Michal Čihař was born in 1980 in Prague, the capital city of the Czech Republic, and he is still living there. He studied Software Engineering at the Czech Technical University, and during these studies he started contributing to several free software projects, with the biggest contributions being made to phpMyAdmin and Gammu, and related projects. He currently works for Novell, mostly on the SUSE Linux Enterprise platform.

Michal has been active in the phpMyAdmin project since 2001, when he started as a translator for the Czech language, later moving to a developer role (working, for example, on index manipulation, and export and import subsystems), and since 2010 he has also acted as a secondary project manager.

Ben Dodson has worked with the Internet for over 15 years, yet originally studied Politics. He trained briefly as an Air Traffic Controller for the RAF before deciding to change career paths and work as a freelance HTML/PHP developer, in Devon. He relocated to London to work for a digital agency, and was rapidly promoted to Development Manager in charge of a team of front- and back-end web developers in several countries.

After working for a few more agencies, he decided to return to freelancing but this time as an iPhone Developer. He now splits his time in Central London between working on his own applications and working on applications for brand-name clients, incorporating everything from store locators to iPad magazine concepts.

Ben still maintains a strong connection to his web development roots by working on APIs for geo-coded Wikipedia Articles (www.wikilocation.org) and the London Underground (www.tubeupdates.com). One of his main interests is in the power of location-aware applications and so he has spent a lot of time developing Gowalla Tools, a suite of applications that utilize the popular Gowalla geo-location service.

Aside from his websites and iPhone applications, Ben enjoys working on everything from browser extensions to OpenID servers. He is a keen photographer and designer, and is currently working on his first book, which discusses Machiavellian republicanism.

Ben has been invited to speak at several conferences and has appeared on BBC Television's "Working Lunch" program to discuss e-commerce, and also Channel Five's "The Gadget Show" to demonstrate iPhone Application development.

Kai 'Oswald' Seidler was born in Hamburg in 1970. He graduated from the Technical University of Berlin with a Diplom Informatiker degree (Master of Science equivalent) in Computer Science. In the '90s he created and managed Germany's biggest IRCnet server, irc.fu-berlin.de, and co-managed one of the world's largest anonymous FTP servers, ftp.cs.tu-berlin.de. He professionally set up his first public web server in 1993. From 1993 until 1998, he was a member of Projektgruppe Kulturraum Internet, a research project on net culture and network organization. In 2002, he co-founded Apache Friends and created the multi-platform Apache web server bundle XAMPP. Around 2005, XAMPP became the most popular Apache stack worldwide. In 2006, his third book, Das XAMPP-Handbuch, was published by Addison Wesley.

Currently he's working as a technology evangelist for web tier products at Sun Microsystems.