Aral is a developer, professional speaker, consultant, and entrepreneur. In 2008 Aral created and staged the world’s first fully-virtual web conference, . As developer, Aral has been programming for over twenty years (he started really early), has a love for learning new programming languages, a passion for simplicity, and an enduring fondness for both visual and experience design. Unabashedly an alpha geek, he is currently hacking Objective-C on the iPhone, Python and Django on Google App Engine, and, of course, what he is most well-known for, Flash, Flex, and ActionScript on the Flash Platform. As entrepreneur, Aral is founder and director of Naklab, a UK-based idea factory and web consultancy. Alongside , in 2008 Naklab launched Pistach.io, an ad network for influencers, and later spun it off into an independent company. Aral is an advocate of open source and Creative Commons and has launched several open initiatives and projects, including OSFlash, the home of the open-source Flash community, SWX (the native data format for the Flash Platform), and, more recently, the Google App Engine Backup and Restore project which brings data portability to the Google App Engine platform. Aral is immensely passionate about the potential that the Internet holds for individual empowerment, education, and the democratization of communication and self-expression. He finds the convergence of commoditized infrastructure, multi-gestural interfaces, the emerging ubiquity of the mobile Internet, and location-based services hugely exciting.
