London 2009
Speakers
To view further details about each speaker, please click on their photo or name.
Day Moderator
Susan Kish
Social Networks Specialist
Speakers
Wesley Chan
Group Product Manager, Google Voice
Stowe Boyd
Social Media Blogger and Front Man for The /Messengers
Jason Falls
Vice President and Director of Interactive and On-Line Communications, Doe Anderson
Merran Wrigley
Head of External Communications & PR at Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications
Andy Piper
IBM, Social Bridgebuilder and Consulting IT Specialist
Jason Goldberg
Chief Product Officer, XING / CEO & founder of socialmedian Inc.
Lee Bryant
CEO, Headshift
Umair Haque
Director Havas Media Lab, Founder Bubblegeneration, and Blogger Harvard Business Publishing
René E. Rechtman
Group Managing Director, GoViral
Marilyn Pratt
SAP Community Evangelist, Business Process Expert Community Advocate
Eugene Lee
CEO of Socialtext
Lloyd Davis
Social Artist and Master Community Builder
Frans van der Reep
Professor InHolland University
Chris Thorpe
Developer Platform Evangelist at MySpace UK
Nick burcher
Head of VivaKi Nerve Center UK and Products & Partnerships EMEA
Iain Simpson
Head of Commercial Insights & Digital Marketing, BDO Stoy Hayward
Christophe Langlois
Social Media Evangelist
Detailed profiles
Susan Kish
Social Networks Specialist
Susan Kish has more than two decades of executive experience in finance and starting businesses. Currently, Susan is the Director of Knowledge Services at New Energy Finance, the leading independent provider of global research to investors and decision-makers in renewable energy, energy efficiency, carbon capture and storage, nuclear power, and the carbon markets. Previously as CEO for First Tuesday Zurich, she led its growth into a recognized innovative think- tank and knowledge network focused on new technologies and industries undergoing radical change, producing thought leadership and leading publications.
Susan is active on several boards, occasionally blogs, and supports various initiatives including as a Jury Member for the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year. Susan was a banker before her entrepreneurial career, with Chase and then UBS for more than 14 years, most recently as Global Head of Structured Finance. Susan is an experienced public speaker and moderator at institutes and corporate events on topics including financial services, entrepreneurship, risk and innovation. Susan graduated from Harvard College.
Wesley Chan
Group Product Manager, Google Voice
Wesley Chan is an early employee and fun-loving entrepreneur at Google, where he is tasked with scouting new opportunities and turning them into disruptive billion dollar businesses. Two of his favorite products he’s founded and launched include Google Analytics and Google Voice.
Wesley is a reciepient of Google’s founder award–the company’s most prestigious recognition–for leading the development of Google Toolbar and building out Google’s early client efforts. Prior to Google, Wesley has worked as a research lead at HP Labs, a Program Manager at Microsoft, and is a graduate of the MIT Media Laboratory.
In his spare time, Wesley also serves as Google’s Chief Photographer Emeritus. His favorite camera is the Canon EOS-5D Mark II.
Stowe Boyd
Social Media Blogger and Front Man for The /Messengers
Stowe Boyd is a well-known media subversive, and an internationally recognized authority on real-time, collaborative and social technologies.
Stowe is best known for his writing at /Message and the brain behind it. He is obsessed with social tools and their impact on business, media, and society. Stowe coined the term “social tools” in 1999, the same year he started blogging, and he hasn’t looked back since. Stowe spoke at innumerable conferences on web culture, social tools, and web 2.0 technologies in recent years, such as Lift, Reboot, Web 2.0 events, Enterprise 2.0, Supernova, Defrag and dozens of others. July 2008 Technobabble.com rated Stowe in the top five analysts who blog (#2 for microblogging). Stowe has a bachelor’s degree from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a master’s degree in computer science from Boston University.
Eugene Lee
CEO of Socialtext
Eugene Lee is the Chief Executive Officer and member of the Board of Directors at Socialtext. Eugene assumes day-to-day management and operational control over all aspects of Socialtext’s business, including driving product direction and development, strategic alliances, and scaling the sales, marketing and support organizations globally.
Eugene comes to Socialtext from Adobe Systems, where he led Adobe’s enterprise marketing and vertical market segments. Previously, he held several executive leadership roles at Cisco Systems, ranging from Vice President (VP) Worldwide Small/Medium Business Marketing to VP Worldwide Enterprise Marketing. Eugene also held key management positions at Banyan Systems, including General Manager for the messaging business unit. He was co-founder of Beyond Inc., developers of the award-winning BeyondMail product, and holds four patents in messaging, workflow and privacy technologies. Eugene has a B.A. in Physics and B.S. in Engineering and Computer Science from Harvard College and an MBA from M.I.T. Sloan School of Management.
Jason Goldberg
Chief Product Officer, XING / CEO & founder of socialmedian Inc.
Jason recently joined XING in Hamburg (Germany) in the newly created position of Vice President Applications Platform at XING. In this position, Jason is responsible for managing global partnerships for application developers and content providers to connect with the XING network.
Prior to XING, Jason founded and led two Web 2.0 startups. He is the founding entrepreneur and visionary behind socialmedian, the leading innovator in social news, and Jobster, the leader in web 2.0 recruitment services. socialmedian was sold to XING AG of Hamburg, Germany in December 2008. Prior to founding Jobster, Jason led Strategic Planning & Alliances for T-Mobile USA and before that held management positions at AOL Time Warner.
Jason is a frequent public speaker on web 2.0, social media, employment issues, and recruiting industry trends. Jason has been featured on CNN, CNBC, Fox Business News, and in the Wall Street Journal, USA Today. From 1993 to 1998 Jason worked at the White House in Washington D.C., the final two years as senior aide to the White House Chief of Staff, Erskine Bowles. Jason worked for Bill Clinton in a series of leadership roles from 1991 to 1998 before embarking on his current career in business. He received an MBA from the Stanford University and holds a BA from Emory University with honors.
Lee Bryant
CEO Headshift
Headshift is Europe’s leading enterprise social computing consultancy, with over 5 years’ experience in designing, implementing and growing next generation social software solutions.
Lee co-founded Headshift in 2002 to focus on the emerging area of social software and social networking. Lee has been playing with words and computers since the age of 10, and has a strong belief in the empowering potential of the internet. He is also a board member of a social enterprise, Involve, and a trustee of the Foundation for Science Technology and Culture.
Jason Falls
Vice President and Director of Interactive and On-Line Communications at Doe Anderson
Jason Falls is Vice President and Director of Interactive and On-Line Communications at Doe Anderson, one of the United States’ oldest and most accomplished brand-building agencies. He oversees social media and Internet marketing strategies for iconic brands such as Maker’s Mark and Knob Creek bourbons. Falls’ aggressive approach to social media produced innovative programs such as the Jim Beam Baja Twitter Tracker and the first social media campaign and brand blog in the spirits industry.
A public relations professional by trade, Falls is an internationally known speaker and commentator on the social media, marketing and public relations industries. His blog, SocialMediaExplorer.com, is one of the most widely read and rated in the social media, marketing and public relations categories and can be found on the Advertising Age Power 150. With a mix of wit and candour, Falls both informs and entertains as he explores and discusses issues of the day in the on-line marketing world. Falls is also the cofounder of the Social Media Club Louisville.
René E. Rechtman
Group Managing Director GoViral
GoViral is a fast growing digital branded content distributor. Goviral partners with well known brands such as Nissan, Nokia, Coca-Cola, Nike, EA, seeding and pushing their branded content to consumers via video, games and widgets in order to secure brand engagement.
René Rechtman has worked in media, communications, management and the Internet in EMEA for more than 13 years. Currently, René is MD at GoViral where his remit is to build a strong global business. Before this René spent over 8 years helping to build TradeDoubler into a leading European provider of online performance based marketing solutions. René’s latest role at TradeDoubler was VP, where he was responsible for the group’s advertiser and publisher sales. Prior to TradeDoubler, René worked in private equity, co-founded a management consultancy and worked in a marketing and communication agency group. René is also a seed internet investor, co-founder of Adamma real estate fund and holds several board and advisory positions. René has a degree in Political Science and International Relations from Copenhagen University and worked on a Business PhD at Kingston Business School on the subject of business strategy.
Frans van der Reep
Professor InHolland University
Frans van der Reep is a reflective practitioner - known as researcher, trend watcher, writer, regular speaker, and entrepreneur. He is a Professor at the Dutch Inholland University, Senior Strategist at Royal KPN and holds a number of non-executive board memberships both in the non-profit and profit sector. He has written many papers and a number of books on how the Internet impacts our lives and work thereby connecting the various business realms of Strategy, Marketing & Sales, HRM, Finance, Business Process Management and ICT.
Frans van der Reep in the News
Andy Piper
IBM, Social Bridgebuilder and Consulting IT Specialist
Andy Piper has been with IBM Software Group since 2001. He is part of the Software Group Development Laboratories, where his “day job” is to define product futures, produce collateral and improve software consumability, particularly around the WebSphere brand. Andy is a key ambassador for IBM’s internal BlueIQ social software community and has been championing the use of social media inside the enterprise for a number of years. He is also one of the founding members of IBM’s Virtual Universe Community.
Andy is probably best known online as a “social bridgebuilder” who spans a number of different areas of technology and interest. His weblog The Lost Outpost http://andypiper.co.uk reflects the diversity of his skills and interests: development, design, communications, social media, community building, marketing, gaming and digital imaging. He is one of the organisers of Home Camp http://homecamp.org.uk and spends a lot of time with the folks from the IBM Emerging Technologies team who run the eightbar http://eightbar.co.uk blog, debating anything that is new and cool. Andy also regularly co-hosts the Dogear Nation podcast http://dogearnation.com.
Andy is a regular conference speaker on various topics, ranging from WebSphere to Virtual Worlds to social software. Furthermore, Andy is a member of the British Computer Society and is a Chartered IT Professional. He holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Modern History from Brasenose College, Oxford University, in the UK.
Umair Haque
Director Havas Media Lab, Founder Bubblegeneration, Blogger Harvard Business Publishing
Umair Haque is Director of the Havas Media Lab, a new kind of strategic advisor that helps investors, entrepreneurs, and firms experiment with, craft, and drive radical management, business model, and strategic innovation. Umair also blogs for Harvard Business Publishing.
Prior to Havas, Umair founded Bubblegeneration, an agenda-setting advisory boutique that helped shape the strategies of investors, entrepreneurs, and blue chip companies across media and consumer industries. Bubblegeneration’s work has been recognized by publications like Wired, The Red Herring, Business 2.0, and BusinessWeek, and in Chris Anderson’s Long Tail, to which Umair was a contributor.
Chris Thorpe
Developer Platform Evangelist at MySpace UK
Chris Thorpe is a consultant at MySpace advising on what developers want from MySpace, what MySpace want from developers and what users want from both of them.
Chris has been involved in the world wide web since 1992 from the early days of http, the letters at the start of all web addresses. He started off as a research scientist playing with really large computers and he’s been looking for more and more excuses ever since to build online experiences for people so he can play with more really big computers. He’s been involved in projects as diverse as bringing Which? to an online audience, social worlds for 7-11 year olds, video archives of Nobel Prize winners telling their life stories, a James Bond premiere webcast and putting contemporary sculpture on Trafalgar Square’s Fourth Plinth. For the past few years Chris has been interested in the underlying interaction patterns and anthropological features of the social web. He founded his consultancy Jaggeree in 2008 and consults with a diverse collection of clients including The Guardian, Techlightenment, NixonMcInnes and BrandoSocial. He blogs and twitters when he as time too.
Nick burcher
Head of VivaKi Nerve Center UK and Products & Partnerships EMEA
Nick Burcher oversees the EMEA operation of the VivaKi Nerve Center (VNC) – a central hub that builds best-in-class tools, platforms and partnerships for Publicis Groupe agencies Denuo, Digitas, Starcom MediaVest Groupe and ZenithOptimedia.
He is chiefly responsible for driving digital development of the VivaKi agency brands across Europe, serving in a hybrid role that provides social media, performance marketing, research and display media expertise. Prior to this, Nick spent 12 years working for both Zed Media and ZenithOptimedia. He started in traditional media, before moving into digital, where his most recent role was running the ZenithOptimedia Group Search and Performance marketing teams across some of the UK’s largest brands, such as O2, Toyota, Lexus, Lloyds TSB, BT, Capital One and BMW. During this time, he was also the ZO Group representative on the IPA Search council and won industry awards for work on Zurich, Open University and MG Rover. Nick is a frequent conference speaker and vocal advocate, discussing media and advertising trends on his Advertising Age Power 150 blog at www.nickburcher.com.
Merran Wrigley
Head of External Communications & PR at Sony Ericsson Mobile
Merran leads the global external communications team at Sony Ericsson’s corporate head quarters in London, overseeing product & technology PR, lifestyle PR campaigns, and corporate PR including analyst and investor relations. In the last year she has established a cross functional team of customer services, digital marketing, content & services and risk management to develop a unified social media strategy within the global organisational structure of Sony Ericsson. The main thrust of this has been to create a ‘coalition of the willing’ to align the existing resources in the company and focus communication strategies on building communities around specific areas of interest such as creative design, sustainability and third party application developers.
Merran joined Sony Ericsson from Sony Corporation, where she worked in the corporate PR Division in Tokyo with a number of different business groups including consumer electronics, new business development such as Sony’s internet portal - SoNet - and internet bank. She also led PR for blue-sky technologies such as Sony’s robot program. She has a degree in Philosophy, a masters in Japanese Studies & Language plus an MBA from London Business School.
Marilyn Pratt
SAP Community Evangelist, Business Process Expert Community Advocate
Marilyn began writing code in the early 80’s and has worked for SAP in the Americas since 1999, where she served as a senior instructor for SAP Education, delivering courses in the Advanced Business Application Programming Language (ABAP) to thousands of developers and consultants. Marilyn was one SAP Education’s earliest adopters and promoters of online learning and rich media learning content, facilitating and moderating online training events. Community is part of Marilyn’s DNA having lived for over a 15 year period of time in a socialistic communal environment, where she served as IT director and also was a grassroots environmental advocate. In 2004 Marilyn became a community manager and content strategist for the SAP Developer Network and in 2006 helped launch the Business Process Expert Community, where she is presently the community evangelist and participant facilitator. In this context she walks the tightrope between the old paradigm of enterprises wanting to control messages and the new reality of engaging with a participatory and open ecosystem model. Marilyn holds a master’s degree in Adult Education and Distance Learning as well as a fine arts degree in professional theater directing. Social responsibility and sustainability topics are among her passions and she can be found talking about them at http://grannimari.blogspot.com and her SAP Community Network blog.
Marilyn Pratt in the News Back to top
Iain Simpson
Head of Commercial Insights & Digital Marketing, BDO Stoy Hayward
Iain is a creative strategist with a passion for digital media. In a career spanning over 20 years he has worked with some of the biggest names in their respective industries (Shell, KPMG, MTV, Save the Children and BDO) and has engaged people by demonstrating the art of the possible. His board level interactions have enabled him to bring about change despite bureaucracy and cultural risk aversion. Considered to be a maverick as well as a strategic and methodical thinker, he has a track record of innovative thought leadership.
As a technology and multimedia evangelist he has presented at conferences on ‘Management of Corporate Reputation in Cyberspace’, Utilising Technologies to Support Communities’, Enterprise Knowledge Management and Virtual Worlds. He is an honorary member of the IVCA (International Visual Communications Association) and has chaired and judged awards panels on Multimedia, Digital Marketing, Public Sector Information and Innovation.
Christophe Langlois
Social Media Evangelist
Christophe is an active blogger and business networker. His main blog, Visible Banking, is the leading independent blog 100% focused on social media in banking and financial services. Christophe is an experienced presenter, thought leader, and advocate for Web 2.0, and he is a regularly requested speaker at conferences.
Prior to his recent Senior Innovation Manager role at Lloyds TSB, one of the major UK banks, Christophe worked in business development in both telecommunications and banking. In these roles he helped drive significant new business, especially in payments straight through processing and the anti-money-laundering space.
In late 2008, Christophe founded his consultancy firm to help financial institutions better understand and leverage social media.
Christophe Langlois in the News
Lloyd Davis
Social Artist and Master Community Builder
Lloyd Davis has been described as a Social Artist and Master Community Builder. He is the founder of the Tuttle Club, a thriving community-based physical space for people in social media to come for social, learning and work activities. Tuttle has been described as: “the best way to start a Friday morning when recovering from Thursday night while still doing your job properly.”
Training both as an actor and as a software engineer gave Lloyd a unique perspective on how people use computing socially. After graduating, Lloyd spent eight years in knowledge and information management at the Audit Commission before becoming an independent consultant with constantly evolving portfolio in 2002. When not speaking, writing, thinking or dreaming about creating social capital, Lloyd can be found playing his ukulele and singing his little heart out.
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