EDM08 Speaker Bios

Tommy Ahlers founded ZYB in 2005 with two other entrepreneurs from Copenhagen – Morten Lund and Ole Kristensen – with the desire to bring mobile data to life through a free and easy to use global service. As CEO of ZYB, Tommy brings more than six years experience in strategy and management – partly from the mobile industry. He was previously with McKinsey & Co for more than four years, where he served as an engagement manager working with mobile operators to shape their strategies. In addition to ZYB, he also founded another start-up which provided a global SMS-service to mobile users. Tommy holds a master degree in law from the University of Copenhagen.

Dermot Berkery joined Delta Partners in 1999 as a General Partner. He serves on the board of Seewhy Software, M-Spatial, and Sensl. He was previously on the board of Farran Technology (sold in 2005 to Smiths Industries for $30m) and Similarity Systems (sold in 2006 to Informatica Inc. for $55m).

Before joining Delta, he was a Senior Manager with McKinsey & Co. Having worked in McKinsey, Atlanta for 4 years, he returned to Dublin in 1995 to grow McKinsey's presence in Ireland. From 1995 to 1998, he helped Irish companies in a range of sectors to develop and pursue accelerated growth strategies. A graduate of University College Dublin in Commerce, he holds an MBA with distinction from the Harvard Business School and is qualified as a Chartered Accountant.

He is the author of 'Raising Venture Capital for the Serious Entrepreneur' published by McGraw Hill in the US (2007).

Russell is one of the leading experts on mobile marketing, having overseen nearly 3,000 campaigns since 2000. MobHappy, his blog about mobile technology and mobile marketing, is one of the most popular on the web focusing on this area. Before specializing in mobile, he spent over 15 years working in marketing, including advising leading brands such as Coca-Cola, Diageo, Texaco and Mars. In 2000, he was recruited to be Director of Marketing of mobile marketing start up, ZagMe, one of the leading pioneers in mobile advertising. Russell learned about AdMob soon after the launch and joined as the first employee, with the remit of launching AdMob into the EMEA market.

Russell is currently Vice-Chair of the Board of The Mobile Marketing Association for EMEA, is a regular speaker on mobile at conferences throughout the world and has published many articles, as well as a white paper on location based marketing.

Simon Grice is a serial Internet entrepreneur and advisor. As CEO of ideas.org, he provides a range of services for web & mobile digital businesses across Europe.

He started his career in 1991 when he worked at CERN in Geneva with members of the team who built the first web servers and browsers. Simon has founded The Connections Group, PersonalMail, edison Interactive, Netpoll, etribes and more recently ideas.org.

Simon is an active investor and has investments in the following services - Testcard.tv, BeLocal, SeedFund, Ourpower & GreenMySuffolk. Simon founded the highly popular mashup* Event series and co-founded the Being-Digital Conference. Simon regularly speaks and attends a wide range of digital conferences and events and has a wide personal network in the digital community.

Simon enjoys skiing, windsurfing, small cars, building plots and his electric guitar, hanging out with the family . . . and the Internet.

Christian Hugonnet brings over 16 Years experience in Technology management and Venture Capital investment. He is presently CEO of Novasys, a leading provider of Internet and Mobile services with location intelligence. As such, Novasys enables its clients such as Telecom operators, Directory Assistance companies, Internet Portals and Assistance Call Centres to offer location centric services and information to customer in a logic of mobility.

Melvyn Hunt is Joint MD of Navauris, which he co-founded in 2002. Novauris develops core speech recognition technology for voice mobile search, both server-based and on embedded platforms. It is responsible for what is probably the world’s largest scale voice mobile search service (VZW’s Get It Now Search).

Melvyn headed speech recognition research for BNR (Nortel), the National Research Council of Canada (NRC), Marconi and (jointly with John Bridle) at Dragon Systems UK, a role he continues to fulfill at Novauris. Melvyn's team at Marconi developed the Heathrow FliteCall service, which allowed people to determine the status of an arriving or departing flight by naming the flight over a phone link. As well as contributing the Dragon’s well-known dictation technology, Dragon Systems UK developed the robust in-car speech recognition technology used in Jaguars and other cars in the Ford group of companies. Melvyn has a doctorate from Oxford University.

Steve Ives is founder and CEO of Taptu Ltd, a mobile search company based in Cambridge which is developing a novel mobile search service. Previously he was founder and CEO of Trigenix, a Cambridge-based mobile software company which was acquired in 2004 by Qualcomm Inc. He worked for Qualcomm Europe as VP Business Development and then VP Strategic Marketing until mid- 2005.

Steve graduated in Biochemistry from Cambridge University, holds an MBA from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvannia, and was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in London. He also serves as non-executive Chairman and director of Teamstudio Inc, a software tools company with operations in the USA, UK and Japan.

During his period as CEO, Trigenix won the 2003 3GSM Award for Best Wireless Application Developer, and the 2003 Sunday Times Fasttrack 100 Award for Best Management Team.

A retail and marcomms professional with over 20 years work experience, Helen has specialised in mobile for the last 8 years or so. Helen was at the birth of mobile marketing in 2000 as Head of Customer Experience at ZagMe, the location based mobile marketing pioneer.

Today, Helen runs her own mobile marketing, advertising and media consultancy, BeepMarketing, developing mobile strategies and implementing campaigns for a wide variety of clients including NewsCorp, Teletext, The English National Opera and MyMart to name but a few.

Helen has just written the Guide to Mobile Marketing and Advertising, published by Tanla Mobile (www.tanlamobile.com/guide), she's a familiar face on the conference circuit and teaches mobile marketing at the University of Westminster, e-consultancy and the IDM. She runs the popular mobile networking event, Swedish Beers (www.swedishbeers.co.uk/), and blogs about mobile marketing (www.technokitten.com).

Jim is currently Director of Product Marketing for Search and Digital Advertising at Amdocs, an industry leader in customer experience systems innovation for telecommunications and cable organizations worldwide. Jim has extensive knowledge of interactive technologies and digital marketing within consumer and business-to-business markets. Jim was formerly at DoubleClick where he was part of the management team responsible for launching DoubleClick’s Advertising Exchange, an impression-by-impression auction designed to monetize remnant inventory for premium publishers. His previous background includes over twenty years of marketing and advertising for global brands including a ten-year association with IBM that included senior responsibilities on IBM Servers, IBM Global Services and IBM Personal Systems Group. His advertising experience includes senior management roles at worldwide advertising agencies including EURO RSCG, Wells Rich Greene BDDP, Hakuhodo, Interpublic and the MacManus Group.

Sandy McKinnon is Investment Director with Pentech Ventures. Sandy has over 15 years experience in helping successful commercialisation of defensible technology innovations. As Director of Knowledge Transfer & Technology and Research Services (TRS) at Heriot- Watt University he helped incubate twelve spin-out companies and helped them raise over £4.6M in funding.

As a freelance consultant and also whilst he was with Scientific Generics (Sagentia) in Cambridge - where he helped evolve and finally ran their Advance Technology Group - he provided due- diligence services over a wide range of sectors for a variety of blue-chip companies, institutions and VC funds. Sandy is on the boards of Sonaptic, Velocix, Omniperception, SeeWhy and RapidMobile. He is passionate about technology and helping teams succeed.

As Global Head of Content Standards Annie Mullins is responsible for ensuring Vodafone’s protection of customers, with particular emphasis on young users in accessing new content services through mobile. Annie has been Member of the UK Government Home Office Child Protection and the Internet Task Force for the past 6 years. She has Chaired Good Practice Project Groups for Guidance on Chat, Instant Messaging Service, World Wide Web, Moderation of Interactive Services, and Social Networking and User Interactive Services Good Practice Standards.

In 2007, Annie was the UK's ISPA Internet Hero for Home Office Task Force on Protection of Children on the Internet and the European Union's Safer Internet Programme. She is former Head of Social Issues for Yahoo! UK managing social issues and delivering products and services responsibly and former Consultant for Virgin Mobile, European Commission and Consumer Council for children and the Internet.

Mike is one of 3i's key Digital Media & IT investors, having being involved with over 25 of 3i's investments into the TMT sector over the last eleven years. The sectors Mike focuses on primarily are EU internet, media and IT.

Although Mike worked in the Nordic region between 2002 and 2004, Mike is based from London. Deals Mike has been involved with include SBL (acquired by Crucell Group), Q-Matic (acquired by Altor), Hotsip (acquired by Oracle), Magic4 (Acquired by Openwave), Adaytum (acquired by Cognos), Marlborough Stirling (LSE IPO), Xenicom (acquired by Andrew Corp.), CDC Solutions (acquired), Kaisha (acquired), Fastbooking.com, Taptu, Cachelogic amongst others.

Mike's current board appointments include Connectivity and Instone International. Mike graduated from Bath University (UK) with a degree in Business Administration.

Darin began his yellow pages career in 1991 in Northern California with Valley Yellow Pages - a publisher of four directories. In 1997, Darin was appointed the position of Regional Vice President and over the course of the next eight years, grew his territory of one book, one office, 20 employees, and 3 million in revenue, to 24 books, 9 offices, 400 employees, and over 60 million in revenue and played a significant role in growing the company to be the largest privately held independent publisher in the U.S.

In 2005, Darin joined the largest publicly traded independent publisher in the U.S. - Yellow Book USA. Darin was responsible for its Las Vegas operations and grew the Vegas directory to a top five directory in revenue out of 1000 Yellow Book directories in the U.S. Darin then joined the infofast team as an officer & director, and launched 1-800-info-fast to the public in 2007.

Andrew is currently CEO of Rummble, a mobile technology company. Rummble makes it easy for you to find personalized trusted content relevant to your location, at home or on the move. Rummble is all about people and places you love.

A serial entrepreneur, Andrew ran a successful web development company serving blue chip clients through the dot com years, which sold in 2001; he co-developed the world’s first online digital video news archive (www.britishpathe.com with 4000 hours of video and 13+ million images), later founded a ground breaking interactive personal fitness website with Olympian Dave Morgan, built the UKs first interactive SMS dating platform and pioneered Europe’s first location based social software.

As an authority in the field of online communities and social software, Andrew speaks at industry events and contributes to trade press.

Mike’s career spans 33 years in Electronics and Telecommunications, with the last 20 years in Mobile Communications. Mike’s focus today is on Third Generation cellular, Mobile TV and steering Telefonica O2 Europe’s Group Research and Development in mobile.

He was elected Chairman of the GSM Association for 1995/96 and served on their Executive Board for 5 years. He has also served as a member of the UK Home Office Internet Task Force and UK OSAB (Ofcom Spectrum Advisory Board) until 2006 and 2007 respectively.

Mike has chaired the MDA since 1998, leading the Association as Chairman / spokesperson and on Public Policy. He was appointed VP Technology for O2 Group in 2000, Visiting Professor at Surrey University in 2003 and to the Coventry University Board in 2006. He is a Fellow of BCS/CIPS/RGS, a Member of IET and the Royal Television Society.

Carl Taylor has worked for Hutchison since 2000 developing new applications and services for its 3G networks, and in the creation of Hutchison's mobile technology strategy including the X-Series products. Carl is Hutchison's representative to the GSMA Executive Management Committee, the Services Review Group and the Mobile Advertising Programme. He is also the principal Hutchison representative to the dotMobi Product Steering Group, and W3C. He has a history in mobile technologies dating back to 1987 with the first CT2 cellphone systems.

Stuart M. Whitaker formed Whitaker Associates in 1991 after having worked for the US local exchange carrier NYNEX and equipment manufacturer Northern Telecom. Through Whitaker Associates, Stuart helps organizations take advantage of opportunities in domestic and international telecommunications markets created by the communication technology revolution and regulatory reform. Whitaker Associates also publishes The Operator, a newsletter for directory services markets worldwide, and has sponsored the European Directory Services Marketplace conference series since 2001.

Stuart has particular expertise in competitive, technological, and regulatory issues affecting specific segments of the communications industry including value added and information services. Services provided by Whitaker Associates include marketing, analysis of market, competitive, technological, and regulatory issues, business planning, project management, and litigation support. Stuart received an MBA from the University of Chicago in Finance and International Business.

Tim has a degree in Civil Engineering, and originally intended to pursue a career in the construction industry. A chance encounter with a Sinclair ZX81, put paid to these plans, and he made the move to IT. He has now spent over 23 years in the IT and Telecoms industry in a range of technical, sales and management roles including spells with Intergraph, Dun & Bradstreet, Cable & Wireless, and Schlumberger-Sema.

Tim founded Trek Wireless in 2004 based on a long held interest in mapping and navigation together with an idea that geotagging would be big one day. Trek Wireless developed a vehicle based image capture system (for which a patent is currently under inspection) and this has been used to produce over 17,000 images of central London streets. Today both on foot and vehicle based systems are used to produce a range of geotagged image products covering both streets and Points of Interest which are marketed under the POSIPIX brand name. Images are also viewable on the LONDON5151.com website which was launched in May this year to further promote the concept of using getoagged images for navigation, local search and contextual advertising.