World Class Speakers at the Ditigal Festival
“The Digital Festival” takes place on November 13th ’09 at the Burlington Hotel. Be part of a unique community and benefit from world class speakers and experts in the leading digital channels,
who using real world case studies will show you how to optimise your business and communication strategies.
Biographies of the Speakers
BRENT HOBERMAN, Co-Founder, LastMinute.Com
Brent Hoberman shot to fame as one of the bright young faces of the ‘dot-com’ boom, when he co-founded lastminute.com. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Brent’s venture survived when the bubble burst and has gone from strength to strength.
Operating across multiple markets, lastminute.com has established approximately 13,600 supplier relationships and over 10 million subscribers. It also owns a number of online brands, including holidayautos.com and travelprice.com. By the time it was sold to Sabre, the company was valued at $1.1bn.
Before lastminute.com, Brent was a Senior Associate at Spectrum Strategy, a media and telecoms consultancy. He then held business development responsibilities at Line One, British Telecom and United News & Media, and was also one of the founding team of the online auction site, QXL.com.
A prolific entrepreneur, Brent went on to establish another VC-backed site, mydeco.com, which provides interior design advice and furniture retail. He then took up the post of chairman of Wayn.com, a travel and leisure social network with over 10 million members. As an angel investor, Brent has backed a number of other startups including moveme.com (house moving), viagogo (tickets), t5m (celebrity channel), imagini.net (dating) and wigadoo.com (social events). With all that, he still finds time to be a Governor of London’s University of the Arts College, and a non-executive board director of the Guardian Media Group.
PETER KIM, Managing Director, The Dachis Group
Peter Kim is a leading thinker and analyst on social business, which he discusses in his blog at Being Peter Kim. He has been quoted in the press by media outlets including CNN, CNBC, NPR, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal.
Peter was previously an analyst at Forrester Research, focusing on the intersection of social technology and marketing strategy. Earlier, he managed international marketing operations, e-commerce, and digital marketing at PUMA AG.
Peter is a graduate of the University of Virginia’s Darden School and the University of Pennsylvania.
Peter is on Twitter as @peterkim.
SHEL ISRAEL, Author Twitterville & The Naked Conversation
Shel Israel is a writer and speaker on social media issues. He co-authored with Robert Scoble the book Naked Conversations, How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers (John Wiley & Son 2006).
He has completed a second book called Twitterville on business uses for Twitter, published in September 2009. He has contributed editorially to BusinessWeek, Dow Jones Co, and FastCompany.TV.
He was the host of Global Neighbourhoods with Shel Israel, an online video blog series, which was produced by FastCompany.tv, covering enterprise and trends in social media. He lives in Silicon Valley, California and frequently speaks on social media related topics.[
RUSSELL DAVIES
Russell was born in Derby, enjoyed an uneventful childhood, did college, all that. After failing as a popstar and a joke writer he ended up in advertising and tried to do ‘interactive marketing’ way before anyone was interested. Ended up at Wieden + Kennedy working on clients like Microsoft, Nike and Honda. Then he went to work for Nike as Global Consumer Planning Director. He went freelance in 2006 and works with shadowy organisations like the Open Intelligence Agency and the Really Interesting Group. He also writes eggbaconchipsandbeans occasionally organises ‘Interesting’ conferences, plays with things like speechification, dawdlr and slowpoke and does columns for Campaign magazine and Wired UK.
If asked what he actually does all day, he’ll normally mutter something about ‘post-digital’.
http://kedlestone.backpackit.com/pub/974583
Martin Bailie, Planning Director, Glue London
"After a few eventful years as a theatre director followed by marketing roles at the Arts Council of England, at the BBC, BBC worldwide and at UK charities, Martin formed a digital marketing agency for the Arts and media sectors creating some of the earliest digital marketing in the UK. In 2000, Martin joined glue as Planning Director and a founding partner. Martin is a regular lecturer at the Institute of Direct Marketing, a founding member of the IPA Direct Marketing Committee, a member of the IPA strategy group and writes and lectures widely on marketing, business and technology."
Tim Duggan, Founder, Mercury Girl
Company : Mercury Girl Inc www.mercurygirlinc.com
Co-founder and director
Tim has worked largely in film and TV Commercial production and post production for the last 10 years. Working with Windmill Lane, Screen Scene and Toytown Films as assistant producer.
He took time off in 2004 to work with international telecoms firm Mount Wilson where he quickly rose to the position of head of production and business development opening up operations in Australia and The US for the firm, growing revenues and expanding the investment portfolio.
With his group company Mercuryboy inc starting to secure large production contracts, Tim moved back into media production and development, while maintaining interests in telecoms and mobile.
When the iPhone released, Tim and his business partner decided to develop a small application for the handset, proving a success and proving a market. MercuryGirl was born in 2009 as a mobile software and web design company working with clients such as RTE, Etihad Airlines, The Irish Times, Meteor, Eircom, Agency.com and TBWA.
MercuryGirl inc now has 4 applications in the Apple App store, 3 in completion on development as of October 09, and 6 further video distribution and premium content apps wit full investment for production and delivery. MercuryGirl also has one Google Android app NextDart which uses Augmented reality. MercuryGirl are also only 1 of 100 authorized worldwide developers for the layr platform on Google Android.