{"id":382306,"date":"2013-10-15T09:30:44","date_gmt":"2013-10-15T07:30:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/2013.capetown.wordcamp.org\/?p=382306"},"modified":"2013-10-15T10:38:44","modified_gmt":"2013-10-15T08:38:44","slug":"speaker-spotlight-rian-van-der-merwe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/capetown.wordcamp.org\/2013\/speaker-spotlight-rian-van-der-merwe\/","title":{"rendered":"Speaker Spotlight: Rian van der Merwe"},"content":{"rendered":"

Rian van der Merwe, who will be speaking on building an audience in 743 difficult steps<\/strong>\u00a0at this year’s WordCamp, tells us a little bit about himself and how he got into this game…<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"rian-family-tree\"<\/a>My professional story starts in\u00a0Stellenbosch, South Africa<\/strong>, where I completed degrees in Engineering and Information Science, and caught the Internet bug after seeing a full color photo of a mountain slowly come up on the screen through the dial-up connection in our Engineering lab.<\/p>\n

After my initial studies I moved to\u00a0Perth, Australia<\/strong>\u00a0to complete a Ph.D in Internet Marketing and pursue this Internet thing all the way. I did my dissertation on Social Network Theory and its implications for Marketing and the Web.\u00a0I met a girl while I lived in Australia, so after completing my studies there I moved to California to pursue her (no it\u2019s not as creepy as it sounds, and yes we eventually got married).<\/p>\n

I spent the next 6 years working in\u00a0Silicon Valley<\/strong>: first at market research firm\u00a0Survey.com<\/strong>, followed by 4 \u00bd years in\u00a0eBay<\/strong>\u2018s User Experience Design group where I got infatuated with the theory and practice of all aspects of Design. My last position at eBay was as\u00a0Senior Manager of Product Strategy<\/strong>, where my responsibilities included leading a team of strategists who worked with various parts of the organisation to develop and guide product roadmaps and requirements that meet user needs.<\/p>\n

I then joined South African startup Yola.com in San Francisco as a\u00a0Senior Product Manager<\/strong>, where I was responsible for the product vision, strategy, design, and development of a variety of areas of the Yola user experience. In March 2010 our family moved back to South Africa permanently where I established and grew the Product and User Experience teams at Yola\u2019s\u00a0Cape Town<\/strong>\u00a0office. In December 2010 I moved to build and head up the Product & User Experience Design teams at online retailer\u00a0kalahari.com<\/a>, where we built the team from 4 to 14 designers and product managers. I decided to move into full-time consulting with Flow in June 2012.<\/p>\n

User experience design and software development is my obsession, and I’m excited about the great opportunities ahead in the South African Internet space. I blog and\u00a0tweet<\/a>\u00a0regularly about these and other topics, and I enjoy the speaking circuit. I also run a Tumblr blog called\u00a0B-Sides<\/a>, where I post interesting things that don’t quite fit the focus of Elezea<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Rian van der Merwe, who will be speaking on building an audience in 743 difficult steps\u00a0at this year’s WordCamp, tells us a little bit about himself and how he got into this game…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9355949,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-382306","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-speakers"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3pPMj-1Bse","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/capetown.wordcamp.org\/2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/382306","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/capetown.wordcamp.org\/2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/capetown.wordcamp.org\/2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/capetown.wordcamp.org\/2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9355949"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/capetown.wordcamp.org\/2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=382306"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/capetown.wordcamp.org\/2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/382306\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":385901,"href":"https:\/\/capetown.wordcamp.org\/2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/382306\/revisions\/385901"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/capetown.wordcamp.org\/2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=382306"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/capetown.wordcamp.org\/2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=382306"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/capetown.wordcamp.org\/2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=382306"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}