Today we’re revealing the twelfth group of speakers for our third annual GamesBeat 2011 conference. Our newest batch of speakers illustrates the wide variety of speakers and topics we're getting for our event on July 12-13 at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. We've got 69 speakers signed up and more are coming soon. (See agenda.)
Our newest batch includes Adam Lavine, CEO of FunMobility; Dror Oren, executive director of the SRI Ventures team at Silicon Valley research institution SRI International; and Colin DiGiaro, chief operating officer at social and mobile gaming firm MindJolt.
Adam Lavine is founder and CEO of FunMobility, a company dedicated to making apps more fun through gamification. He will be speaking in our breakout session on Gamifying Mobile Apps, which will be moderated by VentureBeat's own game writer, Matthew Lynley. FunMobility recently released FunChat, a cross-platform app that blends chat, HTML5 multiplayer games, virtual currency rewards, and achievements for mobile devices. Lavine founded the company (originally called FunMail) in 1999. Prior to that, he was CEO of 3D graphics and animation firm Specular International, which was sold in 1997.
Dror Oren is the executive director at SRI Ventures, which commercializes technologies created at the famous Silicon Valley research institution SRI International, in Menlo Park, Calif. Oren will speak on a panel about Mobile Game Discovery as a continuation of the discussions we have had about how to get apps noticed in a sea of content. SRI recently licensed its virtual personal assistant technology -- which used artificial intelligence technology to discover locations and other info via mobile phones -- to the startup Siri, which was purchased by Apple. Oren has more than a decade of experience in software development and tech products. Prior to joining SRI, he was at VMware and Nice Systems. Yes, it sounds unusual to have an AI-oriented research guy at a game conference, but he'll be able to talk about the future of discovery.
Colin Digiaro is the COO of MindJolt, which has a successful line of mobile, social and web games. He oversees business operations, including mobile publishing, monetization, marketing and human resources. He is speaking on our panel on Mobile Game Discovery. While MindJolt has done a good job helping games get discovered on Facebook and the web, mobile game discovery is new to MindJolt. But the company recently acquired mobile gaming pioneer SGN and launched a new mobile game. Digiaro has spent most of his career launching internet startups. Prior to MindJolt, he was co-president of Slingshot Labs and co-founder of MySpace alongside Chris DeWolfe.
Our previous announced speakers include Brian Selzer, president and founder of Ogmento; Suli Ali, CEO of TinyCo; Dennis Ryan, executive vice president of worldwide publishing at PopCap Games; Keith Lee, CEO of Booyah; Peter Farago, vice president of marketing at Flurry; Eric Eldon, editor of Inside Network; Daniel Terry, CEO of Pocket Gems; Michael Pachter, managing director and gaming analyst at Wedbush Securities; Lars Buttler, CEO of Trion Worlds; Mark Friedler, game industry consultant; Kevin Chou, CEO of Kabam; Joe Kraus, partner at Google Ventures; Shervin Pishevar, managing director of Menlo Ventures; Peter Driessen, CEO of Spil Games; Julian Farrior, CEO of Backflip Studios; Kris Duggan, CEO of Badgeville; Jeferson Valadares, general manager of games at Flurry; Gabe Leydon, chief executive of Addmired; Lou Fasulo, chief operating officer of Z2Live; Dave Castelnuovo, CEO of Bolt Creative; David Marcus, founder and CEO of Zong; Rich Wong, a partner at venture capital firm Accel Partners; Chris Bergstresser, executive vice president of online gaming portal Miniclip; Neil Young, founder and CEO of Ngmoco; Andrej Nabergoj, founder and chief executive of Outfit7; Jason Citron, founder and chief executive of OpenFeint; Steve Perlman, chief executive of games-on-demand firm OnLive; Trip Hawkins, chief executive of Digital Chocolate; Peter Relan, chairman of YouWeb and chief executive of CrowdStar; Si Shen, chief executive of PapayaMobile; David Ko, senior vice president for mobile at Zynga; our keynote speaker, longtime game entrepreneur and founder of Atari, Nolan Bushnell; Tim Chang, partner at Norwest Venture Partners; Bing Gordon, partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and former chief creative officer at Electronic Arts; Suli Ali, CEO of TinyCo; Sana Choudary, CEO of game startup accelerator YetiZen; and Tim Merel, managing director of Digi-Capital.
Each year, GamesBeat follows a big trend. In 2009, we focused on how All The World’s a Game, with the explosion of games onto a global stage. Last year, GamesBeat@GDC focused on Disruption 2.0. This year, our theme is Mobile Games Level Up, and it focuses on the busy intersection of games and mobile technology. We’ll focus on everything from smartphone games to tablets and handhelds.
Console games dominated the news in the past, but the center of attention is rapidly shifting toward mobile as more and more users play games on the run. While there are hundreds of millions of gamers on Facebook, analysts believe the number could be much higher for mobile games. Our speakers are right at this intersection of gaming and mobility. GamesBeat 2011 targets an audience of CEOs, executives, entrepreneurs, investors, marketers and other key figures in the game business. Stay tuned for more speaker announcements.
We’ll be exploring the most disruptive game technologies and business models at our third annual GamesBeat 2011conference, on July 12-13 at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. It will focus on the disruptive trends in the mobile games market. GamesBeat is co-located with our MobileBeat 2011conference this year. To register, click on this link. Sponsors can message us at sponsors@venturebeat.com. Our sponsors include Qualcomm, Flurry, Greystripe, Nexage, Tapjoy, Fun Mobility, TriNet, Zong, Sibblingz, OpenFeint, Spil Games and WildTangent.