iGames Summit 2009

We’re continuing to add speakers, so watch this space - we’ll have some great additions to this list to announce shortly. Companies interested in speaking at the iGames Summit should contact Charles Hudson via email at charles@igsummit.com.

Danielle Cassley, Co-Founder, Aurora Feint

Danielle Cassley and Jason Citron are the founders or Aurora Feint Inc, the iPhone development company responsible for the popular Aurora Feint series games. Danielle, an avid gamer, graduated from UC Berkeley in 07 with a double major in Applied Mathematics and Computer Science. With their combined interest in gaming and mobile development Danielle and Jason are building out the first asynchronous MMO for the iPhone.

Michael Chang, CEO and Founder, Greystripe

Michael is responsible for Greystripe’s market vision. He was most recently an Associate at Incubic Venture Capital and was responsible for reviewing investments in Internet and software companies. He has an MBA from Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business and five years of engineering and marketing product management with SAN pioneer Gadzoox Networks. At Gadzoox he was responsible for the Microsoft partnership strategy and was the project manager for the COMPAQ Fibre Channel Hub. Michael also has a BS in EE from Carnegie Mellon University.

Jason Citron, Co-Founder, Aurora Feint

Jason Citron and Danielle Cassley are the founders or Aurora Feint Inc, the iPhone development company responsible for the popular Aurora Feint series games. Jason is a valedictorian in video game design and development from Full Sail in Florida and also has several years of experince in the industry. With their combined interest in gaming and mobile development Danielle and Jason are building out the first asynchronous MMO for the iPhone.

Steve Demeter, CEO, Demiforce LLC

Steve Demeter owns Demiforce LLC, a San Francisco-based startup specializing in games and entertainment concepts for the iPhone. He is the creator of Trism, one of the most successful games in the iTunes AppStore. Prior to this he has worked in the games industry dating back to the 90s, creating games for handheld devices such as the Gameboy Color and Gameboy Advance.

Ken Gullicksen, Partner, Morgenthaler Ventures

Ken Gullicksen is a venture capitalist at Morgenthaler Ventures in Menlo Park, California. Investment interests include software, web-based services, and digital media. He currently serves on the Board of Directors of imeem, blist, Danal, Nominum, and Voltage Security. Ken led or co-led the series A investments for these firms. He continues to focus on first institutional round investments.

Ken has several years experience in Silicon Valley high-technology as a leader in business strategy, market development, and engineering management at Nortel Networks, Hitachi-Raychem Display Systems, and Sun Microsystems. Ken has a BSEE from San Jose State University and an MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Sebastien de Halleux, Chief Operating Officer and Founder, Playfish

Sebastien answers for distribution, monetization and business development at Playfish. Prior to Playfish Sebastien was at Nokia where he was responsible for Strategy and Business Development for the newly formed mobile advertising group. He helped accelerate this key group by completing the successful acquisition of Enpocket, a US-based mobile advertising company. Prior to Nokia, Sebastien was Strategy and Operations Director at Glu Mobile. During his tenure, he structured the European financial planning and analysis organisation and the tactical sales operations department responsible for prioritising, deploying and tracking several million mobile gaming SKUs. He was previously Head of Strategic Alliances at Macrospace where he was responsible for corporate development and key partnerships, resulting in the merger with US-based Sorrent and the formation and integration of Glu Mobile. Prior to Glu Mobile, Sebastien was a management consultant with Booz Allen Hamilton, working on Finance and Media projects across EMEA and APAC. Sebastien holds an MEng (Hons) in Civil Engineering from Imperial College.

David Helgason, Co-Founder and CEO, Unity Technologies

IT entrepreneur, software developer, and student of subjects as diverse as physics and Arabic, David’s work is about driving Unity Technologies to the top. In the past he created and participated in multiple startups in areas such as early news and community integration, music distribution, data integration, and consulting. David serves on the boards of several games and technology startups.

Andrew Lacy, COO, Tapulous

In January 2008, Andrew joined Bart Decrem (Flock, Firefox, Easel) to found Tapulous, the first company created on the emerging iPhone platform. In just 12 months they have grow Tapulous to be a market leader in the space and are responsible for the hit gaming franchise, Tap Tap Revenge. Tapulous is currently working with music labels and artists to create increasingly interactive music gaming experiences for music fans. Andrew is a graduate from Stanford Business School and has previously worked as both a consultant with McKinsey & Company and in business development and commercialization for CSIRO, and Australia government scientific research organization.

Nicole Lazzaro, President, XEODesign

Nicole, founder and president of XEODesign, Inc., is an award-winning designer and an authority on emotion and games. Clients including Sony, EA, Ubisoft, Sega, PlayFirst, The Cartoon Network, LeapFrog, Mattel, Monolith, Xfire, D.I.C.E, Leap Frog, The Learning Company, Broderbund, Roxio, and Maxis. She has a degree in Psychology from Stanford University where she also studied film making and computer programming. A frequent speaker at industry events she consults extensively on games and why people play them. She has spent more than 18 years designing successful experiences for all levels of players and users, from novice to expert, in many game genres. Her work on the emotional and cultural content of play has improved the player experiences for more than 40 million people and helped expand the game industry’s emotional palette beyond the stereotypical range of anger, frustration, and fear.

Keith Lee, CEO & co-Founder, Booyah

Keith Lee has a proven track record in the interactive entertainment industry. Prior to founding Booyah, Mr. Lee was the Lead Producer at Blizzard Entertainment for the Diablo franchise including Diablo III. Before Blizzard, Mr. Lee worked at Insomniac Games as the Lead Programmer and Project Manager for the Ratchet & Clank series. Prior to the gaming industry, Mr. Lee worked at several investment banks, including Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs. Mr. Lee graduated with a BS in Computer Science and a BA in International Relations and Economics from Stanford University.

Rebecca Lynn, Principal, Morgenthaler Ventures

Rebecca joined Morgenthaler’s Menlo Park office in 2007, and she focuses on early-stage investments in mobile, internet services, digital media and financial services. Rebecca began her career at Procter and Gamble where she worked in international new product market entry. She then spent four years at NextCard where she led product development efforts and later served as the Vice President of Marketing where she managed one of the top five largest online marketing efforts. After NextCard, she ran her own consulting business focusing on online marketing for financial services and affiliate marketing.

During law school, she was a Summer Associate at Heller Ehrman/Venture Law Group and at Quinn Emanuel where she focused on intellectual property litigation. Rebecca is also an inventor on several issued patents. She was published in the Berkeley Law and Technology Journal, and she is a registered Patent Agent. During business school, Rebecca chaired the Berkeley Business Plan Competition and was a member of New Venture Fellows. Rebecca earned a JD/MBA degree from the Haas School of Business and Boalt Hall School of Law at the University of California at Berkeley, and a B.S. in chemical engineering from the University of Missouri.

Mike Mettler, AdMob

Mike is Director of Product Management at AdMob, the world's largest mobile advertising network. AdMob serves over 1 billion ads each month to iPhone users, providing distribution for advertisers and monetization for app developers. Mike is responsible for AdMob's publisher and platform products, including iPhone and Android. Prior to AdMob, Mike worked at Obopay (a mobile payments startup) and In-Q-Tel (a venture capital firm). Mike has a BS in Mathematical and Computational Sciences from Stanford and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

Mike Pagano, Associate Producer, EA Mobile

Mike Pagano is an award-winning iPhone producer at EA Mobile, responsible for the development of Spore Origins and SimCity, and Yahtzee Adventures. He is currently driving production on various premium titles including Need for Speed Undercover. Mr. Pagano has experience managing end to end production and is responsible for design R&D of potential new platforms. Prior to his current position as Associate Producer at EA Mobile, Pagano served as Technical Producer at Walt Disney Internet Group Disney Online (WDIG). At WDIG, Pagano produced all Disney Extreme Digital’s launch games and later led a group in special cutting-edge projects, focusing on producing Disney’s first iPod game. Previously, Pagano served as Producer at Warner Bros. Online Inc. where he began his career designing and producing games for mobile devices. Mr. Pagano joined EA Mobile, the leading mobile game publisher worldwide, in August 2007. He has Bachelors in Realtime Interactive Simulation (BSc) from DigiPen Institute of Technology.

Mark Pincus, Founder and CEO, Zynga

Mark Pincus is a leading Internet entrepreneur, having founded and established four successful companies. His latest venture Zynga, founded in January 2008, is the largest social gaming network, and marries his knowledge of social networks with his desire to create the next mass market video game phenomenon. Zynga has received $39 million in funding to date and has more than 7 million daily active users playing their online social games.

With a visionary eye, Mark foreshadowed the popularity of social networks when he founded Tribe Networks (tribe.net) in 2003, one of the first online communities and social networking sites. Tribe partnered with major local newspapers and was funded by The Washington Post, Knight Ridder Digital and Mayfield Venture Capital. Four years later, Cisco purchased the core tribe.net assets to provide an initial platform for its digital media services group.

Prior to Tribe, Mark co-founded SupportSoft, Inc. (Nasdaq: SPRT), originally known as Support.com, a provider of service and support automation software. Mark served as chairman and CEO and led the company through its successful IPO to become one of the world's leading publicly traded enterprise software companies.

Mark's initial Internet success began with Freeloader, the first web-based consumer push information service. Freeloader was acquired seven months after launch by Individual, Inc. for $38 million. Prior to Freeloader, Mark worked in various capacities in venture capital, business development and financial services.

Mark earned his B.A. from University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business and his MBA from Harvard Business School. A native of Chicago, Mark has lived in several cities across U.S. including Philadelphia, Boston, Washington DC and Denver and currently resides in San Francisco.

Shervin Pishevar, CEO and Co-Founder, Social Gaming Network

Shervin Pishevar is the CEO and co-founder of Social Gaming Network (SGN), which he helped incubate from within Webs Inc. last year. Since its inception in September 2007, SGN has grown to more than a billion page views per month and more than 50 million users across all major social networks, Facebook, MySpace, Bebo and Hi5. In the last four months, Shervin conceived of a way to leverage the iPhone's accelerometer technology to launch a series of sports games, including iBowl, iGolf, iBaseball and is just about to launch iBasketball. All these games, require the player to swing, the phone to bowl, golf, catch or hit a baseball and get the basketball in the net. They are currently the only gaming network that uses this technology and have had over 4million downloads on the iPhone / iPod Touch platform since September 17th. This week Shervin and his team took this one step further wirelessly connecting the iPhone or iPod Touch to your computer with iFun. Starting with Golf, iFun allows you to swing the iPhone and see the drive hit on your computer screen. Tennis will be launching next month. This launch has seen coverage on NBC News, the New York Times, Washington Post, TechCrunch, CNET, Mashable and many other major outlets.

Named “Bill Gates’ Worst Nightmare” by the Financial Times, Shervin is a visionary technology entrepreneur, published researcher and technology incubation expert, best known for helping usher in the on demand web computing era and the visionary behind the first web operating system with his first startup, WebOS.

Brett Seyler, General Manager, GarageGames.com

Brett Seyler is the General Manager of GarageGames.com, home to GarageGames’ technology licensing business. He started with GarageGames in marketing and business development early in 2007 and quickly moved into a fulltime role business development role. A gamer from a young age, he left behind a career in mathematical finance and hasn’t looked back. Brett has a B.S. in Mathematics from the University of Oregon.

Anu Shukla, Founder and CEO, Offerpal Media

Anu Shukla is a serial entrepreneur. Prior to founding Offerpal Media, she was the founder and CEO of Mybuys Inc., where she currently serves on the Board of Directors. Mybuys is a venture-backed company in the eCommerce personalization market. Prior to Mybuys, Anu pioneered the category of Internet Marketing Automation as founder and CEO of Rubric, Inc. Rubric was acquired in 2000 for $366 million. Prior to Rubric, Anu held a variety of executive roles including the VP of Marketing and Product Strategy at Versata (VATA), and Vice President of Worldwide Marketing and Product Management at Compuware/Uniface Corporation (CPWR).

Ge Wang, Asst Professor, Stanford University and Co-Founder & CTO, Smule

Ge Wang is an assistant professor at Stanford University in the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA), and is the CTO and Co-founder of Smule. Ge research interests include interactive software systems (of all sizes) for computer music, programming languages, sound synthesis and analysis, music information retrieval, new performance ensembles (e.g., laptop orchestra and mobile phone orchestras) and paradigms (e.g., live coding), visualization, interfaces for human-computer interaction, interactive audio over networks, and methodologies for education at the intersection of computer science and music.

Ge is the chief architect and co-creator of the ChucK audio programming language. He was a founding developer and co-director of the Princeton Laptop Orchestra (PLOrk), the founder and director of the Stanford Laptop Orchestra (SLOrk) and of the Stanford Mobile Phone Orchestra (MoPhO). Ge composes and performs via various electro-acoustic and computer-mediated means.

Additionally, Ge is the Co-founder and CTO of Smule (a.k.a. SonicMule, Inc.), a startup company exploring interactive sonic media (starting with the iPhone) and intensely exploring expressive audio, enabling creativity for a wide population, and new social interactions. Ge is the designer of Ocarina, an expressive wind instrument for the iPhone, currently enabling hundreds of thousands of users to not only expressively play music, but listen to others and engagement in new types of expressive social interactions.

Neil Young, CEO & Founder, ngmoco

Neil Young is the CEO and Founder of ngmoco, creator and publisher of games exclusively for iPhone and iPod touch.

Prior to founding ngmoco, Neil held various positions at Electronic Arts, most recently as the Group General Manager of the EA|Blueprint Studio group that included Maxis (creators of Spore™ & The Sims™) and EA's collaborative partnership with Steven Spielberg. Neil joined Electronic Arts in 1997 as the General Manager of EA's Origin Systems subsidiary, where he supervised the launch of the world’s first Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing game, UltimaOnline™.

Prior to EA/Blueprint, Neil served both as Vice President and General Manager of EA Los Angeles (EALA) and EA Maxis, where he oversaw all aspects of the studios responsible for the blockbuster franchises Medal of Honor™, Command &Conquer™, The Lord of the Rings™ & The Sims™. In 2002 and 2003, Young also led the development of the first The Lord of the Rings games at EA Redwood Shores – The Lord of the Rings™: The Two Towers™ and The Lord of the Rings™: The Return of the King™.

In addition to his other producing and management credits, he was also the creator and driving force behind Majestic™, the first Alternate Reality Game (ARG) and a pioneering internet experience that blurred the line between fiction and reality by engaging players through non-traditional gaming media.

Greg Yardley, CEO & Co-Founder, Pinch Media

Greg Yardley, the co-founder & CEO of Pinch Media, has helped create the most sophisticated and widely-deployed analytics platform for native smartphone applications, beginning with the iPhone. Prior to Pinch Media, Greg led product management for the real-time auction portion of Yahoo’s next-generation ad serving platform, Yahoo! APT. He holds an M.A. from Stanford University and lives in beautiful Hoboken, New Jersey.