We have invited some really good keynotes for the first edition of our WebTech Congress!

>> Nicolas Brasseur and John Rizzo, founders of JavaBlackBelt platform and community dedicated to providing technical and study exams about Java related technologies

John and Nicolas both have Master's in Computer Science, are Java drill sergeants and senior developers.
They have taught for many companies like IBM, Sun Microsystems and Siemens as well as for various Belgian government agencies. They teach to a variety of classrooms sizes, from one to one hundred developers.
From their developing and teaching experiences they've devised unique pedagogical tools for visual learning: TechMaps and TechAnims. A TechMap is a diagram that explains a technology with minimal words. A TechAnim is a Flash animation with subtitled narration, divided into sections that can replayed or skipped. The narration and subtitles can be switched off, making the animation also a study tool.

>> Noël Jaffré, Vice President, International Technical Field Operations bij Fatwire (Frankrijk).

In his current role, Noël leads the international teams that provide pre- and post-sales engineering, support, training, and professional services.
Noël has worked with the Content Server solution since 1996, when he joined Open Market as a Senior Pre-sales Engineer. Since then, he has held a number of senior roles in product management, product marketing, and international technical management.
Previously, Noël was a technical account manger at Oracle and a pre-sales engineer at Digital Equipment Corporation. He began his career at Thales S.A., formerly known as Thomson-CSF, as a CAD/CAM 3D mechanical designer.
Noël has a degree in mechanical engineering and master degree in computer science.

>> Luc Van de Velde, director Developer & Platform Group  at Microsoft Belgium

Luc Van de Velde is director Developer & Platform Group  at Microsoft Belgium. In this role he leads a team of specialists that are responsible for representing Microsoft's vision for the future of technology both in development as platform. The current focus of the team is on SOA & Web 2.0 technologies including .Net 3.0 and the SOI platform to run these solutions.
Luc joined Microsoft in 1999 and has held a number of significant roles within the company since that date. Initially, he was consulting manager working with Enterprise Customers & Partners and then moved on to become the partner development & marketing  lead. Before that he worked at various services and software vendors in the development tools and database space.

>> Edwin Mol, Founder Siteware

Founder of Siteware, a webdesign company specialized in e-commerce solutions.
Edwin created "Sitestore" which is a java based e-commerce platform build using various open-source frameworks. Sitestore can be used in different e-commerce scenario's and has many features such as: product management, category management, shipping and ordering management, order handling, inventory management, promotions, multi-language, mailing list, notifications, content management system, e-mail templates and others.
It is search engine optimized and can be run in a multi-site setup, being able to administer different web shops from a single interface.
Previously Edwin worked as Chief Java Architect for Real Software.
As a developer/architect Edwin has acquired a lot of experience with web application frameworks.

>> Ate Douma, Software Architect at Hippo

Ate Douma is Software Architect and Portal and Portlet specialist at open-source based CMS vendor Hippo in The Netherlands.
Ate is Java Community Process (JCP) Expert Group member for JSR-286: Portlet Specification 2.0 and JSR 301: Portlet Bridge Specification for JavaServer Faces.
He is also an active committer for the Apache Jetspeed Enterprise Portal and Apache Portals Bridges, Project Management Committe (PMC) member for Apache Portals, and initial creator of the Apache Portals Struts Bridge, now part of Apache Portals Bridges

>> Luc Claes, CTO at Contact Office

Before joining ContactOffice since day one as CTO, Luc Claes was a researcher in software engineering at the University of Namur and held top R&D management positions at Unina and Telindus.
Passionate about software creation since almost 30 years, he designed, architected and wrote countless programs from device drivers to meta-modeling tools.
At ContactOffice, his current topics of interest include GWT, transparent data persistency, data synchronization and communication modeling.
Luc is an industrial engineer in electronics and holds a master degree in computer sciences.

>> Arjen Poutsma, Senior Consultant at Interface 21

Arjen Poutsma is a senior consultant at Interface21 with more than ten years' experience in commercial software environments. During this time he has worked with both Java EE and Microsoft .NET. Three years ago, Arjen started to specialise in Web Services and Service Oriented Architectures. During this period, he has worked for some of the largest organizations in the world helping them better understand enterprise Java and how SOAs fit into their organizations. In part from his experiences with these organizations, Arjen founded the open source Spring Web Services project and continues to lead the technical direction and development as the project lead for Spring Web Services. This project aims at facilitating development of document-driven web services.
Arjen has also contributed to various other open source projects, including XFire, NEO and others. He is a regular speaker at Java and SOA conferences, including JavaPolis, The Spring Experience, JavaZone, W-JAX, and many others.