Formerly of Activision, James Portnow is the CCO and founder of Divide by Zero Games.  Besides his work as a designer, James Portnow is a recognized design theorist and prominent industry journalist, having been published worldwide and being a regular columnist for such sites as Next-Gen.biz and Game Career Guide.

Scott Dodson founded Flying Rhino Studios in 1994 and ran the company until its sale in 2006. An advertising and marketing communications firm, Flying Rhino produced award winning work for a client list which included: T-Mobile, Microsoft, The Experience Music Project, Washington Mutual, Costco, Alaska Airlines, and Wizards of the Coast. He served as president of the Seattle Advertising Federation (2001-2002). In 2004 he became President and CEO of Tenacious Games, bootstrapping for two years and funding it in 2006 & 2007.

Tenacious Games developed and published the wholly original, internationally acclaimed trading card game, The Spoils. Tenacious broke new ground in the hobby game market with successful business and brand initiatives including a self contained Singapore based production studio and wholly owned subsidiary, the first ever “Open Beta” launch of a tabletop game, and a record breaking 2007 Summer Tour complete with national level sponsorship (Bawls, PAX, GenCon). Mr. Dodson has an unadulterated passion for games and a deep understanding of the business challenges and opportunities surrounding them.

Joseph spent the last two years as a designer for Tenacious Games, building the internationally distributed collectible card game (CCG), The Spoils, from pre-production through launch and three expansions. He is currently working with Bucephalus Games, a board game company that will ship more than 20 games on a national level this year alone. He has previously done design for Front Porch Classics and testing for Score Entertainment and Wizards of the Coast. Prior to entering the industry Joseph supported himself as a professional gamer. He began by selling collectable cards from Magic: The Gathering in his youth, moving on to selling digital property in MMOGs, and finally becoming a semi-professional poker player.

Joe Ludwig is a fifteen year veteran programmer with ten years of experience in the game industry. Joe most recently worked on the PC MMO Pirates of the Burning Sea at Flying Lab Software from the project's inception past launch. He served as Lead Programmer, then Director of Development, and ultimately as Producer on Pirates, with 60+ reports. Before Pirates, Joe was the Senior Engineer for Rails Across America (named Multiplayer Game of the Year by Computer Games Magazine). Prior to Flying Lab, Joe spent a year working on the Middle-Earth Online project at Sierra.

Joe is a frequent speaker and occasional writer on MMOs and their challenges. He has spoken at the Online Game Development Conference, the Austin Game Development Conference, and the ION Game Conference. Joe also serves on the advisory board of the ION game conference. You can find his writing on MMOs and technology in general at http://programmerjoe.com.