Monetization 2.0 - Show Me the Money

John Pleasants | Chief Executive Officer, Playdom

Before taking the helm at Playdom, John served as President of Publishing and Chief Operating Officer of Electronic Arts (EA), where he oversaw global operations for the four billion dollar gaming company and led its consumer-facing businesses, including EA Mobile, Pogo, EA.com, global online gaming and Rupture. In addition, John drove a push to move EA from a software to a services model, and spearheaded the company’s expansion into social gaming. Prior to joining EA, John served as President and CEO of Revolution Heath and CEO of Ticketmaster, the world's leading live event ticketing company. During his tenure at Ticketmaster/InterActiveCorp (IAC), John also oversaw several leading online entities such as Evite.com, Match.com, CitySearch.com and ReserveAmerica.com. John is a Director of the Board for The Artists Den, a music production and promotion company, and previously held Board of Director positions with Expedia.com, Active.com, Fastclick, Going.com and Extend Health. John earned a BA from Yale University and an MBA from Harvard University.

Sebastien de Halleux | COO & Co-Founder, Playfish

Sebastien de Halleux (pronounced duh alloew) is Chief Operating Officer and Co-founder of Playfish, one of the largest and fastest growing social games companies. Sebastien leads operations in Playfish's San Francisco office where he drives distribution, monetization and business development, as well as partnerships with Facebook, Google, Apple and MySpace.

Prior to Playfish, Sebastien was part of the team that incubated Nokia Ad Service, a business unit aimed at monetizing mobile traffic across Nokia's 850 million mobile devices worldwide.

Sebastien also was an early team member of Macrospace Ltd., a company which merged with Sorrent Inc. to become Glu Mobile (NASDAQ: GLUU), where he was instrumental in building the sales and marketing functions of the organization.

Sebastien holds a Master's in Civil Engineering with honors from Imperial College London. He has resided in Brussels, Bangkok and London, and presently lives in San Francisco.

Jason Oberfest | SVP of Business Development, MySpace

As Senior Vice President of Business Development for MySpace, Jason is responsible for structuring and negotiating deals to drive revenue and support the launch of innovative new products. Jason also serves as General Manager of the MySpace Open Platform.

Prior to MySpace Jason served as Managing Director of Business Development and Product Management for Los Angeles Times Interactive where he structured deals with leading startups including Netvibes, Aggregate Knowledge, Eventful and Mixx.com.

From 1999-2005 Jason served as Vice President of Strategic Planning at Blast Radius, an interactive agency. In this role Jason founded the strategic planning division of the company and led the design and development of media and commerce websites for Sony, Nintendo, Viacom, Warner Music Group, A&E Television Networks and others. Jason worked with AOL from 2002-2005 developing AOL Shopping, AOL Search, AOL.com, and other products. Blast Radius was acquired by the WPP Group in 2007.

Lance Tokuda | CEO and Founder, RockYou

Lance is the Chief Executive Officer and Co-founder of RockYou, and brings over 15 years of software and management experience to the company. Prior to RockYou, Lance held Vice President & Chief Technology Officer positions in consumer and enterprise web services companies Iconix and Open Harbor, and was an early employee (number four) at Resumix, now Yahoo! HotJobs. Lance holds patents in text extraction and document categorization, with an email patent pending as well, and has received the American Association of Artificial Intelligence Award of Innovation for work on spatial text understanding. He received his Bachelors and Masters in Electrical Engineering from the University of Hawaii, and his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Texas.

Cary Rosenzweig | Chief Executive Officer, IMVU Inc.

Cary began serving as the CEO of IMVU Inc. in November, 2007, and has since led the company to rapid revenue growth and profitability. Previously, he served as either CEO or Chief Marketing Officer at four other technology startups, including mySimon.com (acquired by CNET) and Autoweb.com (acquired by Autobytel). Cary was VP and General Manager at Intuit, responsible for QuickBooks Payroll, which he grew from $100 million to $200 million over a three-year period (2003-2006). Cary began his career in marketing and brand management at Procter & Gamble, where he was Tide Brand Manager. He then went to Clorox, where he rose up the marketing ranks before becoming General Manager of the Clorox Pet Products Company. Cary earned an A.B. in International Relations from Stanford University and an M.B.A. from the Stanford Graduate School of Business. When he isn’t working, Cary dreams of diving again with the beautiful Napoleon wrasses at Blue Corner in Palau and with the enormous Manta rays at Goofnuw Channel in Yap. Cary’s avatar name is “CaryJay.”

Tom Hale | Chief Product Officer, Linden Lab

Hale joined Linden Lab as Chief Product Officer in September 2008, bringing over 15 years of experience in product development, marketing and management. Having most recently served as Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Knowledge Worker Business Unit at Adobe Systems, Hale now drives the product strategy for Second Life, supporting and further developing the inworld economy now projected at more than US$450 million in user-to-user transaction in 2009.

Prior to Linden Lab, Hale was an Entrepreneur-In-Residence (EIR) at Redpoint Ventures, investigating the intersections of gaming, virtual goods and virtual worlds, online communications, community and social networking. At Adobe, Hale led the collaboration and Software as a Service (SaaS) agendas, driving the strategy for businesses such as Adobe Acrobat, Adobe Connect (formerly known as Macromedia Breeze), and the Flash Media Server after the acquisition of Macromedia. At Macromedia, Hale was instrumental in making Macromedia products standard for web development, establishing the Flash Player as a platform for rich internet applications (RIAs), and building a $100 million a year business in the learning and training space.

Danielle Deibler | Adobe Systems

Danielle Deibler works for Adobe Systems, investigating early-stage technology and business opportunities. Her current focus is the casual gaming space as it pertains to the Flash Platform. Deibler has over 17 years in the Internet infrastructure, software development, and networking arenas. Her primary area of focus in the last 7 years has been on building scalable real time collaboration platforms and applications. Previously, she's held senior leadership positions in software development, engineering, business development and product management for several early stage companies. She is also an avid gamer.

Peter Relan | Founder and Chairman, Aurora Feint (Aurorafeint.com) - iPhone Social Gaming Platform

Peter brings twenty five years of technology, executive management and serial entrepreneurship experience from Silicon Valley companies.

Before founding YouWeb, Peter was founder and CEO of Business Signatures, the first online consumer fraud detection solution based on detecting "signatures" through click stream query processing in real time. Business Signatures was acquired in 2006 by Entrust, a public software company in the security sector. Before co-founding Business Signatures in 2001, he was founding CTO for two years at Webvan Group, which filed for the largest IPO in Silicon Valley in 1999 at $8B. Webvan was subsequently sold to Kaiser Permanente for its sophisticated technology engine, which is currently used to distribute and deliver drugs, medicines and medical supplies to all Kaiser Permanente hospitals.

At Oracle, Peter was founding vice president of its Internet Division, responsible for creating Oracle's Application Server and E-Commerce Applications, now a multi-billion dollar business at Oracle which recently subsumed BEA Systems for nearly $20B. At Hewlett-Packard he was principal architect of the OpenView enterprise platform, now a multi-billion dollar software and services business for HP.
Peter holds a B.S. degree in computer science from UCLA and an M.S. degree in engineering management from Stanford University where he graduated as a Hewlett Packard Resident Fellow. He currently resides in Atherton, California with his wife and two children.

Charles Hudson | VP of Business Development, Serious Business

Hudson is the VP of Business Development for Serious Business, a leading producer of social games for the social web. At Serious Business, Hudson is responsible for business development partnerships and monetization of the company's expanding portfolio of social games.

Prior to joining Serious Business, Hudson was the Sr. Director for Business Development at Gaia Online, a leading online hangout for teens and young adults. In addition to Gaia, Hudson has worked in New Business Development at Google and in Product Management at IronPort Systems. Hudson started his career at In-Q-Tel, the strategic venture capital group for the Central Intelligence Agency.

Hudson holds an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business and a B.A. in Economics and Spanish from Stanford University. He is also on the Advisory Board for BizWorld, a nonprofit that educates students about business, and the MIT/Stanford Venture Lab, a nonprofit connecting entrepreneurs, ideas, and capital.

Damon Hougland | Senior Director of the PayPal Platform

Damon Hougland is a geek. He is the Senior Director of the PayPal Platform. This means he leads the Product Development teams focused on creating PayPal’s API service suites. He is also co-author of three books on Java and wireless technologies. He has a passion for all technologies that are viral and disruptive. More than anything he wants to make developers on the PayPal Platform successful beyond their wildest dreams.

Craig Alexander | VP of Product Development, Turbine Inc.

Craig Alexander joined Turbine in 2007 as the Vice President of Product Development and oversees the development and production of all of Turbine's franchises. Craig brings over twenty years of engineering and studio general management experience to Turbine and previously held the positions of VP and General Manager of Z-Axis, VP and Executive Producer for Electronic Arts Partners, VP of Online for Electronic Arts’ Westwood Studios and General Manager for Sierra Online. Mr. Alexander graduated from the University of Southern California with a BSEE in Computer Engineering and received his MBA from the Anderson School at UCLA.

Fernando Paiz| Executive Producer, Turbine Inc.

Fernando Paiz is an Executive Producer at Turbine overseeing Dungeons & Dragons Online™. Fernando is a long-time veteran of the MMOG space, having led engineering and development efforts for virtual worlds since 1999. Fernando originally joined Turbine in 2004 as Director of Game Technology, where he played a pivotal role as the technology owner for the performance and stability initiatives leading up to product launches for Dungeons and Dragons Online and The Lord of the Rings Online™. Under his direction, these products had two of the most stable and technologically advanced launches in the industry.

Prior to joining Turbine, Fernando was the engineering manager, technical lead and producer for There.com, a ground-breaking social world service that featured mini-games, kinetic activities and user-created content frameworks.

Ned Sherman| CEO, Digital Media Wire Inc.

As CEO, Publisher and Executive Editor of Digital Media Wire, Inc., Ned Sherman works at the center of the rapidly growing digital media industry, where he brokers relationships and keeps a tab on the most important developments shaping the industry. According to the Wall Street Journal, "Publisher Ned Sherman is more than the average pundit: He is an attorney and has an inside grasp of what is happening."

Ned has established Digital Media Wire as a leading online media company that provides daily news, information and community to tens of thousands of executives and professionals at entertainment, media and technology companies throughout the world and owns and produces nine annual conferences. The advertising, sponsorship, client, partner and subscriber relationships that Ned has brokered make Digital Media Wire one of the best known media and entertainment industry brands to emerge in the digital age.

Johny Mang| Live Operations Director, Electronic Arts

Johny Mang is the Live Operations Director of a newly created business unit at Electronic Arts focused on developing and publishing Play4Free games. His team is responsible for the marketing, sales, and game operations of the PC based Play4Free games Battlefield Heroes and Battleforge with currently over two million registered users from over 130 countries.

Prior to his current role, Johny held the position of Business Development Director, EA Games Europe. He has 5 years of games industry experience and a background in strategy consulting and science. He holds a PhD in Computational Fluid Dynamics from Graz University and an MBA from INSEAD. Johny was born in Vienna, Austria and is currently based at EA’s DICE studio in Stockholm, Sweden.

Nanea Reeves | Senior Vice President, EA Online Group

As Senior Vice President of the EA Online Group Nanea Reeves oversees the delivery of centralized consumer destinations and online technologies for Electronic Arts, including shared lobby services, community engines, commerce interfaces, and digital content distribution channels. Previously, Ms. Reeves was one of the early members of the JAMDAT Management Team and responsible for many of JAMDAT’s technology initiatives, including the delivery of JAMDAT’s multiplayer platform and mobile content distribution interfaces.

Prior to JAMDAT Nanea Reeves has held various positions in product development and marketing for emerging new media and e-commerce companies including eToys, eCompanies, and Venu Interactive. Well known in the digital content field, she began her career in motion pictures and television advertising/marketing.

John K. Bates| Business Development & Strategic Marketing, Mindark / Entropia Universe

John Bates represents Mindark throughout North America and Australia and is responsible for business development, strategic marketing & PR initiatives. He has been with Minark since 2006.

An Internet trailblazer since 1987, Bates is also an owner of Goldstar.com, the world’s leading direct marketer of live entertainment. Previously John co-founded BIGWORDS.com, a leading youth marketer and textbook seller. John consults companies on sales, marketing, brand advocacy, as well as Internet strategy & public relations. Bates has guided the explosive growth of companies from zero to millions in revenues and has experience in virtual worlds and games dating back to 1994.

A highly sought after speaker, John has garnered excellent ratings at diverse venues like South by Southwest, Harvard’s Cyberposium, WebAttack, Jupiter Online Developers Conferences, Vanderbilt School of Business Distinguished Speakers Series, St. Gallen School of Business World Leaders Symposium, VeerStichting Symposium, Virtual Worlds, Virtual Goods Summit, GDC, and more. John brings passion, enthusiasm and long experience in virtual worlds. John graduated from the UCLA Honors Collegium Summa Cum Laude.

Jessica Alter| Director of Business Development and GM Platforms, Bebo/AOL

Jessica Alter is Director of Business Development and GM Platforms at Bebo/AOL. She leads multiple business development efforts including virtual economy and games as well as the platform strategy and community at Bebo.

Prior to Bebo, Jessica worked in business development at Hands-On Mobile and as strategy consultant at Accenture. She holds a Bachelor’s in Business Administration from University of Michigan and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

Ramu Yalamanchi | Founder and Chief Product Officer, hi5

Ramu Yalamanchi is founder and Chief Product Officer of hi5. In that role, he oversees product strategy and development, focusing on the company's social entertainment business. After launching hi5 in 2003, Ramu led the company to profitability within the first year of operation, and continues to drive the vision for what has become one of the world's largest consumer entertainment services.

Prior to starting hi5, Ramu played a key role in technology companies that have advanced online advertising and the progression of Internet communities. He was an early contributor serving in product management, business development, and sales at eGroups (acquired by Yahoo!) and AdKnowledge (acquired by CMGI). In his final year of college, Ramu helped launch Sponsornet - the Web's first advertising network. Prior to these experiences, Ramu learned about company building and business leadership from his entrepreneurial father, who established and managed more than a half dozen companies as Ramu was growing up in the suburbs of Chicago.

Ramu holds a B.S. in computer science from the University of Illinois – Urbana, Champaign.

Robert Goldberg | SVP of Business Operations, Zynga

Robert Goldberg is Zynga’s senior VP of Business Operations, which includes revenue management, sales, marketing, business and corporate development, partner management and studio services. He brings over 25 years of senior management experience at industry leading media, e-commerce, enterprise software companies and venture capital firms, including Idealab and NBCi.