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Zachary Garbow

The feature speaker will be Zachary Garbow, founder of 2 start-up companies and a former IBM software engineer. Garbow is the co-founder of the software start-ups Socialbrowse and Funeral Innovations.

Socialbrowse was conceived when Garbow and co-founder Dave Fowler were selected to be a part of Silicon Valley 's Y Combinator startup program. Socialbrowse aims to change what Garbow described as the “static, individual” experience of browsing the Web into a more social and dynamic one. The first version of the product allows people who use the Firefox browser to install a program that creates a real-time sidebar of links and comments shared by their friends. They're recently closed a seed stage round of funding, and will soon be launching a revolutionary new version of Socialbrowse that serves as a platform for social browsing applications, which run on any web browser without any installation.

Garbow also founded a software start-up, Funeral Innovations, which provides a leading edge, web-based software suite for the funeral industry. Their flagship product, Memorial Designer, is creating massive industry buzz by allowing funeral directors to design and submit a memorial headstone in front of their customers in minutes using their granite provider's specific stone colors, designs, and shapes – a process that previously took days or even weeks. Within their first year of operation, 75% of the Midwest 's largest granite providers have signed on to provide Memorial Designer to their resellers.

Garbow is a graduate of the IT Honors program of the University of Minnesota . While at IBM, he was named an IBM Master Inventor, the company's top inventing honor. He was the youngest person in IBM history to achieve this honor with over 110 patents pending.

At this year's Innovation Expo™, Garbow will share his experiences in launching technology start-ups, hurdles that were overcome and how his teams capitalized their companies.