Niall Kennedy of Hat Trick Media is the Tech MC at WordCamp SF 2010

I made it past the crowds into the Fischer Room at the Mission Bay Conference Center here in San Francisco. This was where all the “techie”er sessions were going to take place.  I got inside just in time to see Niall Kennedy take stage.

It was great to see an online Avatar in person. Until now, I had “seen” Niall only in cyberspace – through VideoPress (the Video Hosting Service for WordPress.com and other Blogs / Websites) – and on some of the other blogs on new technology.

Niall introduced himself as the MC of the Tech Track at Wordcamp SF 2010.

Niall went on to give an introduction that included a brief bio, what he was doing for Automattic on the VideoPress and more.

Highlights from the introduction

• Niall is the CEO / Founder of Hat Trick Media
• Niall is also a Contractor & Consultant for Automattic. He is the Product lead for VideoPress. (Preimium Addon for wordpress.com blogs).
• VideoPress has a lot of cool features like Trancoding to MP4, Ogg, Thumbnails etc.
• Believes in the Fremium Model (Giving some features, software away for free and charging a permium for services / addons to the free service)
• WordPress.com runs PHP 5.2.
• In tha latest version wp-includes has built in support for JSON, jQuery, oEmbed, SimplePie, XML-RPC

After the introduction, Naill presented the first tech session of  the WordCamp, titled Writing Plugins for nOObs.