Mitch Altman is an international hacker and inventor, best known for inventing TV-B-Gone remote controls, a keychain that turns off TVs in public places. He has been creating music and music synthesizers since he was a teenager, was co-founder of 3ware, a successful Silicon Valley startup in the late 1990s, and did pioneering work in Virtual Reality in the mid-1980s. He has contributed to 2600, MAKE, and other magazines, and wrote a chapter for “Maker Pro”, a book about making a living from projects one loves. Mitch enjoys his frequent hacker/artist-in-residencies, where he shares, learns, and continues to cross-pollinate. For the last several years Mitch has been giving performances, talks, leading workshops around the world, inspiring people, sharing how to make cool things with electronics, and teaching everyone to solder. He promotes hackerspaces and open source hardware, and mentors others wherever he goes. He is a co-founder of Noisebridge hackerspace in San Francisco, and is President and CEO of Cornfield Electronics.

Wikipedia page:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitch_Altman

TEDxBrussels talk: "The Hackerspace Movement":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkiX7R1-kaY