The Speakers of Mobile 2.0 Europe 2009
(click the speakers’ name to see their short bio below)
Tommy Ahlers – Founder of Zyb, now Head of LBS at Vodafone / CEO at Wayfinder Systems.
Fee Beyer – Product & Innovation Team at T-Mobile International.
Michael Breidenbruecker – Founder Reality Jockey Ltd. / Co-Founder Last.fm Ltd.
Mike Butcher – editor at TechCrunch.
Xavier Carrillo Costa – CEO / Founder Digital Legends Entertainment.
Andreas Constantinou, Ph.D. – Research Director at VisionMobile.
Regine Debatty – we-make-money-not-art.com.
José Luis de Vicente – Medialab Prado, Madrid.
Carlos Domingo – Director Internet & Multimedia R&D, Telefonica.
Ian Ginn – Programme Director TransmediaLab Amsterdam / Founder Hubbub Media.
Dr. Lai Kok Fung – Chief Executive Officer, Co-Founder BuzzCity.
Tom Hume – Managing Director of Future Platforms.
Matthaus Krzykowski – Mobile Correspondent, VentureBeat.
Ilja Laurs – CEO Getjar.
Jacob Lehrbaum – Senior Product Manager at Sun Microsystems.
Inma Martinez – Digital Media Strategist and Investment Advisor at Stradbroke.
Akhil Monappa – Associate, Atlas Venture.
Ted Morgan, CEO & Founder, Skyhook Wireless.
Harald Neidhardt – CMO & Co-Founder, Smaato Inc.
Felix Petersen – Founder at Plazes.com, now Head of Product Strategy Social Location at Nokia.
Pat Phelan – founder and President of Cubic Telecom (MAXroam).
Priya Prakash – Creative Director for Consumer Experience at Nokia.
Tom Raftery – Lead Analyst of GreenMonk, the Energy and Sustainability practice of RedMonk.
Peggy Anne Salz – Chief Analyst and Founder of MSearchGroove.
Christian Sejersen – Director of Mobile Engineering, Mozilla.
Greg Skibiski – CEO and Co-Founder of Sense Networks.
Gustav Soderstrom – Director of Portable Solutions, Spotify.
Prof. Atau Tanaka – Chair of Digital Media, Acting Director of Culture Lab.
Raimo van der Klein – Co-founder at SPRXmobile.
Katrin Verclas – Co-Founder and Editor at MobileActive.org.
Robin Wauters – writer at TechCrunch.
David Wood, Catalyst & Futurist, Leadership Team, Symbian Foundation.
—–
Tommy Ahlers – Founder of Zyb, now Head of LBS at Vodafone / CEO at Wayfinder Systems.
Tommy Ahlers is a Danish serial entrepreneur best known for the social networking and mobile backup site ZYB, launched in 2005 and sold to Vodafone Europe BV for nearly $50m in May 2008. Before founding ZYB, where he has held the position of CEO since the company’s inception, Ahlers spent six years in strategy and management, partly in the mobile industry.
Tommy is now working for Vodafone as Head of Location Based Services and is CEO of Wayfinder in Sweden, also recently acquired by Vodafone.
Fee Beyer – Product & Innovation Team at T-Mobile International.
Fee has worked in the past for various media and telecom companies including NBC Europe, T-Mobile, Hubert Burda Media and IXI Mobile. In 2007 she started her own consulting firm. She has been helping startups in Germany gain ground via the marketing front. In this role she supported start-ups specifically in the mobile space consulting them on their marketing strategy and product launches. Since December 2008 she is working in the Product&Innovation Team at T-Mobile International.
Michael Breidenbruecker – Founder Reality Jockey Ltd. / Co-Founder Last.fm Ltd.
Michael co-founded Last.fm Ltd. and managed the company as CEO from 2002 until 2005. His approach in combining music discovery, online radio and social software was awarded in Europe and the USA and brought the company to the attention of global media and global players. In 2006 Michael co-founded Lovely Systems Gmbh. which is today managing a portfolio of web based products and services for the publishing industry. In May 2008 Michael founded Reality Jockey Ltd. which is the publisher of the RjDj mobile applications and online music portal www.rjdj.me. RjDj is acclaimed to be one of the most innovative Iphone applications and is praised by music aficionados for being the next evolutionary step in music and music technology.
Michael is regularly booked as speaker in international events and you will find interviews in magazines from Wired to Business Week. He is enjoying live with his family in a little village, in the Austrian Alps where you will also find him skying and snowboarding on the local mountains.
Mike Butcher – editor at TechCrunch.
TechCrunch Europe is edited by Mike Butcher (FRSA). Mike has written for UK national newspapers and magazines including The Financial Times, The Guardian, The Times, The Daily Telegraph and The New Statesman. He is a former editor of New Media Age magazine, the leading new media weekly in the UK, and the European edition of The Industry Standard. Since 1996 has launched or re-launched numerous media web sites and in 2000 he was nominated as NetMedia’s European Internet Journalist of the Year. In 2004 he was voted ‘One of the 100 Innovators of the UK Internet Decade’ by GfK NOP, the fourth-largest custom research business in the world. In July 2008 he was put at No. 47 out of the Top 100 people in London’s creative industry by The Independent newspaper and The Hospital Club. In August 2008 TechCrunch Europe was awarded the best “Web 2.0 and business blog” in the UK, by the readers of Computer Weekly magazine. He is a regular commentator on the technology business, appearing on BBC News, Sky News, Channel 4 and Bloomberg. Mike’s personal blog is mbites, while he Twitters as @mikebutcher.
Xavier Carrillo Costa – CEO / Founder Digital Legends Entertainment.
Xavier Carrillo Costa has over 10 years experience in the industry and has previously served as Executive Producer for ONE Sequel and Soccer Fury / Project Director at Digital Legends Entertainment S.L. for ONE and Development Director / Project Director at Rebel Act Studios for Codemasters Severance Blade of Darkness. His hardware experience includes PC, XBox and mobile devices. He is fluent in Spanish, French, and English. Xavier has studied at Polytechnic University of Madrid in Engineering in telecommunications.
Andreas Constantinou, Ph.D. – Research Director at VisionMobile.
As Research Director, Andreas oversees the research, advisory and industry mapping projects at VisionMobile. He has nine years experience in research, development and strategy in wireless, specialising in mobile handsets, software strategy and open source. Andreas has worked on several product and marketing strategy projects for clients including Sony Ericsson, France Telecom, T-Mobile, OMTP, Qualcomm, Red Bend, Abaxia, TAT and Trolltech, and authored numerous research reports for analyst firms Informa, Ovum and ARCchart. Andreas also teaches the Mobile Open Source workshop, part of VisionMobile’s 360 degree workshops on complex industry sectors. His interests include uncovering under-the-radar industry trends and pursuing human-centric design. When not hopping on planes, Andreas spends his time in Athens, Greece.
Andreas is invited regularly at international telecoms conferences as a speaker and chairman. He is also a monthly columnist for the B2B telecoms magazine ‘InfoCom’. Andreas holds a Ph.D. in Image & Video Compression from the University of Bristol, UK.
Regine Debatty – we-make-money-not-art.com.
Régine Debatty studied Classics in Belgium and England, worked as a teacher of Latin and ancient Greek, then moved to media, working as a documentary director for the Belgian national TV, as a reporter for the radio Onda Cero in Spain then as a consultant for the MEDIA programme of the European Commission in Italy.
She now writes about the intersection between art, design and technology on her blog we-make-money-not-art.com as well as on several European design and art magazines. She curates art shows and speaks at conferences and festivals about the way artists, hackers and interaction designers (mis)use technology.
Selection of lectures: ARCO Contemporary Art Fair, Madrid. OFFF, Lisbon. arte.mov, Sao Paulo & Belo Horizonte. Mobile Music Workshop, Amsterdam. Conflux, New York. Get It Louder, Beijing. Documenta, Kassel. Pixelazo, Medellin. PSFK conference, London. Medialab Prado, Madrid. Chaos Communication Congress, Berlin. Design Academy, Eindhoven. Triggered by RFID workshop at Mediamatic in Amsterdam. O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego. LIFT, Geneva. SONAR, Barcelona. Futuresonic, Manchester. Fabrica, Treviso. ITP, New York University. PicNic, Amsterdam. Bauhaus University, Weimar.
José Luis de Vicente – Medialab Prado, Madrid.
José Luis de Vicente is a researcher, curator and writer working around the edges of new media arts, digital creativity, and innovation in Design and Culture.
He is a member of the board of FAD, Barcelona’s centenary Asociation of Architects and Designers, and directs the VISUALIZAR program on Information Visualization at Medialab Prado, Madrid. Recent projects include The Atlas of Electromagnetic Space (www.spectrumaltas.org), a data blog about the history of Spectrum regulation, and the Exhibition Machines and
Souls at the Reina Sofia National Museum of Modern Art, Madrid. He is also one of the founders of zzzinc, a new lab space in Barcelona.
He teaches history of the Internet and interactive media in the Escuela de Diseño Elisava of Barcelona, and writes regularly about digital culture on Spanish newspapers such as El Mundo, Público and ADN.Es.
Carlos Domingo – Director Internet & Multimedia R&D, Telefonica.
Carlos Domingo holds a MsC in Computer Science from the Tokyo Institute of Technology, a PhD in Computer Science from the Polytechnic University in Catalonia and postgrad business studies from Stanford Business School. Carlos has over 15 years of experience in the IT and telecommunications industry. At different stages in his career he worked at Synera Systems S.L. and Toyota Overseas Marketing. In 2002 he become VP of Technology for Celartem, a publicly traded Japanese company and eventually became the CEO of its US subsidiary after merging Extensis, LizardTech and Celartem USA. In 2006 he joined Telefónica I+D in Barcelona as the Director for Internet and Multimedia and Director of the R&D center. Recently he was awarded the “National Award to the Professional Career” granted by the Asociación de Ingenieros en Informática (Computer Science Engineers Association) in Spain.
Ian Ginn – Programme Director TransmediaLab Amsterdam / Founder Hubbub Media.
Ian is a creative producer, media entrepreneur, writer and educationalist. He has been working twenty plus years in the (digital) media industry in feature films, television drama, interactive media, open-source software, and innovation projects for leading media and technology corporations.
Exited Egmond Film & Television when it was acquired by Eyeworks in 2006, Ian started to research multi-platform storytelling and production models, founding HubbubMedia in 2008, to acquire, develop, package and produce multi-platform formats and properties for audiences worldwide.
As Program Director of the TransMedia Lab in the University of Amsterdam, Ian has established a cross-faculty applied research and educational lab engaging masters and bachelor students in areas including narratives, storytelling, reception, technology, applications, marketing and business models.
Ian has bachelor degrees in Fine Art and Videographics and a masters degree in Digital Media and Computer Animation, and is preparing Ph.D. research into Transmedia Storytelling
Hubbub is developing transmedia formats for kids, teens and young adults, to include television and on-line drama, videogames, social networks and on-line graphic novels.
Dr. Lai Kok Fung – Chief Executive Officer, Co-Founder BuzzCity.
Dr KF Lai is co-founder and chief executive officer of BuzzCity, a developer of global wireless communities and consumer services. Established in 1999 in Singapore, BuzzCity today operates the worlds leading wireless community – mygamma.com – for two distinct audiences: the newly connected emerging middle class in developing markets and the blue collar sector in developed regions. These “unwired” consumers are accessing the mobile Internet on their phones due to widespread and affordable wireless access. Prior to founding BuzzCity, Dr Lai worked as an applied researcher in laboratories funded by the Singapore government, specializing in pattern recognition and text retrieval. He graduated with First Class Honours in Electrical Engineering from the National University of Singapore and obtained his Doctorate in Electrical Engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Tom Hume – Managing Director of Future Platforms.
As Managing Director, Tom divides his time between greasing the wheels of our design and development team and business development. He’s actively involved in the mobile industry, serving as an Invited Expert for the W3C Mobile Web Best Practices Group and speaking regularly at industry events like Mobile Mobile, the Future of Mobile and dConstruct.
Before founding Future Platforms Tom spent 5 years at early UK digital agency Good Technology, where he served as Technical Director and Head of Wireless, helping grow the company from 3 to 80 and serving on the management team as the business was sold to communications group WPP.
Tom is a rabid champion of user experience and holds a Designers & Art Directors Silver Nomination for his work in Interactive Media (client: Kylie Minogue). He somehow finds time to write online at http://tomhume.org/ ; in 2005 this site beat strong competition from The Guardian and Ofcom to win the NetImperative “Best Digital Media Blog” award, but he doesn’t let that go to his head (much).
Matthaus Krzykowski – Mobile Correspondent, VentureBeat.
Matthäus covers mobile as freelancer for Venturebeat. He tends to write three types of pieces: analysis pieces, trends pieces and interviews. If you want to pitch him any ideas, he’s particularly interested in these selected fields: * Mobile Web, WAP * Mobile Social Networks * Mobile Advertising * Google Android … Matthaus was consulting for a mobile social network in Europe last year when he started getting excited about some of the software developments affecting the entire industry. He ran into Matt Marshall at a Berkeley event in April 2008, two weeks after he came over from Europe. Matt wanted Matthäus to write a guest piece on mobile social networks, Matthäus wanted to get to know people in the Valley. Ever since Matthäus has been writing for Venturebeat every now and then. On top of that Matthäus helped Matt with the organisation of Mobilebeat 2008, particularly with the screening of the applying companies. Matthäus had prior journalistic experience as a freelancer for various radio stations and magazines. At Venturebeat, he appreciates Eric Eldon’s patience when he is editing his pieces. Prior to that Matthäus was a business unit leader at the t-shirt design competition company la Fraise and a product manager at Spreadshirt. He continues to do hands-on consulting projects in mobile. More generally, he has grown up in Poland, Germany and Swaziland. He’s graduated in with a Masters degree in Business Administration from RWTH Aachen in 2005. For his pleasure he also took a variety of courses in Engineering and History of Art and Architecture. You may notice he is a fan of sketches when you read his articles. Today he is either to be found in San Francisco or Paderborn, Germany.
Ilja Laurs – CEO Getjar.
Ilja Laurs is Founder & CEO of GetJar, the world’s most popular mobile application distribution and developer community, with over 200,000 registered developer and beta-tester accounts. It has visitors to the site coming from 135 countries worldwide and crossed the 200 million download barrier in March this year. The company also closed a Series A investment from Silicon Valley and London-based Accel Partners. The company is based in both Lithuania and the UK. 1976 Lithuania born, when in secondary school at a time when the country was part of the Soviet Union, Laurs enrolled in an American student exchange programme, which found him a place in a school in Ohio State for a year. He came back to Lithuania to join Vilnius University. Interestingly, he says he decided to do Economics as ‘technology was not considered cool’ at the time, financing his education by teaching English to school students. In the last year of his Master’s degree, he set up Midas Baltics Ltd, a Lithuanian based mobile R&D subsidiary of Midas Interactive Ltd., a UK based games publisher. He headed the development of Midas’ line of mobile products on all mobile platforms — WAP, SMS, J2ME, Palm, Pocket PC, etc. From 2000 to 2005, Midas developed over 200 games. He continues to stay involved in the company.
Jacob Lehrbaum – Senior Product Manager at Sun Microsystems.
Jacob Lehrbaum is a senior product manager at Sun Microsystems and is responsible for product marketing and developer programs for JavaFX and Wireless. Previously, Jacob was product manager for JavaFX Mobile as well as Java ME solutions for advanced mobile devices. Prior to joining Sun in 2006, Jacob was at embedded Linux pioneer MontaVista Software for 6 years where he managed a variety of products for the embedded and mobile markets including launching the company’s Mobilinux product. In addition to being a frequent author and speaker, Jacob also co-founded the popular embedded Linux portal, LinuxDevices.com
Inma Martinez – Digital Media Strategist and Investment Advisor at Stradbroke.
After holding executive positions in financial institutions and the telecommunications sector, Inma founded in 1999 one of the first UK entrepreneurial ventures of the dot.com era: Escape Velocity. Funded by 3i, EV became one of the first providers of personalisation software to international mobile operators and handsets manufacturers and was depicted by Lehman Brothers as one of Europe’s top 20 companies to follow. Inma continued founding and leading at the helm two other companies, the latter one in Finland, Visual Radio, who later sold to NOKIA and whose software can be found in every multimedia handset of the Finnish mobile giant.
In 2006 she founded Stradbroke Advisors, an international advisory firm on corporate development and capital funding investment agency. Her portfolio of work at Stradbroke covers investor and client mandates in web, mobile, biotech, meditech and content media (film, television and gaming). Combining her over 15 years of work as an executive, she also advises the executive boards of public companies, universities and government agencies in Europe.
As a digital media strategist her work has been recognised by industry and media internationally. FORTUNE and TIME have described her as one of Europe’s top talents in Human Factors and Social Engagement through technology. In 2001 the members of The European Leadership Forum, a Fortune 500 CEO and EU Governors annual summit, voted her “Best Contributor to the Formation of Digital Media Strategy”. In 2005 Red Herring ranked her amongst the top 40 most influential women in technology. FastCompany defined her in 2000 as a “fire starter”. This has proven to be true as her professional engagements have taken her to kick-start many emerging technologies in web, mobile, wireless and the digitalisation of the music and film industries.
Akhil Monappa – Associate, Atlas Venture.
Akhil is an Associate in the technology group, and joined Atlas Venture in their London offices in 2009.
Prior to his graduate studies, Akhil worked at Cambridge Technology Group-an early stage incubator in Cambridge, MA where he worked closely with portfolio companies C-Bridge Internet Solutions (NASDAQ:CBIS) and CellExchange in the areas of sales, strategic alliances and new product development. He has also worked at Grove International Partners and IDG Ventures focusing on emerging market investments in India and Vietnam. While at Georgia Tech, Akhil worked with Nortel Networks in their ASIC design team focused on Access products.
Akhil has an undergraduate in Electrical Engineering (with a specialization in Telecommunications) from Georgia Institute of Technology, an MBA from Harvard Business School, and a Masters in Public-Administration-International Development from Harvard Kennedy School.
Ted Morgan, CEO & Founder, Skyhook Wireless.
Ted Morgan founded Skyhook Wireless with Michael Shean in 2003 to capitalize on the explosive growth of Wi-Fi usage and the emerging demand for location-based services. Prior to founding Skyhook, Mr. Morgan was the Vice President of Marketing for edocs Inc., a provider of customer self-service solutions that was sold to Siebel Systems in January 2005. At edocs, he ran marketing communications, inside sales, product marketing, and product management. Prior to edocs, Mr. Morgan was Group Product Manager for Open Market, one of the early leaders of the e-commerce revolution. Prior to that, he was a product manager for Harbinger Net Services in Atlanta. Prior to the technology industry, Mr. Morgan spent four years in the financial services industry, as part of Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette, Alliance Capital, and Allen & Company. Mr. Morgan has an undergraduate degree in mathematics from Georgetown University and an MBA from the University of Chicago.
Harald Neidhardt – CMO & Co-Founder, Smaato Inc.
Harald Neidhardt is CMO and Co-Founder of Smaato Inc. and was instrumental in conceiving the mobile advertising platform SOMA™. He has over 20 years of experience in marketing and business development, having led interactive agencies and marketing consulting firms in both the US and Europe, among them Pixelpark (US), the North American arm of Bertelsmann’s multimedia subsidiary and one of Europe’s largest Internet solution providers. Harald Neidhardt has a BA in Marketing Communications from Communications Academy, Hamburg.
Felix Petersen – Founder at Plazes.com, now Head of Product Strategy Social Location at Nokia.
Felix Petersen, born and raised in Berlin, has been busy with remote data transmissions since the late eighties and has been building things on the Internet since 1997.
Felix Petersen is co-founder and member of the board of Plazes.com, a bottom-up approach to spatial interaction and location oriented service platform, sometimes also dubbed “Mobile Social Software”. Plazes has been written and talked about up and down the blogosphere and its supporters and developer community include some of the brightest minds in cyberspace. Plazes was featured several times in publications like Wired, Red Herring and others as well as Editor´s pick for “Best of new Web” over at Businessweek.
Nokia acquired Plazes in June 2008. Felix is now heading the Product Strategy Social Location at Nokia.
Pat Phelan – founder and President of Cubic Telecom (MAXroam).
Founder and President of Cubic Telecom, a well known disruptor in telephony circles and one of the leading voices of Voice 2.0.
Pat has developed a number of unique products for the USA, UK and Irish markets including MAXroam
Pat has been involved in the telecoms arena for over 10 years and has deep experience in both the US and European markets. His first step into the market was the building of the first callshop and internet café software, a successful product still in use today by over 100 internet cafés worldwide. Pat launched Ireland’s first independently owned phones cards in 1999 and continues to trade in this market in a numbers of countries, with the business hitting 5-7 million minutes termination per month.
Priya Prakash – Creative Director for Consumer Experience at Nokia.
Priya enjoys crafting simple, fun, addictive tools to enable conversations and experiences underpinned by robust business models. Her expertise lies in developing and managing the complete customer experience for products and services. Over the past ten years, she has built and led product development teams. Her teams have shipped – BBC iMP (iPlayer), BBC Mobile portal, Trusted Places, Project Kangaroo (initial proposal), the Digital Wellbeing Showroom, Sugarscape (Hachette Filipacchi) and significantly increased Flirtomatic’s user revenues. She has worked in various capacities as senior interaction designer, implementation manager, creative director, innovation executive and head of product. Prakash is a RSA fellow with a MA in Interaction Design from Royal College of Art and holds patents for iPlayer. When not working, she dreams of starting her own social enterprise. She recently joined Nokia as Creative Director for Consumer Experience.
Tom Raftery – Lead Analyst of GreenMonk, the Energy and Sustainability practice of RedMonk.
Tom Raftery is lead analyst of GreenMonk, the Energy and Sustainability practice of industry analyst firm RedMonk. As such, Tom leads the research into all aspects of energy, Green IT and Sustainability.
Tom is also director and co-founder of Cork Internet eXchange, a hyper energy-efficient data center based in Cork, Ireland.
Having co-founded and risen to CTO in a number of IT companies, Tom has a very strong tech background. Having helped design and build out Cork Internet eXchange – a hyper energy-efficient data center, Tom has demonstrated his commitment to and expertise in energy efficiency.
Tom speaks regularly at international conferences on Energy and Sustainability, blogs at GreenMonk.net and is on Twitter at twitter.com/tomraftery.
Peggy Anne Salz – Chief Analyst and Founder of MSearchGroove.
Peggy Anne Salz is the chief analyst and founder of MSearchGroove, an online network specializing in analysis and commentary on mobile search, mobile advertising and social media. Her drive to spark debate about issues impacting the industry at all levels, has won her international recognition as a brave new voice in the mobile content market. Her report, Mobile Search & Content Discovery, was regarded as the first in-depth study of its kind, establishing Peggy as an authority on mobile search and content discovery technologies enabling media companies and mobile operators to monetize content and services. She has established a successful writing career based on vision, insight, versatility, and over 15 years of industry experience. Her work, including over 300 articles on mobile content, has appeared in magazines and online destinations such as The International Herald Tribune, The Wall Street Journal, Mobile Entertainment, Mobile Media, and New Media Age, among many more.
Christian Sejersen – Director of Mobile Engineering, Mozilla.
Christian joined Mozilla in 2007 as Director of Mobile Engineering focused on developing Mobile Firefox. Previously he held a Director of Engineering position at Openwave, where he oversaw the development of next-generation embedded products. Prior work includes the EZ-web browser for KDDI, and the J-Phone (now Softbank Mobile) browser. Earlier, Christian worked for CSC and KMD (Danish ISV’s) and also co-founded a software security company. A native of Denmark, Christian Sejersen holds a Master’s degree in Computer Science from the University of Copenhagen.
Greg Skibiski – CEO and Co-Founder of Sense Networks.
Mr. Skibiski is Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Sense Networks. He is responsible for the company’s overall strategic vision in the financial and consumer services markets.
Prior to co-founding Sense Networks, Skibiski served as Principal Architect of the Business Development group at BackWeb Technologies (NASD: BWEB), a mobile infrastructure software company. As one of the first employees, he spent seven years working in the US, Germany and Israel, most recently as a member of the company’s Executive Board.
Previously, he was the Director of BackWeb’s relationship with SAP, the company’s largest source of revenue. Skibiski also acted as the chief software architect for integrations with IBM, Microsoft, and SAP, and was responsible for designing software solutions and leading the development teams that brought them to realization.
Skibiski co-organizes the European Drobny Global Hedge Fund Conference, has been a frequent speaker at SAP’s SAPPHIRE world conferences, and has managed sales, partnership and implementation projects in 25 countries.
He holds an MBA from HEC Paris and a Bachelor’s degree in Civil Engineering from Bucknell University.
Gustav Soderstrom – Director of Portable Solutions, Spotify.
Gustav worked as an entrepreneur (selling Swedish mobile social software company Kenet Works to Yahoo in 2006) and subsequently as product director and business development director at Yahoo Mobile. He recenlty joined the music company Spotify as director of mobile solutions.
Prof. Atau Tanaka – Chair of Digital Media, Acting Director of Culture Lab.
Atau Tanaka bridges the fields of media art, experimental music, and research. He worked at IRCAM, was Artistic Ambassador for Apple France, and was researcher at Sony Computer Science Laboratory Paris, and was an Artistic Co-Director of STEIM in Amsterdam. Atau creates sensor-based musical instruments for performance, and is known for his work with biosignal interfaces. He seeks to harness collective musical creativity in mobile environments, seeking out the continued place of the artist in democratized digital forms. His work has been presented at Ars Electronica, SFMOMA, Eyebeam, V2, ICC, and ZKM and has been mentor at NESTA.
Raimo van der Klein – Co-founder at SPRXmobile.
Raimo (1973) started his career in Retailing. Working in marketing and purchase positions for the largest non-food retailer(Maxeda) in the Netherlands. More than 8 years ago he made his move to mobile. He started in product marketing at Nokia Networks. Later he moved into sales and marketing at Nokia Mobile Phones. During his Nokia time he developed a clear picture of the converging mobile industry , the market forces and how the mobile ecosystem is build up. In 2006/2007 Raimo worked at KPN as a Innovation Manager focusing on the consumer market with a focus on UGC, mobile social networks and presence messaging. Currently Raimo is partner in SPRXmobile. Next to this Raimo is founder of Mobile Monday Amsterdam and writes for one of the leading marketing blogs in the Netherlands.
Katrin Verclas – Co-Founder and Editor at MobileActive.org.
Katrin Verclas is a recognized expert in mobile communications for social impact.She is the co-founder and editor of MobileActive.org, a global network of practitioners using mobile phones for social impact. She is also a principal at Calder Strategies, focusing on mobile strategy, impact evaluation, effectiveness and ROI assessment, and interactive capacity building.Katrin has written widely on mobile phones in citizen participation and civil society organizations, mobile phones in health and for development. She is a co-author of Wireless Technology for Social Change, a report on trends in mobile use by NGOs with the UN Foundation and Vodafone Group Foundation, and author of A Mobile Voice: The Use of Mobile Phones in Citizen Media.Katrin’s background is in IT management, IT in social change organizations, and in philanthropy. She has led several nonprofit organizations, including as the Executive Director of NTEN: The Nonprofit Technology Network, the national association of IT professionals working in the more than one million nonprofit organizations in the United States. Previously she served as a program officer at the Proteus Fund, focusing on the use of technology in civic and democratic participation, and in government transparency.She is the editor of Managing Technology to Meet Your Mission, published by Wiley & Sons., and author of a chapter in Mobilizing 2.0, a book focused on engaging young people and the use of technology. She is a frequent speaker on ICTs in civil society at national and international conferences and has published numerous articles and publications on technology for social change in leading popular and industry publications.Katrin serves on the boards of Mobile Voter and Ushahidi.
Robin Wauters – writer at TechCrunch.
Robin Wauters is an entrepreneur, blogger, conference organizer, social media consultant, startup advisor and allround web addict, based in Belgium, Europe.
Robin is a writer at TechCrunch and managing editor of Virtualization.com. He was one of the first writers to join blognation, an ambitious effort to centralize reports about Web 2.0 startups from around the world into one blog platform.
He is mostly known for setting up Plugg, a one-day conference in Brussels aimed to raise awareness for European entrepreneurship as well as the continent’s most promising Web / Mobile 2.0 startups. He’s also the organizer of the monthly OpenCoffee Club Brussels meetups.
Robin combines these efforts with startup life, as a Partner in Oxynade and social media agency Talking Heads.
David Wood, Catalyst & Futurist, Leadership Team, Symbian Foundation.
David spent more than 20 years envisioning, architecting, implementing, and avidly using smart mobile devices (devices that can also be called “personal electronic brains”): ten years with PDA manufacturer Psion PLC, and then ten more with smartphone operating system specialist Symbian Ltd. Since 2009 David is part of the Leadership Team of the Symbian Foundation.
His background includes: many years building and integrating UI system software and application frameworks in 16-bit and 32-bit versions of “EPOC” software (later named “Symbian OS”); growing and directing the technical consulting teams that worked with leading phone manufacturers to create the world’s first successful smartphones; and defining and running development programs to stimulate and nurture the fast-growing Symbian partner ecosystem.
A founder director of both Psion Software and Symbian Software, David brings a measure of executive continuity to the Symbian Foundation Leadership Team.
As ‘Catalyst’, his role is to enable the Symbian software movement to discover and explore innovative solutions for the many challenges and opportunities faced by the mobile industry.
As ‘Futurist’, his task is to distil compelling visions of the future of technology, business, and society – visions that provide the energy and inspiration for deeply productive open collaboration among the many creators and users of mobile products.
David has an MA in Mathematics from Cambridge University and an honorary doctorate in science from the University of Westminster.
His first book was published in July 2005: “Symbian for software leaders – principles of successful smartphone development projects”.
