Aral Balkan is a web developer, Flash Platform veteran, and overall Internet junkie. This year he's producing Singularity, the world's first global web conference.

His contributions to the Flash community include OSFlash.org; the open source Arp framework; and SWX, the native data format for Flash. His recent open source projects include The GAE SWF Project, which was showcased as the featured application on the Google App Engine Application Gallery in April 2008, and OpenCountryCodes -- an automatically-updated list of ISO 3166-Alpha 2 country codes.

Aral is the author of the Adobe Flex 2 and Flex 3 QuickStart Guides on Adobe.com and has contributed to numerous books and magazine articles. His latest contribution was to The Essential Guide to Open Source Flash Development by Friends of Ed (available July 2008).

Aral is a regular speaker at international conferences including Macworld, FlashForward, d.construct, FITC, Wizards of OS, and Adobe MAX.

He is rumored to have a flying pig.