Joseph Hei is the President and co-founder of Orbit Baby. Orbit Baby applies advanced engineering, innovative design and high-tech materials to create strollers and car seats that are elegantly simple, intuitive to use and unsurpassed in real-world safety. Orbit Baby and its products have been featured in Wired, Business 2.0, and Fast Company, and is the leading choice for discerning celebrities around the world.
In founding Orbit Baby, Joseph and his Stanford classmate Bryan White spent years designing a travel system from the ground up: as the only infant-to-toddler car seat and stroller system, Orbit Baby products make it easy for new parents to keep up with their modern, mobile lives. They built the initial prototypes for the travel system in Bryan’s garage and took them out on weekends to test with real families in the Bay Area. This user-centered design approach led to Orbit Baby’s core system concept, and now the company’s car seats and strollers are sold around the globe. The Orbit Baby team holds patents for 10 key technologies in family travel, and has many more patents pending.

Before Orbit Baby, Joseph spent many years at IDEO developing innovative concepts and products for clients. Joseph worked on projects ranging from the award-winning Handspring Treo PDA phone, to beverage and business concepts for Pepsi and Gatorade. While at IDEO, Joseph generated key intellectual property for companies such as Procter & Gamble, Steelcase, Cole Haan, Gatorade, and Avery. With a knack for bridging different disciplines such as design and ethnography, he was called on to lead projects early on with problem definition, blue-sky design exploration, and strategic direction. Joseph led IDEO U innovation workshops in which he guided executives from companies such as Nestle on how to apply design thinking to their business challenges. In order to continue his passion for teaching, and to contribute to a supportive community, he has also taught in the Product Design program at Stanford University.

Joseph brings an international background to his creative and professional pursuits. He was born in Taiwan and immigrated to the US as a young child, and has spent time living in Asia, the US and Europe. Joseph and his wife have also traveled all over the world with their two young daughters. Joseph holds BSE Product Design and MS Mechanical Engineering degrees from Stanford University.

CARPE DIEM reads the big yellow road sign above John Seigel Boettner’s classroom door. Son, husband, and dad . . . teacher, student, and friend, John is a humble and wand-waving member of the good fairies, those charged with keeping alive the sparkle of wonder in children young and old . . . of noticing the extraordinary in the everyday . . . of holding hands and genuflecting at the little altars around every corner.

For over thirty years, John has been rediscovering joy, mystery, and excitement in classrooms of all kinds and in all kinds of places. September to June, he can be found at Santa Barbara Middle School, while his wife is teaching kindergarten across town at Vieja Valley School. In summers you will find them bicycling all over the world with Santa Barbara middle schoolers. Riding with the Pilgrims and Paul Revere in New England . . . pedaling red clay roads with Anne of Green Gables in the Maritimes . . . chasing leprechauns and rainbows in the west of Ireland . . . singing Sound of Music songs cycling the hills above Salzburg . . . alternating cooking lessons with paintbrushes and pedals in Italy . . . and folding paper cranes in noodle shops, riding from Kyoto to Hiroshima in observance of an August anniversary there . . . are just a few of the dozens of cycling journeys John and Lynn have led.

John is the author of Hey Mom, Can I Ride My Bike Across America? the story of the crowning good and humanhood five kids discovered on their four month ride from sea to shining sea. Just home from that epic, Lynn and John had their first son, Jacob, named for an Amish farmer and father of fourteen they had met in Tennessee. Much to the chagrin of his grandmother, Jacob came home from the hospital by bicycle, pulled in a trailer behind his dad. Less than two years later, as a worried volunteer helped him to the second Seigel Boettner bike trailer, Grandma was back in the Santa Barbara Cottage Hospital lobby proudly announcing the maiden voyage of her second grandson, Isaac. Jacob and Isaac, both graduates of UC Berkeley, are currently touring the globe and paying blessings forward with their award-winning documentary about the transformative power of the bicycle around the world: With My Own Two Wheels.

John is also the co-creator of the Santa Barbara Middle School Teen Press. Watching the Santa Barbara International Film Festival come and go unnoticed by his community, John felt some kids had to seize the opportunity to meet the storytellers brought to Santa Barbara every year for 10 magical days. Their first band of 12- and 13-yr.-olds wrangled some press credentials and, in their first festival, had magical and human conversations with the likes of Al Gore, Will Smith, Helen Mirren, and Sandra Bullock. Over the years since, they have continued to have conversations with some of the most notable film folks of our time. The Teen Press traveled to Washington for the inauguration of President Obama and interviewed folks on the street, visited with Tuskegee airmen and Freedom Riders at the People’s Ball, inspired Jamie Foxx to sing what he thought Ray Charles would have sung, and just after our new president took his oath, three of the Teen Press kid correspondents caught Jesse Jackson on a rooftop and asked him if the day was Martin’s “mountaintop.”

Ask John’s students what he teaches and you will probably experience a pause in thought and a crinkle in the brow. You might hear answers like: ‘I don’t know exactly what he teaches, but he tells us lots of stories.’ . . . ‘He sprinkled my mom and dad with fairy dust!’ . . . ‘He taught me that donuts taste way better after swimming in the ocean at sunrise every Friday.’ . . . ‘He teaches us how to swim in the ocean at sunrise . . . how to seize each moment of the day . . . and how to say thank you when the sun goes down.’ . . . ‘He also says we’re going to be tested on all this, but I haven’t figured that part out yet.’

John and his wife Lynn have been featured in Santa Barbara Magazine. The Santa Barbara Independent honored their Corps of ReDiscovery as Local Heroes for their bicycle ride across America with kids. John and Lynn live in one of the most colorful houses in Santa Barbara. The one on the mesa with crooked, fuchsia shutters, purple and chartreuse walls, iron seaweed railings hung with sea glass collected around the world. Pee Wee’s Playhouse with edibles in the front yard and mosaic chickens bicycling across the pizza oven on the front deck. John is on a quest to make the (almost) perfect wood-fired pizza and Tartine-inspired olive-hazelnut loaf with just the right amount of lemon zest and herbs de provence.

John will be riding his bike to TEDx American Riviera. He has packed his bag with stories, wonder-filled fairy dust, and some not-so-secret ingredients designed to transform spark into sparkle.

See the wonder and the magic and the joy of some of John’s students in Mzungus in the Mist (http://www.youtube.com/user/SBMSTeenPress#p/u/16/-8ULj5uhWxI) a short film about their bicycle discoveries in Rwanda.

See the Teen Press in action and its archives at: www.sbmsteenpress.org

Make it real! Seize the sunrise! Ignite your spark early! Heck, get extra credit, if you want. John invites you to join his kids, their families, and their dogs for their Friday Carpe Diem Swim, 11/11/11, 7AM at Leadbetter Beach. Put your praise on and join them for the weekly benediction. Donuts, coffee, hot chocolate provided. Whipped cream by request. For details contact John (carpediemsb@mac.com).

Tom Snow is one of the most respected and recorded songwriters of the 1970s, 80s, and 90s. His work can be found in virtually every genre. Artists as diverse as Barbra Streisand, Little Feat, Selena and Ray Charles have performed his songs.

Tom was born in 1947, in Princeton, NJ. In 1965 he entered the Berklee College of Music in Boston with the hope of becoming a jazz pianist. Four years later he had earned his Bachelor’s Degree in Music Composition, graduating second in his class. Putting aside his jazz pianist dream he set out to pursue a career in songwriting .

Migrating to California in the summer of ’69, Tom found a job at Viscount Records in Santa Monica. Together with fellow employee Michael Fondiler he wrote and performed songs in the area’s folk music clubs and small restaurants. The two were discovered by Michael O’Bryant and not long after signed to an album deal with an Atlantic Records subsidiary, Clean Records. A year later the LP “Country” was released.

In 1975 Tom signed with Capitol Records as a solo act and produced two albums: “Taking It All In Stride” and “Tom Snow”.

In 1978 he changed his focus from his recording career to writing hits for others. His first BMI airplay award came in 1978 with the recording (by Rita Coolidge) of “You”, a tune he had written for his first album at Capitol. Rita’s version hit the top thirty and Tom’s writing career was up and running.

Working with the cream of Hollywood’s “in-house” songwriting talent and collaborating with a wide variety of artists, he spent the next 25 years building an extensive and eclectic catalogue. Able to adapt to any musical genre while honing his craft as a “tunesmith” he developed the much sought after commercial touch. He also composed for Film and TV and was the composer for the Broadway Musical “Footloose”.

In 1982 Tom departed briefly from his writing career to make one last solo album, “Hungry Nights”, for Clive Davis’s Arista Records.

He has won and/or been nominated for numerous awards including the Oscar, the Grammy, the Emmy and the Tony. Among his many achievements are 15 BMI “Millionaires” awards for songs receiving a million or more plays on radio. In 1986 Tom won the prestigious Robert J. Burton Award for BMI’s Most Performed Country Song of the Year, Dolly Parton’s “Don’t Call It Love” .

In 2000 Tom was honored with the Distinguished Alumnus Award from Berklee.

Tom currently resides in Montecito, CA with his wife Mary Belle.

He is represented by Karen Schauben Music Publishing Administration.
Tel: 770-641-0098.
Email: kschauben@bellsouth.net.

Visit Tom Snow’s Music Website here.

Barry A. Berkus, A.I.A., UCSB and USC alumnus, is the founder and President of B3 Architects and Berkus Design Studio. He has remained on the forefront of design in the US and abroad for over forty-five years. His offices have spanned across the globe, in locations such as Malaysia, Japan and Australia, and have received more than 450 design and planning awards.

His firm was awarded two Operation Breakthrough awards through the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) for new building technology; he was named “Innovator of the Year” by Professional Builder; Architectural Digest counted him one of “The AD 100 Architects”; Builder Magazine named him one of the 100 most influential individuals in the past century of American housing; Residential Architect called him one of the ten most significant figures of 20th century residential architecture, and Barry Berkus is a 2005 inaugural inductee into the Builder’s Choice Hall of Fame, as well as a 2007 inductee into the California Building Industry Foundation Hall of Fame.

In addition to his long list of design awards, Berkus has received some of the highest awards within his community for his contributions to society. Positions and awards include; Commissioner of Rowing in the 1984 Olympics; University of California, Santa Barbara Alumnus of the Year (1989); Honorary Chair of The Arts Fund’s first Canvas Project fundraiser (2001); Innovator of the Year Award by the Santa Barbara Chamber of Commerce (2002); Maritime Museum Award, Outstanding Service to the Community (2002); Lifetime Achievement Award by the Santa Barbara News-Press (2004); congressional recognition by congressperson Lois Capps (2004); letter of recognition by Santa Barbara City Council (2004) and the Santa Barbara Beautiful Business in Art Award (2006). California Building Industry Foundation Hall of Fame inductee (2007), Best in American Living Awards Hall of Fame inductee (2009), and the Santa Barbara Beautiful 2010 Winner of the Moreton Bay Fig Award for Outstanding Body of Work. He was also named one of the “Top 200 Art Collectors in the World” by Art News, and today serves as co-chair for the National Gallery of the Arts contemporary committee. Additionally, Berkus serves as an adjunct professor for the doctorate program in architecture at the University of Hawaii.

Berkus gains inspiration through a lifestyle of exploration, curiosity, and adventure, which has led him to climb the mountains of the Antarctic, helicopter ski the Canadian glaciers, and achieve world records in hydroplane racing. Berkus continues to gain inspiration through his diverse interests, and challenge the built environment with new ideas and forms.

Visit the Barry Berkus Design Studio here.

Dr. Eric Goodman is the Founder and creator of Foundation Training, a body weight based exercise system that is changing what was believed to be proper human movement. Eric has a Bachelors in Physiology and Nutrition, as well as a Doctorate in Chiropractic.

Eric teaches people, often with severe chronic pain, how to develop powerful movement patterns which eliminate pain and prevent physical breakdown.

His groundbreaking new book, with co-author Peter Park, is rewriting the guidelines for preventive medicine. Foundation Training teaches people how to make impactful, physical changes in their daily life by simply changing the way they move.

Learn more about Foundation Training here.