Speakers

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  Alan Cohen

  Cicso

  As vice president of global public sector and industry solutions, Alan Cohen is responsible for building and executing integrated global marketing strategies, solutions and programs to drive maximum relevance and adoption of Cisco’s technology portfolio for key customers in government, health care, education, financial services, manufacturing and retail.

  Alan has more than 20 years of leadership experience breaking new ground in multi-billion dollar markets in the communications and software industries. He is recognized as an expert in the areas of collaboration, business transformation and the impact of technology and social networking in companies and societies. Alan collaborated with Tom Friedman on his two seminal books on globalization: ‘The Lexus and the Olive Tree’ and ‘The World is Flat’. He has also served on the Board of Directors and as Chair of the Compensation Committee of General Growth Properties (NYSE: GGP), one of the largest REITs in the U.S, and Violin Memory, a leading flash storage technology player.

• 

  Atau Tanaka

  Director, Culture Lab

  Atau Tanaka is Chair of Digital Media at Newcastle University and leads the Creative Industries section of Newcastle’s EPSRC funded digital economy hub, Social Inclusion through the Digital Economy (SIDE).

  His work bridges the fields of interactive media and computer music. He holds degrees from Harvard University, and Stanford University’s CCRMA. He left the U.S. in 1992, first to come to IRCAM at the Pompidou Center in Paris, going on to become Artistic Ambassador for Apple France. He went on to be the first artist to become researcher at Sony Computer Science Laboratory (CSL) Paris.

  Atau's work seeks out the continued place of the artist in democratized digital forms. His work in interactive music performance and media art exhibitions have been shown internationally and have gained awards from Ars Electronica, Fondation Langlois, and the Fraunhofer Institute. He has been mentor at NESTA and is currently Director of Culture Lab.

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  Bobby Paterson

  CEO of happiest

  Bobby is the Founder and CEO of happiest, the Newcastle-based digital startup with a global vision to build a ‘Social Motivation Network’ to explore, create and share in life’s happiest experiences. Bobby quite literally believes happiest can help make the world a better place by scaling the principles of personal happiness via the power of social networking, mobile media and the Web.

  Previously, Bobby spent many years working in professional football in a wide variety of organisations including the FA. It was during this time that he become a serious student of the science and practice of motivation which, in turn, led him eventually to starting up happiest.

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  Carlos Ulloa

  HelloEnjoy

  Carlos Ulloa is the founder of HelloEnjoy, an interactive studio specialised in high-end real-time 3D for the Web and mobile.

  Carlos has been passionately involved with interactive entertainment since the early 90s, developing Playstation & PC titles at Psygnosis and Sony Computer Entertainment Europe. In 1999 he moved into online advertising, employed by leading agencies in Madrid, Barcelona and London, and his work evolved into the fields of graphic and typographic effects, motion design, interactivity and mainly 3D. In 2006 he created Papervision3D, the Open Source 3D engine for Flash.

  At HelloEnjoy he continues to explore ways to make 3D design accessible to broader audiences. A good example of this is his latest piece, helloflower, an intuitive 3D flower creator for the iPad. The studio also partners with advertising agencies around the world to create engaging experiences and games for their clients.

  Carlos has been a regular contributor and speaker at international conferences such as TEDGlobal, Creativity and Technology, Casual Connect, FITC, Flash on the Beach and Adobe MAX.

  He currently lives and works in Brighton, UK.

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  Caroline Phillips

  Phillips Internet Consulting

  Californian-born, French-resident entrepreneur and musician Caroline Phillips is one half of Basque music duo Bidaia alongside Mixel Ducau. Her searching, Moroccan- and East Indian-inflected vocals are accompanied by the distinctive, folky sounds of the hurdy-gurdy, an unfamiliar and unusual string instrument operated with a crank-turned wheel. Throughout her years as a professional musician, Phillips has regularly performed in jazz clubs and toured with her one-woman show in the Caribbean and North Africa.

  As an entrepreneur, she's CEO of Phillips Internet Consulting, a web agency that develops and distributes a multi-lingual email marketing suite and President of Yoga Massala, which offers on-line yoga classes and a collection of Yoga clothing.

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  Caspar Berry

  Poker player & Risk Analyst

  Caspar Berry started his career as the lead in the first series of Byker Grove on BBC1 alongside Ant and Dec.

  He read Economics and Anthropology at Cambridge before deciding to move to Las Vegas to become a professional poker player! He played poker professionally for most of the next three years of his life during which time he made a good living pitting his wits against the game’s best known players.

  In 2002, Caspar returned to the UK and co-founded Twenty First Century Media, building it into the fastest growing audio visual media company in the North East of England. In 2008 he sold it to Bob Geldof’s media giant, Ten Alps.

  It was while still at the helm of Twenty First Century Media that he began his career as a speaker and has since become one of the best known speakers on the topics of risk and decision-making based on his years as a professional poker player. He now consults regularly with some of the biggest and best known multinationals in the UK.

  Follow Casper on Twitter

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  Christopher Hatala

  Massive Black Inc

  Christopher Hatala currently lives in San Francisco working as President and Co-Founder of Massive Black Inc, a full production art and intellectual property development studio deeply rooted in the film, television, and video games industries.

  Chris began his career at Tippett Studio in Berkeley, California where he worked as a 3D animator on two feature films: Cats & Dogs (2001) and Evolution (2001). In 2001, he moved to Wellington, New Zealand to animate at Weta Digital on the Oscar winning feature films: The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002), The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003), I, Robot (2004), and King Kong (2005).

  Chris has been a regular contributor and speaker at major industry conferences worldwide, including Game Developers Conference Paris, ConceptArt.Org Workshops, Industry Giants, and at the Singapore Science Centre, Singapore.

  Chris will be performing at Thinking Digital Conference with his co-presenter Wesley Burt.

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  Conrad Wolfram

  Wolfram Alpha

  Conrad Wolfram is European founder and CEO of Wolfram Research and its worldwide strategic director. Since 1988, the Wolfram group has built the Mathematica computational software and since 2009, the spin-off Wolfram|Alpha knowledge engine.

  Conrad’s instigation and leadership of business and technical initiatives has been central to many key innovations in the technical computing industry. He regularly speaks on topics ranging from future technology to the new era of knowledge and the reform of maths education (the subject of his recent TED talk).

  He holds an MA in natural sciences and maths from the University of Cambridge.

• 

  Dan Lyons

  Newsweek & Daily Beast

  The always insightful and entertaining Dan Lyons who joined us this year via Apple's Facetime from Boston, MA. In this often hysterical talk Dan shares his insights about Google, Facebook and Roxxxy the sex robot among other things.

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  Dan Serfaty

  Viadeo

  Dan Serfaty is co-founder and CEO of Viadeo, a professional social network with more than 35 million members worldwide.Viadeo’s roots are in the world of entrepreneurs - a reflection of Dan’s passion for entrepreneurship.

  At the age of 23 he entered his first of many entrepreneurial ventures with the turnaround of DIMO, a company in the tourism sector. Over three years he successfully righted the company and sold it to a German group. Then in 1992, he co-founded a business specialising in the distribution of textile products from Asia, which he then expanded and later sold. In 2000, Dan teamed up with Viadeo co-founder Thierry Lunati to launch what was then an innovative concept in the private equity world: Agregator, an entrepreneurs’ group that aggregated and valued private company shares to fund the expansion of member companies. It grew into an organisation with 400 members whose connections were forged by capital and business relationships. It was from this beginning that Viadeo launched in 2004 to facilitate business among the club’s members by allowing them to continue their networking online. Dan currently lives with his wife and three children in San Francisco.

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  Erin McKean

  Wordnik

  Erin McKean likes to call herself a Dictionary Evangelist. She is the CEO of the new online dictionary Wordnik and prior to that she was the Editor in Chief of the New Oxford American Dictionary. She is the author of ‘Weird and Wonderful Words’, ‘More Weird and Wonderful Words’, ‘Totally Weird and Wonderful Words’, and ‘That’s Amore’ (also about words).

  Her first novel, ‘The Secret Lives of Dresses’, will be published by GrandCentral/5Spot in February 2011. She recently moved from Chicago to the Bay Area, rants about dresses on her blog (A Dress A Day), and she’s actually really bad at Scrabble (but surprisingly good at roller-skating).

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  Ewan McIntosh

  NoTosh Ltd

  Ewan McIntosh co-directed the digital strategy that helped the SNP in a historic election win this year. His company is all about engagement: engagement of young people in schools, engagement of consumers with media, engagement of voters in their future.

• 

  Gerd Leonhard

  Media futurist

  The WSJ calls Gerd ‘one of the leading Media Futurists in the World’. He is the Co-author of the influential book ‘The Future of Music’ (Berklee Press, 2005), as well as the author of ‘The End of Control’ (2007), ‘Music 2.0’ (2008), and ‘Friction is Fiction‘ (2009, Lulu Publishing).

  Gerd’s background is in the music business; in 1985 he won Berklee College’s ‘Quincy Jones Award’ and subsequently worked 12 years as a professional guitar player, composer and producer. He then spent a decade as digital media entrepreneur and start-up Internet CEO, based in San Francisco. In 2001, Gerd returned to Europe and started his career as a Futurist and Strategic Advisor. He now travels around the globe and speaks at major conferences and business events, company retreats and thinktanks on the Future of Business, Media, Content and Entertainment, Technology, Marketing, Advertising & Branding, Telecommunications, and Culture.

• 

  Heather Knight

  Marilyn Monrobot

  Heather Knight is a researcher at Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute and runs Marilyn Monrobot Labs in New York City, which creates live robot theatre performances. Her installations have been featured across the US and Europe and she recently spoke at the inaugural TEDWomen Conference in December 2010.

  Her work also includes: robotics and instrumentation at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, interactive installations with Syyn Labs and sensor design at Aldebaran Robotics. She is an alumnus from the Personal Robots Group at the MIT Media Lab, earning her bachelors and masters at MIT in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science with a minor in Mechanical Engineering.

  Heather will joined onstage by 'Data the Robot'. Data is a NAO Series robot created by Aldebaran Robotics based in France. Prior to Thinking Digital, he'll be appearing with Heather at the London Festival of the Spoken Nerd and the Amsterdam Comedy Festival.

• 

  Jer Thorp

  Data wizard

  A former geneticist, Jer’s digital art practice explores the many-folded boundaries between science and art. Recently, his work has been featured by The New York Times, The Guardian, BusinessWeek and the CBC.

  Thorp’s award-winning software-based work has been exhibited in Europe, Asia, North America, South America, and Australia and all over the web.

  Jer has over a decade of teaching experience, in Langara College’s Electronic Media Design Program, at the Vancouver Film school, and as an artist-in-residence at the Emily Carr University of Art and Design. Most recently, he has presented at Carnegie Mellon’s School of Art, at Eyebeam in New York City, and at IBM’s Center for Social Software in Cambridge.

  Jer’s unique collection of organic Flash experiments and generative artworks, has won numerous awards and has been featured in many art and design publications, both online and in print. Jer is a contributing editor for Wired UK.

• 

  Matthew Postgate

  BBC R & D

  Matthew Postgate has been the Controller BBC Research & Development since October 2008. Matthew is responsible for leading BBC R&D to ensure the corporation continues to deliver value to the BBC, wider industry and academia working across the media value chain. Matthew also serves on the BBC's technology board and is the BBC's Director on the board of YouView.

  Prior to his current role with BBC R&D Matthew was the BBC's Controller of Mobile with responsibility for coordinating the corporation's public service presence across all mobile platforms. During this time he successfully led the relaunch of BBC Mobile to become the UK's leading mobile site and led the delivery of BBC iPlayer on mobile. He also established the unit within the BBC that provides compliant interactivity to programming.

  Matthew joined the BBC as an Executive Producer working across emerging media platforms and was a key member of the team that launched BBC iPlayer.

• 

  Nancy Duarte

  Duarte Design

  Nancy Duarte is one of the world’s foremost authorities on presentation development and design. She is the founder of Duarte Design, who specialise in presentation mastery and visual communications. Duarte design is also one of Silicon Valley’s most successful and largest woman-owned businesses.

  Most notably, Duarte created the slide presentation that was at the heart of Al Gore’s Oscar-winning film, ‘An Inconvenient Truth’. She is also the author of the award-winning book ‘Slide:logy – The Art and Science of Creating Great Presentations’ and the recently published ‘Resonate – Present Visual Stories that Transform Audiences’.

  As well as creating presentations, executive keynotes and on-demand media for some of the world’s most recognised organisations, Duarte Design also host a number of training programmes to teach companies their principles in order to improve their presentation literacy.

• 

  Nicole Yershon

  Ogilvy Digital Innovation Lab

  Nicole Yershon began her career in advertising 25 years ago at Simons Palmer and GGT, two of London’s most renowned creative agencies.

  In 2000, she joined Ogilvy London where she now works as the Director of Innovative Solutions. In her first four years at Ogilvy she overhauled the agency’s broadcast and video capabilities, taking them from analogue to digital, with the creation of RedWorks Broadcast.

  Consolidated in 2007 into the Ogilvy Digital Innovation Lab (part of a worldwide network), the agency’s innovation activities have seen Nicole build partnerships between industries and across media channels to fuel unprecedented creative campaigns, and educate, both within the agency and beyond, speaking at global conferences and building clients Labs of their own.

• 

  Paul Rawlings

  Co-founder, Screenreach

  Paul co-founded ScreenReach Interactive and created the ‘screach’ product from his vast experience in digital signage and interactive technology. Paul started out creating EPOS, SalesOrder Processing and Marketing systems for businesses including Burger King and Dixons. In 2009 he built a couple of Twitter based businesses - these included Twe2, a free SMS provider for twitter sold privately by Paul in the same year, and a social auction website Twebay, which grabbed headlines around the world.

  His latest startup is heralded as arguably the most exciting North East startup since graphic.ly and quite possibly since Sage Gateshead plc. It is genuinely seen to have that much potential. Appropriately, Tom Maxfield, one of the earliest employees of Sage Gateshead plc, is the Chairman of the company. Screenreach was part of the initial round of startups from the hugely successful Difference Engine incubator and has raised significant amounts of venture capital since then.

• 

  Paul Smith

  Twitchiker

  Paul Smith is a writer and author of Twitchhiker - How One Man Travelled the World by Twitter. In 2009, Paul travelled around the world relying on the goodwill and generosity of strangers he met through Twitter. Paul's second book, Tales from the Edge of America, will be published in Autumn this year.

  Paul is also the co-founder of app development agency Never Odd Or Even, which develops third party mobile apps and has found success with its own projects, including Ask the Hoff, Next Metro (a joint venture with North East developer Alex Reid) and Appysnap.

• 

  Sam Martin

  Frog Design

  Sam Martin is the Director of Content Strategy at Frog Design where he is responsible for their global thought leadership, social media strategy and content initiatives and partnerships. He is also Editor-in-Chief of Frog’s Design Mind magazine.

  He is the author of nine books of non-fiction, the first of which he admits to writing in his front room while his two year old son played in the background. Working in this kind environment inspired his most recognisable publication, ‘Manspace: A Primal Guide to Marking your Territory’ which talks about Martin’s experiences of creating what he describes as a ‘den or hideaway where a man can claim a piece of territory for himself’.

  His writing, ghostwriting, and advice have appeared in numerous publications including Dwell, Metropolis, the New York Times, and the Washington Post.

• 

  Steven Bathiche

  Microsoft

  Steven Bathiche is Director of Research in Microsoft Corp.'s Applied Sciences Group, which he helped establish. He has been doing applied research at Microsoft since 1999 and was the inventor of a number of Microsoft features and products, including the SideWinder Freestyle Pro game pad, the first commercial gaming device to use accelerometers. He oversaw a complete redesign of the pointer ballistics algorithm that has been shipping in Windows since XP, and he invented the new laser tracking technology in Microsoft pointing devices. He also is the co-inventor of Microsoft Surface.

  Bathiche's interests are in creating novel human interfaces and computer form factors that create new scenarios and user paradigms to ultimately affect people's lives and their digital world. His current technical focus is in the field of co-locating display and sensing technologies. He holds 45 patents.

• 

  Tan Le

  Emotiv

  Tan was named Young Australian of the Year in 1998 and was voted one of Australia’s 30 Most Successful Women Under 30 in that same year. In 2000 she co-founded a wireless technology company, SASme.

  In 2003, Tan co-founded Emotiv, a neuroengineering company that has developed a breakthrough interface technology for digital media taking inputs directly from the brain. Emotiv’s vision is to revolutionize human-computer input in the same way the graphic user interface did 20 years ago. Applications for the Emotiv technology and interface span an array of industries – from gaming to interactive television. Emotiv is a recognized world leader and pioneer in this field of brain computer interface.

  Tan was a Special Visitor to the United Kingdom as a guest of the British High Commission and Foreign Commonwealth Office, a Goodwill Ambassador for Australia in Asia and is a Patron of the Australian Youth Ambassadors for Development Program. She has also been an Ambassador for the Status of Women since 2001. Tan has been appointed to a number of prominent Boards including Plan International Australia, Australian Citizenship Council, National Committee for Human Rights Education in Australia, RMIT Business in Entrepreneurship and the Centre for the Mind.

  Tan Le also spoke at the 2010 conference.

• 

  Tom Scott

  Gadget Geeks

  Tom Scott is a wry and hysterically funny observer of digital culture. His work has appeared on BBC One, Channel 4, NBC, at the paraflows net-art exhibition in Vienna and in publications around the world including the Guardian, Daily Mail, New York Magazine, Vanity Fair Daily and Time Magazine online.

  In 2011 he will become the first three time speaker at the Thinking Digital Conference. He won the 2008 Kevin Greening Award for Creativity and a 2009 bronze for Best Entertainment at the Student Radio Awards.

  He once got in trouble with the Cabinet Office for his version of their Preparing for Emergencies site, and has been described as a “sometime internet funny man” by The Register. He also runs the British part of International ‘Talk Like A Pirate Day’, and once got five gold runs on ‘Blockbusters’.

  Tom Scott also spoke at the 2010 conference.

• 

  Dr Vincent W. Li

  Angiogenesis Foundation

  Li tackles a common denominator of disease called angiogenesis, or new blood vessel growth. He created the Foundation in 1994 and currently oversees the Eat to Defeat initiative and ENABLE project, a global system that integrates patients, medical experts and healthcare professionals and democratises the spread and implementation of knowledge about angiogenesis-based medicines, diet and lifestyle. He is a highly sought international lecturer, advisor, and consultant for his insights into how to create paradigm shifts with medical innovation and transformation.

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  Walter De Brouwer

  OLPC Europe

  Walter De Brouwer is the CEO of OLPC Europe, the European Branch of the One Laptop per Child Initiative. The non-profit initiative has developed a low cost laptop to revolutionise the way we educate the world’s poorest children. Each child is given an ‘XO Laptop’, a low cost, low power, connected laptop with software tools and content designed for collaborative, self-empowered learning.

  Before leading this transformational project De Brouwer was one of the founders of PING, which was eventually acquired by telecom giant QWEST. As an internet entrepreneur he’s been involved in the creation of 38 companies, two of which have become successful IPOs.

• 

  Wesley Burt

  Massive Black Inc

  Wesley lives in San Francisco, CA, working as Senior Concept Artist with Massive Black Inc. He has contributed to such films as Transformers 1, 2, & 3, and G.I. Joe 1 & 2, and game titles such as Infamous, Infamous 2, Fallout 3, Fallout New Vegas, Silent Hill : Shattered Memories, Tomb Raider Underworld, Saboteur, Red Faction Guerilla, and many others.

  Wesley Burt was born and raised in Kansas City, KS and has been drawing and painting for the majority of his life. He received a BFA from The Cleveland Institute of Art in 2004, majoring in Drawing with minors in Printmaking and Painting.

  Wesley continues to pursue his own artwork as well, showing with various galleries in the United States and Europe and instructing at art workshops worldwide.

  Wesley will be performing at Thinking Digital Conference with his co-presenter Christopher Hatala.

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  Wladimar Baranoff-Rossine

  MobiCart

  Wladimir is a serial entrepreneur, who first envisioned theMobiCart concept, arranged bootstrap financing and is the direct manager of MobiCart’s activities. MobiCart formed in 2010 and provides a free and simple way to build and manage your m-commerce store as a native or webapp. Prior to MobiCart, he was Managing Director at Dpivision Ltd.,a successful software development and web design studio that has been in operation and profitable for 7 years. Dpivision has thousands of clients worldwide, ranging from small and medium businesses to large corporations including the airline Flybe.

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