about the new
people and ideas of giving. She also is publisher of Cause Global, an
acclaimed new blog about the new media trends and the use of social
media in social advocacy. She also blogs for the Stanford Social
Innovation Review and justmeans.com. Ms. Stepanek has received a
variety of awards for her work, including a George Polk award for
consumer journalism, a National Press Club award for Washington
correspondence, a New York Newswomens’ Club Front Page award for
internet commentary, and was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize. Ms.
Stepanek, who has covered the evolution of the internet and its impact
on society, commerce, and the workplace since 1994, is a frequent
speaker on the subject of social media and new trends in philanthropy,
and she moderates and produces New Conversations for Change, a
Manhattan forum series highlighting social entrepreneurs and
innovation in social change advocacy.

Andrew Zolli

Andrew Zolli is a well-known expert in global foresight and innovation, studying the complex trends at the intersection of technology, sustainability and global society that are shaping our future. He is widely recognized as a writer, thinker, commentator and speaker on futures-related topics. As Pop!Tech’s Curator, Andrew develops the program, theme, speakers, content and the structure of Pop!Tech’s conferences, and has co-led the development of Pop!Tech’s social-innovation-related programs. Andrew also serves as a Fellow of the National Geographic Society. His work and ideas have appeared in a wide array of media outlets, including PBS, the New York Times, National Public Radio, Fast Company, American Demographics, Popular Science, and many others.