TechCrunch20 Conference: Caterina Fake, MC Hammer & Rajeev Motwani Join Expert Panel

I’m excited to announce the next three experts for the TechCrunch20 Conference in San Francisco this September. Caterina Fake, MC Hammer and Rajeev Motwani join the previously announced experts. The full Panel of Experts is here, and we will continue to announce new experts every week or so..

The Panel of Experts will assist us in selecting the twenty startups to launch at the conference and will participate at the conference in discussing and judging startups after their presentations. Our goal is to bring together a diverse group of hyper-intelligent and interesting individuals to make the event as exciting as possible.

Also, we’re pleased to announce the addition of the Mayfield Fund as a charter sponsor for TechCrunch20.

Registration for the event is here. Submit your company to launch at TechCrunch20 here. Keep up to date on the conference at the TechCrunch 20 blog.

Caterina Fake

Caterina Fake is an American businesswoman and entrepreneur. She is best known as the co-founder of Flickr, a photo-sharing service that was acquired by Yahoo, and a previous Art Director at Salon.com. She has won many awards, including Business Week’s Best Leaders of 2005, Forbes 2005 eGang, Fast Company’s Fast 50, and Red Herring’s 20 Entrepreneurs under 35 and the Time 100, Time Magazine’s list of the world’s 100 most influential people. She sits on the board of Etsy and advises many startups. At Yahoo! Caterina runs strategy for Brickhouse, known for its Hack Yahoo! program, a stimulus to innovation and creativity.

MC Hammer

MC Hammer is an entrepreneur and American MC who brought rap music to a mass pop audience during the late 1980s and early 1990s, selling millions of copies of his chart topping albums. He is known for his important influence on hip hop culture and music. Following the September 11, 2001 attacks, Hammer released the patriotic album Active Duty on his own WorldHit label and donated portions of the proceeds to 9/11 charities. MC Hammer has a television show on the Trinity Broadcasting Network. Hammer is an advisor to stealth Internet start-up Dance Jam.

Rajeev Motwani

Rajeev Motwani is a professor of computer science at Stanford University, where he also serves as the director of graduate studies. His research interests include: databases and data mining, web search and information retrieval, robotics, and theoretical computer science. He is a co-author of the book, Randomized Algorithms, published by Cambridge University Press. Motwani has received the Arthur P. Sloan Research Fellowship, the National Young Investigator Award from the National Science Foundation, the Bergmann Memorial Award from the US-Israel Binational Science Foundation and an IBM Faculty Award.