Robert Burke is a member of the Developer and Platform Group at Microsoft Ireland. In his previous life, he was a researcher in the MindGames group at Dublin's Media Lab Europe, where he was architect and lead developer of a .NET application called Symphony, which was used for everything from a brain-computer interface to performance art pieces.

In 1995, his final year at the University of Cape Town, Mark Shuttleworth founded Thawte (www.thawte.com), a company focusing on Internet security for electronic commerce which has become the leading Internet Certificate Authority outside of the USA. He is founder and non-executive director of HBD (hbd.com), a venture-capital company seeking to invest in innovative technology companies based in South Africa bearing the potential to serve the global marketplace. In addition to this, Mark has created the Shuttleworth Foundation (shuttleworthfoundation.org), a non-profit organisation that supports social innovation in education in Africa. He is frontrunner and an advocate of Open and Free Software, particularly in developing countries, has participated in Debian development since the early 1990s and returned to the GNU/Linux world by funding the development of Ubuntu through Canonical Ltd. and founding the Ubuntu Foundation (www.ubuntu.com).