We’re thrilled to share the time with some amazing keynotes and session leaders: Lane Becker of Get Satisfaction; Nathan Curtis from EightShapes, Kristina Halvorson of Brain Traffic, Peter Merholz of Adaptive Path, the Banff Leadership Arts Ensemble and the nForm team, with more to come!

Lane Becker, President, Get Satisfaction

Lane is one of the masterminds behind Get Satisfaction, the support and help site that really helps you.

Get Satisfaction was created as a place where customers and companies can come together to answer each others’ questions: questions about shipping, pricing, fulfillment, the product itself, and myriad other details. By putting all of these conversations in one place — and holding nothing back — Get Satisfaction has created a new way to not just handle customer service, but to explore all the things we collectively love and hate about our favorite products and services, and the companies that offer them.

Lane is also one of the co-founders of Adaptive Path, and continues to serve on the Board of Directors. While based in San Francisco, Lane originally hails from Manitoba.

Nathan Curtis, Principal, EightShapes

Nathan Curtis is a founder and principal at EightShapes, LLC, a user experience consulting firm based in Washington, DC. Nathan has been practicing varied disciplines within user experience design since 1996, and areas of interest include information architecture, interaction design, usability research, and front-end development. He started EightShapes in 2006 and has helped improve the user experience for clients in Washington DC and across the United States.

Prior to founding EightShapes, Nathan led user experience design projects at Sprint Nextel. Before that, Nathan was a principal owner at BIG fish in Washington DC, which was preceded by his first job at SAS Institute in Cary, North Carolina, in the R&D group for statistical software applications. Nathan is educated in mathematics and statistics, having obtained a BS summa cum laude from Virginia Tech in 1995 followed by a masters degree from the University of Chicago in 1996.

Nathan enjoys writing about and realizing the potential of various tools of user experience designers. He has presented at many conferences and published articles on patterns, components, wireframes and deliverables. He writes and published UX tools at http://unify.eightshapes.com and currently lives in Fairfax, VA with his wife and two children.

Kristina Halvorson

Kristina Halvorson is the author of Content Strategy for the Web and is widely recognized as one of the country’s leading Web content strategists. For more than a decade, Kristina has led content projects for hundreds of websites across dozens of industries. She is a passionate advocate for Web content strategy and speaks regularly on the topic to audiences around the country.

As president of Brain Traffic, Kristina oversees the agency’s three core service offerings: Web content strategy, information architecture, and writing for Web sites. Brain Traffic content experts collaborate closely to make Web site content more useful, usable, consistent, and contextual.

Kristina is a past president of the Minnesota Interactive Marketing Association (MIMA), one of the country’s largest and most active IMAs. Her professional background includes marketing, sales, public relations, and playwriting. When she’s not running around the country trying to annihilate bad Web copy, Kristina can be found in St. Paul, Minnesota, chasing after her two kids and enjoying the weather year-round.

Peter Merholz

Peter is President and one of the founders of Adaptive Path. He recently co-authored Subject to Change with three of his colleagues, and has recently started blogging for Harvard Business in addition to his longstanding personal blog. For more than six years, Peter has been instrumental in developing Adaptive Path’s ability to provide world-class consulting, training, and public events.

At Adaptive Path, Peter began with a focus on information architecture, and over time expanded his knowledge to include product strategy, user research, and practice development. He’s worked with a wide variety of clients, from large companies such as Intel, Vanguard, and United Airlines, to smaller, avant-garde firms like SocialText (an enterprise wiki startup) and Rojo (an RSS feedreader acquired by Six Apart).

Peter’s personal blog, http://peterme.com/, and his essays for Adaptive Path demonstrate his foresight on issues of information architecture, organizational change, and product strategy. He has the perhaps dubious distinction of coining of the term “blog” in 1999 when it was still a nascent genre.

The Banff Leadership Arts Ensemble

The Banff Leadership Arts Ensemble is a group of the Banff Centre’s Leadership Development creativity facilitators, community artists and adult educators. This ensemble works collaboratively in a leadership/arts lab environment to explore, test, and define connections surfacing between leadership, artistic mediums and creative processes. Canux has been delighted to welcome Colin Funk and other ensemble members the past four years— he and the rest of the team at the Leadership Development group are fantastic, and we’re planning on an amazing program from them this year.