Social Gaming 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 Social Gaming Summit 2009 should contact Charles Hudson via email at charles@socialgamingsummit.com.

Erikka Arone, VP Business Development, Zong

Erikka Arone is the VP of Business Development for Zong. She is responsible for partnerships with virtual goods and gaming companies to drive monetization and adoption. Erikka has broad experience in numerous high-growth social web and mobile businesses. She was at Six Apart, where she was responsible for distribution and product partnerships for TypePad. Before that, Erikka was VP of Business Development at Snapvine (sold to Whitepages), where she helped grow the company to over 10 million users in a year and become one of the top 10 applications on MySpace. Prior to Snapvine, she led marketing at Flock, a social media web browser.

Erikka was iPod Product Marketing Manager at Apple, and worked on the iPod mini, nano, and touch. She worked on gaming for iPod. Before Apple, Erikka was at Microsoft, and led consumer marketing for the Pocket PC and Smartphone, TabletPC, and Portable Media Player, a $40M business. She began her career in mergers and acquisitions at Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette, and in venture capital at Advent International. Erikka attended Stanford University, and the MIT Sloan School of Management.

Michael Arrington, Founder and Co-Editor, TechCrunch

J. Michael Arrington is a serial entrepreneur and the founder of TechCrunch, a blog covering startups and technology news.

Arrington attended Claremont McKenna College and Stanford Law School, and practiced as a corporate and securities lawyer at two law firms: O'Melveny & Myers and Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati. His clients included idealab, Netscape, Pixar, Apple and a number of startups, venture funds and investment banks. He also co-authored a book on initial public offerings.

In 1999 he left WSGR to join RealNames as VP Business Development and General Counsel. In 2000 he cofounded Achex, an online payments company. Achex was acquired by First Data Corp in 2001 for $32 million. Achex is now the back end infrastructure to Western Union online. Arrington worked in an operational role at a Carlyle backed startup in London, founded and ran two companies in Canada (Zip.ca and Pool.com), was COO to a Kleiner backed company called Razorgator, and consulted to other companies, including Verisign.

He founded TechCrunch on June 11, 2005. In May 2008 Time Magazine named Michael Arrington as one of the world's 100 most influential people.

Andrew Busey, Founder & CEO, Challenge Games

Andrew Busey is the founder and CEO of Challenge Games, a new online gaming company creating exciting and challenging short-form games that don't require huge time commitments to play and enjoy.

Over the past 15 years, Andrew has pioneered some of the industry's most important web technologies – including work on Mosaic, the first web browser (now part of Microsoft Internet Explorer); creating iChat, one of the first instant messaging applications; and building WebCenter, the first major web-based customer service technology (now part of Avaya). He most recently co-founded Pluck which enables social media on major sites such as TheStreet.com, USA Today, and Reuters.

But his passion has always been gaming. In 2006 Andrew decided the time was right to pursue his dream and Challenge Games was born. Challenge Games launched their first game Duels in August 2007. In the past, Andrew led, developed, and contributed to numerous "Multi-User Dungeon" or "Multi-User Domain" (MUDs) games, which were the early predecessors to games like World of Warcraft and Everquest. In 1994, he wrote Secrets of the MUD Wizards, the first major published book on the topic.

Andrew holds seven technology patents and has several others pending. He is a graduate in computer science and marketing from Duke University and holds an MBA from The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.

In Duels, Andrew is known as Loki.

Adam Caplan, President, Super Rewards

Adam is the President at KITN Media (Super Rewards), a leading monetization technology for social network applications, casual gaming sites, MMORPGs, virtual worlds and other websites using virtual currencies. Adam is responsible for Super Rewards’ senior client relationships, strategic partnerships and business development, as well as helping to formulate the company's long-term strategy. Prior to joining KITN Media, Adam spent more than eleven years as an investment banker with Morgan Stanley, leading the firm’s emerging Internet / digital media effort in New York, assisting both early stage and larger companies with capital raising and strategic transactions. Adam holds a Bachelor of Commerce degree and a Law degree from the University of Melbourne, Australia.

Siqi Chen, Founder, Serious Business

Siqi is founder of Serious Business, a YCombinator and Lightspeed Venture Partners-funded startup in the Facebook space, and a top ranked developer on the Facebook platform. He was previously a product manager at video sharing site Veoh and a software engineer at the semantic search startup Powerset.

James Currier, Co-Founder and CEO, WonderHill

James Currier is the Co-Founder and CEO of WonderHill, a social game development company in San Francisco. (Stan Chudnovsky is the other Co-Founder and CTO.) James has been developing digital media companies since 1991. Prior to WonderHill, James was the Founder and CEO of Tickle, which registered over 200 million people and sold to Monster in 2004. James is a graduate of Princeton University and Harvard Business School, and he is a Henry Crown Fellow at the Aspen Institute.

Renata Dionello, Director, Consumer Business Development, PayPal

Renata leads PayPal's efforts in business development on the consumer side of the business. She is currently involved in developing PayPal's strategy in the micropayments and social media space. Renata has over 10 years of experience in business development, strategy, product management and marketing. Prior to PayPal, she ran marketing and product management at Pictage, the leading online services provider for professional photographers. Renata's experience also includes heading up strategy at Rent.com, corporate strategy at Disney, project management at Universal Music and strategy consulting at the Boston Consulting Group. Renata holds a BA and MEng from the University of Oxford (England) and an MBA from the Harvard Business School.

Gareth Davis, Platform Manager, Facebook

Gareth Davis is a Platform Manager at Facebook, where he oversees games for Facebook Platform. Prior to Facebook, Gareth spent many years in the game industry, producing titles for leading game publishers Sega and Electronic Arts. He also led software development at Pixar Animation Studios for five years, working on the award winning and commercial blockbuster films, "The Incredibles," "Cars" and "Ratatouille." He has a Bachelors degree in Artificial Intelligence and lives in the North Beach district of San Francisco.

Rob Goldberg, CEO, GMG Entertainment

Rob is the Founder and CEO of GMG Entertainment, the leading “Physical Publisher” of digital gaming and entertainment brands via prepaid cards at retail. Prior to founding GMG in 2002, Rob spent 7 years growing LAUNCH Media (now Yahoo! Music) where he was Vice President of Partnership Marketing and created the LAUNCH Breakout Artist Endcap at Target Stores nationwide. Rob’s entrepreneurial spirit began early when at age 22 he was founder and CEO of the llizwe Trading Company, a youth-focused footwear and apparel company based in Cape Town, South Africa. Rob has a B.A. in English/Creative Writing from the University of Wisconsin Madison, which qualified him to be a bartender.

Jim Greer, Founder and CEO, Kongregate

Jim Greer is the founder and CEO of Kongregate, a startup that combines over 14,000 user-submitted Flash games with achievements, high scores, chat, multiplayer, virtual items and other community features. Developers share in ad and microtransaction revenue, and retain the rights to their games.

Before founding Kongregate in June 2006, Jim was Technical Director for Pogo at Electronic Arts. He has worked in the game industry since 1991 and hold a Computer Science degree from Princeton.

Sebastien de Halleux, Chief Operating Officer and Co-Founder, Playfish

Sebastien de Halleux (pronounced duh alloew) is chief operating officer and co-founder of Playfish, one of the largest and fastest growing social games companies. Sebastien leads operations in Playfish’s San Francisco office where he drives distribution, monetization and business development, as well as partnerships with Facebook, Google, Apple and MySpace. Prior to Playfish, Sebastien was part of the team that incubated Nokia Ad Service, a business unit aimed at monetizing mobile traffic across Nokia’s 850 million mobile devices worldwide.

Sebastien also was an early team member of Macrospace Ltd., a company which merged with Sorrent Inc. to become Glu Mobile (NASDAQ: GLUU), where he was instrumental in building the sales and marketing functions of the organization. He later expanded Glu’s distribution footprint in Europe, forged key partnerships with network operators Vodafone, T-Mobile and Orange, and reorganized the company’s financial planning and sales operations in preparation for its IPO on NASDAQ. Sebastien holds a Master’s in Civil Engineering with honors from Imperial College London. He has resided in Brussels, Bangkok and London, and presently lives in San Francisco.

Daniel James, Founder and CEO, Three Rings

Daniel is the founder and CEO of Three Rings, a San Francisco developer and operator of massively multi-player online games for the mass-market casual audience. Puzzle Pirates, Bang! Howdy and Whirled are Three Rings' titles. Prior to Three Rings Daniel consulted on game design, toiled for many years on Middle-earth Online, and co-founded two profitable UK internet startups, Avalon and Sense Internet.

David King, Founder, (Lil) Green Patch

David King is an entrepreneur focused on social gaming and digital media. He is interested in the evolution of digital media which enables people to do good through the use of technology. To this end, the (Lil) Green Patch social game has saved over 70,000,000 square feet of rain forest on the Osa Peninsula of Costa Rica. (Lil) Green Patch accomplishes this through a partnership with the Adopt an Acre program of The Nature Conservancy. Prior to founding Green Patch, Inc. David was a product manager at Google focusing on Google’s Mobile distribution and monetization products and Google’s core Adwords product. David holds a B.S. cum laude in Computer Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where he also holds an International Minor in Engineering.

Jeremy Liew, Managing Director, Lightspeed Venture Partners

Jeremy Liew invests primarily in the Internet and mobile sectors, with a particular interest in social media, commerce, gaming and methods for increasing monetization. He joined Lightspeed in early 2006.

Previously, Jeremy was with AOL, first as SVP of Corporate Development and Chief of Staff to the CEO and then as General Manager of Netscape. Jeremy joined AOL from InterActiveCorp (originally USA Networks), where he was VP of Strategic Planning. While there, he was responsible for acquisitions, divestitures and investments in TV Networks, consumer Internet companies and online travel companies.

Jeremy started working in the consumer Internet industry as an early employee of CitySearch in 1996, where he held a variety of sales management, operational and business development roles. He was also a management consultant at McKinsey & Company. Jeremy holds an MBA from Stanford and a BA/BSc from the Australian National University in Linguistics and Pure Mathematics.

Jeremy is a frequent contributor to the Lightspeed blog at http://lsvp.wordpress.com.

James Liu, COO, Oak Pacific Interactive

James Liu is the Co-COO of Oak Pacific Interactive (OPI), the second largest private internet company in China that owns and operates leading online services including mop.com, xiaonei.com, uume.com, donews.com, and renren.com. James was instrumental in helping OPI raise 400 million dollars from leading investors such as Softbank in 2008. James joined OPI through the acquisition of UUMe which he founded in 2003 as the first social networking site in China. Before that, James headed the marketing group at Fortinet, and helped the company grow revenue from zero to US$33 million within 2 years. James was a senior product manager at Siebel Systems and worked as Product Manager at Netscape and Cisco while at Stanford. James served as consultant to eBay and worked with BCG as a management consultant for three years. James holds dual degrees in CS and in Economics, both from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, He received his MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business, where he graduated as an Arjay Miller Scholar.

Matt Mihaly, CEO and Creative Director, Sparkplay Media

Matt is a veteran of virtual worlds and MMOs. In 1996, he founded Iron Realms Entertainment and pioneered the virtual goods sales model with its first MUD – Achaea, Dreams of Divine Lands. Soon thereafter, he invented the dual-currency model, allowing players to trade time for money. As CEO, Matt led Iron Realms to become the most successful company of its kind in the last decade in the niche (MUDs) it's in. He is currently founder/CEO and Creative Director of Sparkplay Media and is working hard on releasing his first browser-based 3d MMO 'Earth Eternal.' He speaks about business models and game development at industry events like the Game Developer’s Conference and the Virtual Goods Conference, and edited Dr. Richard Bartle’s canonical book, “Designing Virtual Worlds.”

Jason Oberfest, Senior Vice President of Business Development, MySpace

As Senior Vice President of Business Development for MySpace, Jason is responsible for structuring and negotiating deals to drive revenue and support the launch of innovative new products. Jason also serves as General Manager of the MySpace Open Platform. Prior to MySpace Jason served as Managing Director of Business Development and Product Management for Los Angeles Times Interactive where he structured deals with leading startups including Netvibes, Aggregate Knowledge, Eventful and Mixx.com and launched a first redesign of latimes.com, ultimately generating enough online ad revenue to cover the Times’s entire editorial payroll, print and online: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/jan/12/la-times-online-advertising. From 1999-2005 Jason served as VP of Strategy at Blast Radius, an interactive agency (http://www.apple.com/pro/profiles/blastradius). While at Blast Jason founded the strategic planning division of the company and led the design and development of content and commerce websites for Sony, Nintendo, Viacom, Warner Music Group, A&E Television Networks and others. Jason worked with AOL from 2002-2005 developing AOL Shopping, AOL Search, AOL.com, and other products.

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.

John Pleasants, CEO, Playdom

John Pleasants is CEO of Playdom, a leading social games developer for Facebook, MySpace and hi5. Most recently, John served as President of Publishing and Chief Operating Officer of Electronic Arts (EA), where he oversaw global operations for the $4+ billion gaming company and led its consumer-facing businesses, including EA Mobile, Pogo, EA.com, global online gaming and Rupture. In addition, John drove a push to move EA from a software to a services model, and spearheaded the company's expansion into social gaming.

Prior to joining EA, John served as President and CEO of Revolution Heath and CEO of Ticketmaster, the world's leading live event ticketing company. During his tenure at Ticketmaster/InteractiveCorp (IAC), John also oversaw several leading online entities such as Evite.com, Match.com, CitySearch.com and ReserveAmerica.com. John is a Director of the Board for The Artists Den, a music production and promotion company, and previously held Board of Director positions with Expedia.com, Active.com, Fastclick, Going.com and Extend Health. John earned a BA from Yale University and an MBA from Harvard University.

Sean Ryan, Loki Partners

As part of Loki Partners, Sean Ryan helps companies create and execute online media strategies, with a particular focus on alternative monetization methods such as virtual economy and subscription. In today’s difficult economy, every community site should be introducing premium features to drive additional revenue beyond advertising, and there is no reason or time to relearn everyone else’s lessons.

Sean is the Chairman of Meez, the avatar and virtual world company he founded in 2005. He is also the Chairman & Co-Founder of Two Fish, the virtual item financial platform company. Prior to Meez, Sean was the VP of Music Services at RealNetworks, running the largest subscription music service in the US, after selling Listen.com/Rhapsody to them in 2004. Earlier in his career, Sean was the VP of Business Development at online game company SegaSoft Networks, as well as at parent company Sega of America, working on the Dreamcast online service.

Sean has an MBA from UCLA and a BA from Columbia. He is an active angel investor in online gaming, and also sits on the Board of Directors of educational non-profit Great Schools. Please email us at sean@lokipartners.com if interested in discussing your digital media or monetization needs.

Jia Shen, CTO and Founder, RockYou

Jia is the Chief Technology Officer and co-founder of RockYou, and has focused extensively on graphic design and usability throughout his professional web development career spanning over 10 years. Prior to RockYou, Jia has held management roles leading the user interface and technical solutions teams at Open Harbor, and managing the majority of engineering at Iconix. Jia started working on scalable consumer applications at shopping tools internet provider Bluedog, a Stanford based startup, and was part of the original team at Bell Laboratories which developed the VoiceXML format into the W3C standard. In addition, Jia’s experience has spanned enterprise sales and professional services functions, as he closed transactions and integrated with large multi-national corporation customers like Mitsubishi, Tyco, Flextronics, and DHL. Jia has a double major in Computer Science and Computer Engineering from Johns Hopkins University.

Andrew Sheppard, Executive Producer, hi5 Networks, Inc.

Andrew is the Executive Producer for Interactive Media at hi5 Networks, Inc. He has 9 years of experience working for leading interactive entertainment and high technology businesses. At Electronic Arts, Andrew was responsible for global product strategy and business development on Spore, the latest game from legendary game designer Will Wright. Prior to Electronic Arts, Andrew was responsible for strategic planning and business development at CNET Networks where he played a key role in growing the GameSpot, GameFAQs, MP3.com and Metacritic properties. Andrew has a Masters of Business Administration from the Haas School of Business at U.C. Berkeley and a Bachelor of Arts from Pomona College.

Justin Smith, Founder and Editor, Inside Facebook and Inside Social Games

Justin Smith is the founder and editor of Inside Facebook and Inside Social Games, the original and leading sources for news, analysis, and insight on the social gaming industry. From 2007 to 2009, Justin served as Head of Product for Watercooler, a venture-backed startup and one of the leading developers of applications on Facebook and other major social platforms. Prior to Inside Facebook, Justin was an early employee at Xfire, the largest social utility for gamers, which was sold to Viacom in 2006. Prior to Xfire, Justin earned a degree in Computer Systems Engineering from Stanford University. Justin is also the author of the Facebook Marketing Bible, the most widely referenced book on Facebook marketing today.

Anu Shukla, Founder and CEO, Offerpal Media

Anu Shukla founded Offerpal Media in June, 2007, with the vision of providing social application developers and other social publishers with a viable way to monetize their traffic. She has since grown Offerpal Media into the leading social advertising network on the Web, generating significant revenue for social publishers while driving high quality leads and high value customers to online advertisers. A serial entrepreneur, Anu is also the founder and CEO of Mybuys Inc., the leading provider of personalized product recommendations for online retailers. 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).

Greg Tseng, Co-Founder & Ceo, Tagged

Greg Tseng is Co-Founder & CEO of Tagged, a profitable and fast-growing social discovery site with over 75 million members, 20 million monthly users, and 6 billion monthly pageviews. Tagged is ranked a Top 100 website in the world (Alexa) and the #3 social networking site in the US after MySpace and Facebook (Hitwise). Greg is also the acknowledged expert in viral marketing, having incubated or advised several high-growth Web 2.0 sites like hi5, LinkedIn, Flixster, and Jaxtr. For this conference, he wants to share ideas on micropayments and subscription revenue streams and find revenue-generating applications to integrate on Tagged.