What are two reasons why this year’s Entrepreneur Week in Waterloo Region is expected to attract more than 4,000 participants to a series of events?

Chris Hughes, co-founder and spokesperson for global success story Facebook, and Tim Bray, The Father of Internet Search and XML and co-founder of Open Text Corporation, are keynote speakers — with Hughes kicking off Enterpreneur Week on Monday, November 16 and Bray leading the line-up for the November 17 agenda.

Hughes is a young entrepreneur who co-founded Facebook with Harvard roommates Mark Zuckerberg and Dustin Moskovitz, and served as spokesperson for the company. Hughes also worked as coordinator of online organizing for Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign at http://My.BarackObama.com, the campaign’s online social networking website. Hughes was featured as the cover story for Fast Company magazine’s April 2009 edition under the headline: “The Kid Who Made Obama President; How Facebook Cofounder Chris Hughes Unleashed Barack’s Base – and Changed Politics and Marketing Forever”.  He is currently a consultant for Facebook, an Entrepreneur in Residence at Boston venture capital firm General Catalyst Partners, and a strategic advisor at GMMMB, a political consulting firm that worked with the 2008 Obama campaign. Hughes will speak about how he took a little idea, defeated massive market competitors, and made a lot of money doing what he loved best – marketing to the masses.

 Bray is a Canadian software developer and entrepreneur who co-founded Open Text Corporation and Antarctica Systems. He is currently Director of Web Technologies at Sun Microsystems. Bray is quoted as saying that he heard a conference speaker say that search engines would be big on the Internet, and in “five seconds all the pieces just fell into place in my head. I realized that we could build such a thing with our technology”. In 1995 Open Text released the Open Text Index, one of the first popular commercial web search engines. Bray held the position of Senior Vice-President – Technology at Open Text from 1991 to 1996. He is credited with leading XML and XML namespace specifications, improving web client user experience and web server system performance.

Entrepreneur Week in Waterloo Region is North America’s largest entrepreneur innovation festival, and runs from November 16-22. The week is packed with events and opportunities for entrepreneurs to take a ‘time out’ from their businesses and share experiences and expertise with fellow entrepreneurs. Part of the inspiration of the week is hearing from successful entrepreneurs like Hughes and Bray and gaining tips that can be applied to businesses in the Region. Entrepreneur Week is engineered by Communitech, the regional hub for the commercialization of innovation in Waterloo Region.

Go to www.entrepreneurweek.ca or follow @communitech on Twitter.