Gil Penchina, CEO of Wikia.com will be the first headline Keynote Speaker at the upcoming WebGuild Web 2.0 Conference & Expo on Tuesday, January 29, 2008. Wikia is a community destination supporting the creation and development of wiki communities on any topic people are passionate about. They currently support over 4,700 communities in more than 70 languages. Part of the free culture movement, Wikia content is released under a free content license and operates on the Open Source MediaWiki software. Explore their existing communities or start a new one. The company also just released Wikia Search, a community driven search engine.

Gil Penchina is a serial entrepreneur and CEO of Wikia.com, the largest commercial wiki information and news site, that generates hundreds of millions of page views per month via 800,000 pages of content created in 70 languages in the last three years. Hot topics include the largest World of Warcraft game information resource, travel and city guides and deep-diving fan sites on entertainment topics. Prior to Wikia.com, Gil was an executive at eBay for 8 years, most recently as a regional VP for eBay in Europe. Before eBay, Gil worked at General Electric, Bain & Co. and started two small technology companies. He has a Bachelors in Engineering from the University of Massachusetts and an MBA from Kellogg.

Don’t miss his keynote! Craig Newmark, Craigslist Founder, will be the other Keynote.