GeeknRolla – The Agenda for the day

Agenda: Geek’nRolla – Tech Startups Rock!

London – April 21, 2009

Geek’nRolla is sponsored by Viadeo one of the largest professional social networks in the world, and supported by UK Trade and Investment, as well as NESTA, the National Endowment for Science, Technology & the Arts. Geek’n Rolla is also supported by our strategic partner, School for Startups. And not only will we be having a great day of fantastic content for tech startups, we are planning the mother of all evening networking parties at one of London’s premier venues, Cafe de Paris kindly sponsored by Winston & Strawn’s Bootlaw.

*PLEASE NOTE – WE CANNOT GUARANTEE THE WI-FI WILL STAY WORKING. PLEASE BRING A 3G DONGLE FOR YOUR LAPTOP*

OFFICIAL HASHTAG FOR THE DAY: gknr

Venue:
RIBA (Royal Institute of British Architects)
66, Portland Place
London
W1B 1AD
Nearest Tube: Regents Park, Great Portland Street and Oxford Circus
Map

10.00 Registration – Coffee and Tea

10.18 Opening Remarks

10.20 Europe, The Final Countdown – The Good, the Bad and the SuperBad

Inma Martinez Stradbroke Advisors
Inma Martinez is one of the world’s leading digital media strategists, described by FORTUNE and TIME as one of Europe’s top talents in Human Factors and Social Engagement through technology. Switching a career in the financial markets at Goldman Sachs and The Institute for Infrastructure Finance, she joined Cable & Wireless in the mid-1990s to form their New Technologies Advisory, specifically focused on the Internet and IP services. Co-founder in 1999 of Escape Velocity, a 3i-funded AI software company in the early days of mobile services and selected by Lehman Brothers as one of the Top 20 Software startups to watch, her work delivering transformational technologies to clients has continued to-date. Leading other technology companies in the UK and Finland, her client work moved towards Executive Advisory and in 2006 she founded Stradbroke Advisors, a digital media and fund raising consultancy working with Venture Capital firms (3i, Index Ventures), large corporations (NOKIA Finland, Blyk, BBC, MTV Networks, HP, IBM) as well as Web 2.0 startups and film and TV production companies. She is also an Advisor to the EU Technology Commission. Working across a wide variety of projects, she considers herlself fortunate and honoured to have been directly involved in the emergence of many of today’s digital technologies (Web 2.0, Mobile, Wifi, Blogs) and to work with some of the best talents in the medium. Her work as industry advisor has also continued, being voted Best Contributor to the Formation of Digital Media Strategy at the 2001 European Leadership Forum, a Fortune 500 CEO and EU Governors summit, and being ranked in 2005 by Red Herring amongst the top 40 most influential women in technology. She speaks and writes in the media about investing in innovation, nurturing leadership, creating closer relationships between companies and their clients via digital environments and transforming “Life-As-We- Know-It” thanks to technology.

10.35 The Masterplan – How to Hire a Team of Peers

Andy McLoughlin, CEO Huddle
Defying his mother’s advice that ‘the internet will never take off’, Andy began tinkering with the web in the mid-nineties before starting his career at Fibernet Group plc as the company’s European webmaster in 2001. In 2003 Andy helped found KnowledgeCenter, a knowledge management consultancy focused on the London insurance market. During his time at the company he provided web content and knowledge management consultancy to a number of prominent global clients including QBE, Benfield, Catlin, Arthur J Gallagher and Montpelier Re. With more than 10 years of industry experience, Andy is an expert in field of online collaboration and is heavily involved in the London start-up community. Andy holds a degree in Economics from the University of Sheffield, but has always regretted not studying something more practical like Computer Science. In his spare time he enjoys fencing and skiing (both rather badly) but excels at sitting in sunny beer gardens discussing films, music and cool stuff he recently saw online.

10.50 Hey you, get off of my cloud – Launching your startup on a cloud computing infrastructure
Joe Drumgoole, CTO and Founder PutPlace.com
Joe Drumgoole is a a software industry veteran of 20 years standing who has been using Amazon’s cloud computing environment since it launched in 2006. He has a track record of technology achievement in Irish software companies including CR2, Cape Clear, LeCayla and PutPlace.com. He is a regular speaker at conferences.

11.05 Paper Planes – Monetising your startup from the word go with advertising and affiliates”

Joe Stepniewski, co-founder Skimlinks
Joe Stepniewski is the co-founder of Skimlinks, a service that helps publishers monetise their content via affiliate marketing, through converting outbound links into affiliate links on-the-fly – a simplified process that aggregates together over 16 affiliate networks. Working with a diverse range of web publishers, Joe has experience helping add affiliate marketing to their revenue strategy, and done in an ethical manner. Joe’s background, and passion, is internet marketing: his previous business buys/sells established content and affiliate websites, hence specialised in refining, driving traffic to and monetizing sites through SEO, PPC and decent site design. Joe is a recent twitter-holic and spends far too much time being a geek.

11.20 What’s the frequency Kenneth? – The trials of a mobile apps startup

Jof ArnoldCEO Gymfu.com
Jof Arnold is a self-professed “geektech adventurer” based in London. His latest project is GymFu.com – an iPhone startup focused on using motion-tracking and gaming to improve people’s health. He also runs web and iPhone dev agency BrainBakery.com with GymFu co-founder Benjie Gillam. His move into web startups in 2007 marked a shift from a hitherto mechanically-minded career which featured nuclear robots, lasers, androids, motorsport, kit cars, russian spacecraft and fuel injection systems.

11.35 Hey now, what you doing? – Usability / UX / Call it what you like: What startups most often get wrong and what they should do about it

Leisa Reichelt, User experience Disambiguity
Leisa is a London-based freelance User Experience Consultant who works with companies large and small to gather insight from users and apply findings to design. With a background in Information Architecture she eventually decided that being user centred was more than just thinking about users whilst designing, and now incorporates design research into almost every project for a diverse portfolio of clients ranging from large scale public sector to some of the UKs most recent startups. Leisa is a regular conference speaker and blogs at Disambiguity.com and her regular soap box topics include Agile UX, Collaboration, Ambient Intimacy and Ambient Sociability, and Designing with Communities.

11.50 Panel: Just a girl – Balancing Tech Culture: Getting more women involved in tech startups

Moderator:

Cate Sevilla BitchBuzz
Panel Moderator: Balancing Tech Culture: Getting more women involved in tech startups

Cate Sevilla is the Founding Editor of BitchBuzz.com, and is a freelance writer and professional blogger. Cate is a former editor for Shiny Media and has written for numerous websites such as Yahoo! Personals and T3.com, and has appeared on various TV and radio programs. Specializing in tech, pop culture, and women’s interest, Cate is incredibly passionate about getting more women involved in technology, social media and the web.

Panelists:

Leisa Reichelt, Freelance user experience consultant (see above)

Sophie Cox Worldeka.com
Sophie Cox studied International Development and Politics at the University of East Anglia’s award winning Global Economics Department before joining Omnicom Media Group’s International Business Development and Marketing team. Starting the day after she graduated Sophie was soon working on multi million and billion dollar pitches such as Unilever, Phillips, Pepsi and J&J. Other key aspect of Sophie’s position at Omnicom were developing new business strategies, particularly utilizing digital media and rolling out Omnicom’s new brand PHD. Sophie set up Worldeka with her brother Charlie in 2008. Worldeka is a collaborative platform for social change aimed at charities NGO’s, activists and policy makers, which went into beta January 20th 2009. Their intention is to create a positive technological empowered environment to help people unite and change the world.

Zuzanna Pasierbinska-Wilson Huddle.net
Zuzanna is Head of Marketing Communications at Huddle.net. Zuzanna also founded Silicon Stilettos, an over-cocktails meet-up for women in technology, start-ups, media and social media. A published yet failed sociologist, Zuzanna’s background is marketing, brand communications and PR. Having abandoned academia, Zuzanna spent the next seven years at Rainier creating and executing PR and marcomms programmes for more than 50 various companies in networking, software, hardware, electronics and engineering. She worked with ntl:Telewest Business, Texas Instruments DLP, Hyundai ImageQuest, Wind River, Wacom, NextiraOne and Phoenix Systems. In late 2005, Zuzanna, along with her colleague Gareth Davies, founded Custard PR, a sister agency of Rainier, specialising in digital media, mobile, personal technology and gaming. She blogs on her personal blog – GirlAboutWeb.com. When not in front of her computer, Zuzanna spends time climbing and rounding-up cattle on the US ranches. Zuzanna holds MA in Sociology from the Jagiellonian University in Cracow and MSc in Public Relations from the Stirling University. She also spent some time drinking Guinness on the University College Dublin campus. Zuzanna speaks Polish, some French, Russian, German and Spanish.

Nacera Benfedda, Director of Product Viadeo
Since graduating from HEC in 1997 Nacera has spent the last 10 years in marketing & product design leadership. Notably she has been VP Marketing at Monster, VP Development for the Marrakesh Film Festival, and COO at rich media specialists, Webcastory. She joined Viadeo in 2008 as Chief Product Officer and is leading the global rollout of the Viadeo 2009 redesign. Her specialisms include useability & ergonomics, web architecture, and whole product design. Nacera has a real life too… belonging to a theatre company, and enjoying flamenco, cinema, photography & travel.

12.35 LUNCH and Networking

13.35 Get on your boots – Bootstrapping, Scaling and Cashflow

William Reeve, Entrepreneur and Investor
In 2003, William co-founded LOVEFiLM.com, Europe’s leading online DVD rental subscription service, where he remained as COO until early 2008. In 1997, William founded Fletcher Research, which he successfully sold to Forrester Research, where William then spent 3 years as European Group Director. Prior to that, William spent 2 years at McKinsey & Co as a management consultant. William holds a first class Masters degree from Oxford University.

13.50 American Idiot – Launching Your Startup In the US – when you’re actually in Scotland

Lesley EcclesCo-founder, Hubdub
With over 8 years experiences of sales and marketing for technology companies, Lesley co-founded Hubdub.com, the News Prediction game in November 2007. Prior to Hubdub, she worked as a business consultant in the CRM space and in sales & marketing for technology services companies. She has an MA in Modern Languages from St Andrews.

14.05 We don’t need no education – Geek Tools, A Primer

Ian Hogarth, Co-founder, CEO Songkick.com
Ian got a master’s in machine learning at Cambridge and loves dystopian robot takeover narratives. Seven years ago, Ian realized being a choirboy came with no street cred, so he started DJing hip-hop, funk, drum & bass, and grime. Ian quit his job at Bain & Company, Singapore to start Songkick.

14.20 Panel: Have Love, Will Travel – How to be a startup that wins, excites and keeps users

Moderator: Mike Butcher, Editor TechCrunch Europe

Panelists:

Nic Brisbourne DFJ Esprit (Venture capital)

Nic has been in venture capital since 2000. In that time he has worked in London, Europe and Silicon Valley. His main areas of focus have been software and media. Prior to DFJ Esprit he was with Reuters Venture Capital. Nic’s investment experience includes buy.at (sold to AOL for $125m) and UltraDNS (acquired by Neustar – NYSE NSR). He currently manages DFJ Esprit’s investments in Zeus, WAYN and Tribold. Prior to joining Reuters Nic worked for Operis, a software and services start-up, and Cap Gemini. Nic also authors a blog commenting on the European technology and venture capital markets at www.theequitykicker.com

Wendy White , CEO Moonfruit
Wendy is an entrepreneur, technologist, designer and mother. Currently Marketing Director of Moonfruit and Gandi Group (www.gandi.net), a leading European, ethical domain name registrar and virtual hosting provider. Her first degree in Computer Science from Imperial College led her to a successful career in IT and finance. She was part of start-up team which set up www.egg.com, one of the world’s first Internet banks She founded www.moonfruit.com in 1999, a DIY website building toolkit, for building beautiful sites simply, as CEO raising significant venture capital from Macromedia and LVMH. Moonfruit was sold to Gandi Group in 2005. Wendy was also part of the team who set-up www.zopa.com in 2004, the first European peer to peer lending website and as part of the ‘Gandi Supports’ programme, provides hosting and advice to acclaimed citizen journalist site www.demotix.com. Wendy also has an MA in Future Textiles from Central St. Martins and is a smart textile designer for fun.

Keiran O’Neil CEO Playfire.com
Kieran is the 21 year old CEO of Playfire, the London-based startup that is changing the way gamers socialise online. Backed by worldclass investors such as Michael Birch (founder of Bebo) and Chris Deering (former CEO of PlayStation), Playfire has over 100K gamers using the service. Prior to starting Playfire, he co-founded PSU.com, the game reviews site ready by over 1.5 million gamers per month, and HolyLemon.com, the video sharing site he started when he was 15 and sold to a US plc for $1.25m.

Ryan CarsonFuture of Web Apps / Carsonified
Ryan is an entrepreneur and web advocate who has built two successful web applications; DropSend and Amigo. He also runs web events and workshops, worldwide, that inspire web designers and developers to build their own web applications. For more info on Ryan, please head over to RyanCarson.com.

15.05 COFFEE BREAK

15.25 Send me an Angel – Funding and How to Handle Angels

Nick Halstead CEO Favorit
Send me an Angel – Funding and how to handle Angels
Nick Halstead is the CEO & Founder favorit Ltd, which runs http://fav.or.it, http://www.tweetmeme.com and http://www.feedbroker.net. Fav.or.it at launch generated a frenzy of tech-media coverage for its approach to bringing a more mainstream view of the social web to consumers and to businesses. Nick has been in development for over 15 years running multi-million budget projects for some of the biggest development studios in the UK. An active participant in the London Tech scene who likes to evangelise the use of Twitter, data portability and the use of the social web for businesses.

15.40 Boulevard of Broken Dreams – Recession Business Models for Tech Startups

Reshma Sohoni Seedcamp
Reshma runs Seedcamp on a day-to-day basis as its CEO. She joined Seedcamp from the Venture team at 3i. Prior to 3i, Reshma spent over 3 years at Vodafone in their Commercial Strategy team, working across the Europe and Japan footprints in marketing strategy and pricing functions. Reshma started her career in the US in investment banking (Broadview) and venture capital (Softbank).

15.55 Bankrobber – To VC or not to VC? That Is The Question

Fred Destin Atlas Venture
Fred Destin joined Atlas in 2004 and is a Partner in the technology group. He focuses on software and technology-enabled services and digital media infrastructure and applications. He previously co-managed OM Technology Investments, an IP Services and FinTech focused fund backed by Allianz/Dresdner. He served on the board of a number of companies including SGI-spinoff Kasenna, Xerox PARC-spinoff Inxight, Capital IQ (acquired by S&P) and Rainfinity (acquired by EMC). Previously he was a Venture Manager with Speed Ventures, a seed stage fund backed by Permira and Soros Partners. He was also an Executive Director at Goldman Sachs and has further experience with Zurich Capital Markets and J.P. Morgan. Fred authors a widely read blog at www.freddestin.com, commenting on European innovation and the digital media space. He currently serves on the boards of Atlas portfolio companies Dailymotion, Inspirational Stores, KDS International, NTRglobal, PriceMinister, RealEyes3D, Seatwave, Sporever and Zoopla. He also serves on the board of Seedcamp, which provides mentoring and seed funding to European start-ups. Fred holds a Masters in Financial Engineering from the University of Brussels (Solvay). He is on the Boards of: Dailymotion, Inspirational Stores, KDS International, PriceMinister, RealEyes3D, Seatwave, Sporever, Zoopla

16.10 TechCrunch Pitch! sponsored by UK Trade & Investment

Pitch judges:

Doug Richard, School for Startups
Startup Pitch Judge and Strategic Partner
Having appeared in the first and second series of Dragons’ Den, Doug is the Founder of School for Startups (www.schoolforstartups.co.uk ), Chairman and CEO of Trutap (www.trutap.net), Founder and member of the Cambridge Angels, Chairman of the Conservative Party Small Business Task Force and non-exeuctive director of AlertMe (www.alertme.com), VizWoz (www.vizwoz.com), and BeatsDigital (www.beatsdigital.com) Doug is a successful entrepreneur with 20 years’ experience in the development and leadership of technology and software ventures, both in the US and in the UK. Between 1996 and 2000 he was President and CEO of Micrografx, a US publicly quoted software company. Prior to that he also founded and subsequently sold two other companies: Visual Software and ITAL Computers. Doug holds a BA in Psychology from University of California at Berkeley and a Juris Doctor at the school of Law, University of California at Los Angeles. In 2006 Doug was an Honorary Recipient of The Queen’s Award for Enterprise Promotion. In 2007, Doug became a fellow of the RSA.

Julie Meyer, Ariadne Capital and Entrepreneur Country
Startup Pitch Judge
Julie Meyer has 20 years of investment and advisory experience, helping start-up businesses and industry standards to emerge and establish themselves. As Chief Executive of Ariadne Capital, she has overall general and financial management responsibility for the group which she founded in August 2000. Ariadne is an investment and advisory firm focused on the Software and Services, New Media, Communications and Life Services sectors. Julie is well-known for founding First Tuesday, the largest global network of entrepreneurs, which many credit for igniting the Internet generation in Europe. It was sold for $50 million in cash in and shares in July 2000. Julie has raised hundreds of millions of capital for start-ups in addition to overseeing another $150 million of seed capital found for start-ups through First Tuesday. Named a Global Leader of Tomorrow by the World Economic Forum and one of the top 30 most powerful women in Europe according to the Wall Street Journal, Julies mission is to back the best entrepreneurs in Europe with global ambitions. She was awarded Entrepreneur of the Year Award in October 2000 by Ernst & Young U.K.

Michael Smith, CEOMindCandy Moshi Monsters
Startup Pitch Judge
Michael has been fascinated by games and puzzles ever since receiving a copy of Masquerade for his seventh birthday. More recent distractions have included Poker, Go, Set, Sensible Soccer, Burnout Paradise, and Guitar Hero. In his early twenties he co-founded the online retailer, Firebox.com. Firebox recently featured in 13th place on the Sunday Times Fast Track list of fastest growing companies in Britain. Michael launched Mind Candy in 2003 and development on Perplex City began soon after. Michael’s interest in Monsters probably stems from reading too much Dr Seuss and Maurice Sendak as a child.

Alex Hoye Angel Investor
Startup Pitch Judge
Alex has an entrepreneurial internet background as founder, executive and investor matched with bootstrap as well as institutional global experience. As CEO of Latitude, one of Europe’s largest independent digital marketing agencies, he is driving industry change in marketing focused on customer conversion. Latitude runs campaigns in 57 countries using PPC, SEO, social media strategies, display and affiliate marketing and is on the leading edge of the cross channel advertising. In 1999, Alex co-founded online industrial auction company GoIndustry plc in Europe, which he and his partners built from the proverbial napkin into a 17-country global leader in online industrial auctions. He and the team took it public in London where it was valued at over $100M. Alex cut his teeth at Disney where he was the project lead for the launch of a division and learned the tools of finance and M&A as applied to traditional media business models including terrestrial and satellite broadcasting, and film. Alex perceived the power of online models for media while at Harvard Business School in 1994 and thereafter as a management consultant for McKinsey & Co. working with newspaper, television and music companies migrating to the digital medium. Since 2006 Alex has been encouraged by and encouraging the wave of entrepreneurial inspiration capturing Europe. To this end, Alex has acted as angel investor and mentor in technology and lead generation and advertising-based internet-based projects. In addition to Seedcamp where he is on the board, other investments include: Skimlinks, MyBuilder, RentMineOnline, Faction and GoMix. He also acts as an advisor to private equity firm Vitruvian Partners, a €1B private equity fund focused on technology, media and telecommunications and is a member of Cambridge Angels. Alex has worked and lived in the UK, Germany, the US and Latin America and speaks the respective languages to varying degrees. Ever the entrepreneur, after participating with the Oxford Wine Team during a stint there, he co-founded the wine clubs while obtaining his BA from Stanford and MBA from Harvard. Outside of his hectic schedule, Alex enjoys skiing, kite surfing and running and is a trustee of the Venture Partnership Foundation, which applies venture methods to the social sector. @alexhoye www.hoye.org

Startups Pitching:
Affect Labs
BookingBug
Buildor
Gigulate
Scribblar
Smarkets
Swiffen
VouChaCha
Aroxo
IRLConnect

16.50 Closing Remarks & a Surprise…

18.00 Close of conference

19.00 Networking Party at Cafe de Paris (Either main conference ticket or Party-only ticket required)