Click on the Video Below and Sample a Session from a previous Digital Hollywood event. For Additional Video Sessions, Click Here Digital Hollywood, October 27-30, 2008 Thursday, October 30th 11:05 AM - 12:20 PM Track II: Advertising Innovation! Broadband, Mobile, In-Game, Social Networks, RSS, Blogs and Podcasts Advertising is finally discovering and finding its way into the next generation of technology media and entertainment industries. Broadband, mobile, IPTV, cable and interactive TV and of course in games, ads and branded information are being delivered in many forms. The technologies behind ad-insertion, ad serving, on-demand technologies and a full host of back-end management technologies are enabling greater creativity and enhanced options in the relationship between technology and advertising. In this session, we will open an ongoing conversation of how technologies are evolving, where they are heading and how the advertising and branding industries will gain further technology traction. Greg Hallinan, VP of Marketing, Verve Wireless Michele Tobin, Regional VP, Sales and Business Development, Millennial Media Alicia Morga, CEO, Consorte Media Diaz Nesamoney, CEO, Jivox Jim Else, Vice President, Sales, Wizzard Media Fady Atallah, President/Co-founder, Bluesponge Tom Walker, Executive Director, Firstborn Los Angeles Mani Iyer, CEO and Founder of Kwanzoo Inc., Moderator Mani Iyer is CEO and Founder of Kwanzoo Inc., a provider of interactive user engagement solutions for media and entertainment companies. Prior to Kwanzoo, Mani served as an Interim Executive at several VC-backed start-ups in customer and business development. Mani previously built an e-learning applications business that was acquired by Oracle/PeopleSoft Inc, where he then served as a Vice President. Mani recently chaired the Distinguished Speaker Series, and hosted the Media Convergence Panel at TiEcon, the world's largest conference of entrepreneurs. He is an Alumnus of PeopleSoft, Oracle and Microsoft. Mani has an MSCS from the University of Wisconsin, Madison and BSEE from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Chennai, India. Mani also hosts an occasional radio show covering various social issues at KZSU 90.1 FM in the Bay Area Alicia Morga, CEO, Consorte Media: a leading online marketing firm targeting the Hispanic market. Prior to founding Consorte Media, Alicia was an investment professional focused on venture opportunities in the technology sector for The Carlyle Group's U.S. Venture Fund. She also worked at Hummer Winblad Venture Partners, where she focused on early-stage software investments. While at Hummer Winblad, Alicia served as VP of Operations for Napster and CEO of venture fund Zero Gravity Internet Group. Alicia has served on the boards of technology companies such as Ingenio, Ventaso, Secure Elements, Archetype-Solutions, Applied Semantics, Menerva Technologies and Discovercast. Alicia has also been a corporate attorney for Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati. She started her career as an investment banker at Goldman, Sachs & Co. Alicia holds a J.D. from Stanford Law School and a B.A. from Stanford University. Alicia has been widely recognized for her new approach to bringing stringent methodology to Hispanic online advertising. She was recently named one of the 100 Most Influential Latinos of Silicon Valley by the Mexican American Community Services Agency, was Hispanic-Net Entrepreneur of the Year, appeared in Inc. Magazine and was profiled in the March 2008 issue of Fast Company. She has been invited to speak at SES New York, Toronto and San Jose, Ad:Tech New York, The National Association of Hispanic Publishers Annual Convention and several other leading industry events. She is also profiled in the new book: “Building the Latino Future: Success Stories for the Next Generation”, published by Wiley and Sons. Jim Else, Vice President, Sales, Wizzard Media: Jim Else, a 30-year advertising sales veteran, joined Wizzard Media as Vice President, Sales in April 2007. He was recruited by Wizzard to launch an ad sales initiative to monetize podcasts and create new opportunities for content creators and advertisers. Wizzard Media is the world’s largest podcast hosting network and a unit of Wizzard Software (AMEX: WZE). Mr. Else’s extensive experience includes a distinguished 20-year career as an advertising executive for Time, Inc. He held a variety of positions with the company, including Senior Vice President for Time4 Media, a multimedia company encompassing magazines, websites, television and radio programming, feature films, and events and exhibitions. With a combined monthly audience of more than 30 million, Time4 Media publishes some of the nation’s biggest and best-known titles such as Field & Stream, SKI, Golf Magazine and Popular Science. In this position, Mr. Else achieved tremendous annual ad revenue growth through aggressive sales strategies and strong leadership. He managed a successful corporate sales and marketing team which maintained many impressive customer-focused relationships with major advertisers like Ford, Pfizer and Merck. As Time Inc. VP of Corporate Sales, Mr. Else secured relationships with some of the world’s most well-respected companies including General Motors, Nike, IBM and Microsoft, to name a few. He played an important role in the Time Warner/AOL merger, serving as a member of the Time Warner Ad Council which created and managed cross marketing and sales initiatives. While working as Time’s western corporate accounts director in Los Angeles, Mr. Else negotiated advertising agreements with a number of leading brands including Toyota, Nissan, Mazda and Apple Computer. Immediately before joining Wizzard Media, Mr. Else was Executive Vice President of Enversa, where he spearheaded efforts to introduce the company’s proprietary web-based media bidding tool to advertisers and agencies. Mr. Else earned a BBA degree from the University of Michigan’s Graduate School of Business. Greg Hallinan, Vice President of Marketing, Verve: Greg Hallinan has more than 10 years of experience in business and consumer-based marketing, including brand management, product marketing, and communications strategy. Greg started his career at Intel in strategic marketing, working on the Pentium® III and Xeon® product launches. He then went on to product management positions at Swell.com and, more recently, led the marketing efforts at the leading out-of-home interactive entertainment company - NTN Buzztime. Greg earned his Bachelor's degree from the University of Colorado-Boulder and went on to earn his MBA with honors from the Mendoza College of Business at the University of Notre Dame. Diaz Nesamoney, CEO of Jivox: Diaz Nesamoney is founder and CEO of Jivox. Before founding Jivox, he founded Celequest, raised over $20M in venture capital, and served as its CEO until early 2007, when the company was acquired by Cognos. Celequest introduced the market’s first BI appliance, a disruptive innovation that led to its acquisition by Cognos. He was previously co-founder, President and COO at Informatica, which he took from a startup to a publicly traded company in 1999 with a market capitalization of over $1 billion dollars. Informatica pioneered data integration software as a category and is now the market leader with over $400M in revenue. Diaz is a trustee of the American India Foundation, a leading international development organization charged with the mission of accelerating social and economic change in India. He holds a Masters degree in Computer Science from the Birla Institute of Technology and Science in India. Tom Walker, Executive Director, Firstborn Los Angeles: In his role as Executive Director in the Los Angeles office of Firstborn, Tom is focused on the Los Angeles office’s strategic vision, existing and new client relationships and projects, resource allocation and marketing. After collaborating with Firstborn on projects for clients such as HBO in his role as Director of Interactive at advertising agency Venables Bell & Partners, he saw a great opportunity to be an integral part of the action and joined the leadership team of the Los Angeles office in 2007. Previous Interactive marketing leadership experience includes overseeing teams of more than 30 and managing multi-million dollar department and project budgets, including the above-mentioned Venables Bell & Partners, overseeing all aspects of Interactive including strategy, user experience, producers and production for clients such as HBO, Audi, 24 Hour Fitness-Fit Lite, Barclay’s, Slim Jim and Orville Redenbacher. Previous to that he spent four years at Williams-Sonoma, Inc. where he was Director of Internet Creative for the three Pottery Barn brands. Back in the agency world at AKQA, Tom headed up the print, broadcast, and Interactive production teams on clients like Palm, KNTV-NBC, Lucas Arts, and Visa, and at USWeb/CKS (aka Marchfirst) as VP of Project Management, creating groundbreaking online experiences for clients such as Apple, TiVo, Levi Strauss & Co, Mattel, Grupo Televisa (esmas.com), and Logitech. A San Francisco bay area native, Tom has left the foggy bay behind, shed his wind-breaker and made sunny Los Angeles his home. Fady Atallah, President/Co-founder, Bluesponge: As the head of Bluesponge, Fady leads the company into building its international portfolio, with an unmatched ability to move its clients' businesses into the digital media world. He is supported by a close-knit team of business-art-technology activists that conceive and produce content-driven experiences, while focusing on collaborative development and execution of pioneer work. While Bluesponge strives for the creation of unique content that leverages social software, Fady’s primary occupations are making sure that the company talks to every business interested in growing into online communities and ensuring that its operations are continuously adapting to ever-changing media technologies. After a stint in film production in the late nineties, and a lot of travel abroad, Fady was challenged by the emerging media landscape generated by the web and broadband, and decided, with a few friends, to found Bluesponge (2000). The premise for the company was to tap into the enormous potential that broadband brought to the web/HTML experience, particularly for the development of creative content. After Bluesponge’s beginnings in what it termed “webvideo”, Fady’s role as a producer was to shift focus toward larger and more elaborate environments where users found refuge from the surrounding media chaos and artifice. The founding premise was — and is now more true than ever- that users identify with brands and contents that actually talk to them, inspire them, and engage them. A fundamental part of the Bluesponge equation. Fady completed a bachelor’s degree in economics (1992), which paved the way for a first in-depth work experience in the elaboration of Public policy at the Gamma institute, a Montréal-based think-tank under the wing of Kimon Valaskakis, a Canadian writer, academic and diplomat. This fostered his interest in globalization, which became the study subject of his master’s degree thesis in political science/strategic studies (1994). Fady then expanded his experience to encompass strategic planning under the umbrella of ISOgroup, a Canadian consultancy catering to Fortune 500 corporations. Fady simultaneously completed a graduate diploma in Management at McGill University, Montréal (1996). Following his consulting years, Fady had the opportunity to advise the Lebanese Ministry of Environment, with the specific mandate to support the ministerial team on Free Trade and the Environment around the Mediterranean. His studies were later published by the United Nations’ Environmental Program (UNEP) and the United Nations’ Development Program (UNDP). From consulting, he made a gradual move to his original interest in storytelling. He co-founded NOW images and communication, a film & video production company in 1996. With the upheaval brought to audio-visual entertainment by the web, Fady co-founded Bluesponge, which satisfied his experimental and entrepreneurial leanings and has been driving him ever since.