Daniel Terdiman is a journalist, who has been published in both print and non-print media, including Time Magazine, The New York Times, Wired Magazine, CNET News.com, Wired News, Martha Stewart Weddings, Salon.com, Business 2.0, and the San Francisco Chronicle. He writes about a wide range of subjects from hi-tech to the web to sports.

He has also made speaking appearances at hi-tech conferences as an expert on electronic game development, including: State of Play, Webzine, SVForum, and Sex in Video Games. He has also written extensively about the online game Second Life. He has been a game development advisor for US National Public Radio (NPR) for the Talk of the Nation broadcast and for the BBC in the UK.

He edited and contributed as an author to Drama in the Desert (ISBN 0972178902), a book about the annual Burning Man arts festival, held in the Nevada Desert. He wrote The Entrepreneur's Guide to Second Life: Making Money in the Metaverse (ISBN 0470179147). He was the panel moderator at the Game Developers' Conference 2007, on the topic of Burning Man.

Daniel (Hebrew: דָּנִיֵּאל, Modern Daniyyel Tiberian Dāniyyêl ; Arabic: دانيال, meaning in Hebrew "God is my Judge") is the protagonist in the Book of Daniel of the Hebrew Bible. In the narrative, when Daniel was a young man, he was taken into Babylonian captivity where he was educated in Chaldean thought. However, he never converted to Neo-Babylonian ways. By Divine Wisdom from his God, Yahweh, he interpreted dreams and visions of kings, thus becoming a prominent figure in the court of Babylon. Eventually, he had apocalyptic visions of his own that have been interpreted as the Four monarchies. Some of the most famous tales of Daniel are: Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, The writing on the wall and Daniel in the lions' den.

In the third year of the reign of Jehoiakim (BC 606), Daniel and his friends Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah were among the young Jewish nobility carried off to Babylon. The four were chosen for their intellect and beauty to be trained as advisors to the Babylonian court,(Daniel 1) Daniel was given the name Belteshazzar, i.e., prince of Bel, or Bel protect the king!(not to be confused with the neo-Babylonian king, Belshazzar). Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah were given the Babylonian names, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, respectively.

Larry Harvey (born 1948) is the main co-founder of the Burning Man festival, along with his friend Jerry James. What started in 1986 as a summer solstice evening ritual burning of their artistic creation of an effigy of a man with a group of just a dozen people at San Francisco's Baker Beach, which then became an annual event that over 4 years grew to more than 800 people. In 1990, in collaboration with the SF Cacophony Society, the event moved to Labor Day weekend in the Black Rock Desert, where it has grown precipitously from a 3 day, 80 persons "zone trip," to an 8 day festival with over 50,000 "participants."

As the population grew by the mid '90's to top several thousands, the encampment started to be referred to as Black Rock City, it now has a year round staff headquartered in San Francisco, managing an over 12 million dollar annual budget.

In 1997, six of the main organizers formed Black Rock City LLC to manage the event with Larry Harvey as the executive director, which position he still holds. He is also the president of the Black Rock Arts Foundation, a non-profit art grant foundation for promoting interactive collaborative public art installations in communities outside of Black Rock City.

Philip Rosedale (born September 29, 1968) is an American entrepreneur, best known as the creator of the virtual world Second Life. Within the Second Life metaverse, his avatar is known as Philip Linden.

In 2008 Rosedale was honored at the 59th Annual Technology & Engineering Emmy Awards for Linden Lab’s creation of the Second Life online world.

Rosedale took an interest in computers, technology, and virtual reality from an early age. He started his own company selling database systems to small businesses at 17, used the proceeds to fund his college education and ultimately earned a bachelor of science degree in physics from the University of California at San Diego.

In 1995, Rosedale created an innovative Internet video conferencing product (called "FreeVue"), which was later acquired by RealNetworks, where (in 1996) he went on to become Vice President and chief technology officer. A year later Rosedale left RealNetworks and founded Linden Lab, named after a street in Hayes Valley. With the creation of metaverse Second Life, it fulfilled his lifelong dream of creating an internet scale virtual world. In 2006, he and Linden Lab received WIRED's Rave Award for Innovation in Business. On March 14, 2008, Rosedale announced he will be stepping down as the CEO of Linden Lab, and assuming the role of Chairman of the Board of Directors (coincidentally exactly 6 years to the day from the "birth" of his avatar).

Rebecca MacKinnon is a former CNN journalist who headed the CNN bureaus in Beijing and later in Tokyo, before leaving television to become a blogger and co-founder of Global Voices Online. She is on the Board of Directors of the Global Network Initiative and the Committee to Protect Journalists, and is currently with the New America Foundation as a Bernard L. Schwartz fellow

Born in Berkeley, California in 1969. MacKinnon's family moved when she was three years old to Tempe, Arizona where her father Stephen R. MacKinnon took a job as Professor of Chinese History at Arizona State University. Her parents' academic research caused her to spend most of her primary school years in Delhi, India, Hong Kong, and Beijing, China before moving back to Arizona for middle and high school. She graduated from Tempe High in 1987 and graduated from Harvard University in 1991 with a B.A. magna cum laude in Government.

After graduation, she was a Fulbright scholar in Taiwan, where she also worked as a Newsweek stringer.