October 26, 2009 | Written by simonbaptist
Roland Bryan, Director, Strategy at Associated Northcliffe Digital
Roland currently leads digital strategy across A&N’s digital assets under the AND umbrella. He is responsible for identifying opportunities to drive profitable growth across the portfolio through new product development, improved commercialisation, strategic partnerships and acquisition strategy.
He has also recently launched a new pilot in the hyperlocal space, localpeople, which has 50 live sites across the West of England. He is acting as General Manager of this proposition.
Prior to joining DMGT, Roland headed up the content acquisition team at Virgin Media with a particular focus on major channel carriage deals and growing the VOD content offer.
In addition to these roles, Roland previously worked at OC&C Strategy Consultants from 1999-2006 where he rose from Analyst to Associate Partner, leading their delivery capability in European Media. His projects included work on major media transactions such as Formula 1 and Telegraph Media Group and led corporate strategy assignments for Holtzbrinck, Trinity Mirror, BT and ITV amongst others.
Roland was educated at Oxford University, Keble College where he graduated with a Masters in History.
He lives in London.
Local Social Summit Speaker Biography Footnote: As set out in this post, our policy is to publish Speaker Biographies as is.
October 25, 2009 | Written by simonbaptist
Claudia Poepperl, Founder & CEO
Claudia is founder and CEO for adaffix, a Call 3.0 company that enriches the call experience by adding relevant content to calls in real time. She has 16 years experience in the mobile, media and local search industries with various senior management and operational roles.
Prior to adaffix, Claudia was Chief Marketing Officer for mobile search firm mobilePeople. As Managing Director for UCP Claudia was behind the success of Germany’s largest youth social network ‘uboot.com’. Claudia also worked for Ucp Morgen, Qpass, T-Mobile Germany and T-Mobile Austria. Claudia holds master degrees in Media Science and Mass Communication from Paris-Lodron University (Austria) and Bowling Green State University (USA).
Local Social Summit Speaker Biography Footnote: As set out in this post, our policy is to publish Speaker Biographies as is.
October 23, 2009 | Written by simonbaptist
Jonathan Ewert
Jonathan is a proven executive with global expertise in Internet advertising networks, social networking, e-commerce, and professional services. Mr. Ewert has a consistent track record in business transformation, working capital improvement, business development strategy and execution, organizational change management, and business process re-engineering to drive shareholder value. He is regarded as an authentic and passionate leader with a strong client focus and is a speaker at industry conferences such as Search Engine Strategies and Local Social.
Mr. Ewert was most recently Senior Vice President of Corporate Development for LookSmart (NASDAQ: LOOK), a leading search advertising network and management company, where he led the turnaround of the media business. Mr. Ewert joined LookSmart in April 2007 as East Coast Vice President, Advertising and Publisher
Services and was promoted to General Manager of Advertising Networks in September 2007, to Senior Vice President in October 2008, and to SVP of Corporate Development in April 2009. Through a combination of discontinuing certain operations, enhancing the product portfolio, doubling the size and coverage of the network, and revitalizing the sales and marketing organizations, Mr. Ewert’s leadership resulted in quarter-over-quarter revenue and paid click gains of 50% while decreasing operating expenses at the same time.
From 2003 – 2006, Mr. Ewert served as Chief Executive Officer of ePALS until selling the company. At ePALS, Mr. Ewert eliminated barriers to solvency and growth,
secured $7 million in debt and equity financing, and achieved revenue growth and cash flow break even through expansion of core assets. Prior to ePALS, Mr. Ewert served as VP Business Development to restart eCommerce Solutions, and as VP of Marketing and Corporate Communications for Modem Media, where he led the preparation and positioning of the company for Modem’s successful IPO in 1999.
Previously, Mr. Ewert served in a variety of management roles at Infoseek Corp. until the sale of the company to Disney in 1998. From 1991 to 1996, Mr. Ewert merged Audio Ad, Inc. with Newspaper Voice Services to create a $50 million interactive voice response service bureau serving the publishing industry with customers such as Gannett, Knight-Ridder, and Tribune Company.
Mr. Ewert is a past Board member of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, serves on the Advisory Board of The Guru Nation, the Advisory Board of Stuart Levine & Associates, and the Steering Committee of Project Inkwell, an organization that has built standards to accelerate the deployment of 1:1 technologies onto K-12 desktops worldwide. Mr. Ewert also serves on the Advisory Board of Cancer101, a non-profit that provides tools and resources to the newly diagnosed. He earned his B.A. in Political Science in 1986 from the College of the Holy Cross.
Local Social Summit Speaker Biography Footnote: As set out in this post, our policy is to publish Speaker Biographies as is.
October 23, 2009 | Written by simonbaptist
Jim Brown, CTO CloudMade
Jim Brown is CTO at CloudMade (www.cloudmade.com) where he is responsible for all development, technology and infrastructure. He came to CloudMade after serving as CIO at Sonopia, a US based MVNO.
Before Sonopia, Jim was CTO at WinWin Technologies, building a CRM and advertising ASP around a real-time profiling engine that hosted over 300 million data points across 35 million consumers and supported over 1 million ad-serving transactions per day.
Prior to WinWin, Jim served as COO of Fairgain, which was merged with Jatak. Jim held the role of VP Business Management at Symbian during the company’s fastest growth period. He came to Symbian from Oracle, where he was managing principal and practice director for technical architecture.
Jim began his technical career in the early 1980s at Kmart where he deployed the first distributed Unix systems into over 2,200 store locations and was responsible for international systems, R&D and strategic planning at various times. He also spent several years at GM/EDS implementing plant floor automation systems.
Local Social Summit Speaker Biography Footnote: As set out in this post, our policy is to publish Speaker Biographies as is.
October 22, 2009 | Written by simonbaptist
Paul has been active in the local+social space for the last five years, which has included creating a pioneering video website introducing city neighbourhoods. Now a digital strategist at Imagination, his recent #sixweeks project used social media tools to challenge basic assumptions about consumer behaviour and saw a number of companies pay him for being their customer.
You can find him on:
Local Social Summit Speaker Biography Footnote: As set out in this post, our policy is to publish Speaker Biographies as is.
October 21, 2009 | Written by admin
Ben Barney is a founding member and Director of Akesios. He specialises in productising new media products for traditional businesses with large sales forces, and creating monetisation opportunities from the developing players in the Local Search space. With over 10 years experience with Directory and Yellow Page companies throughout Europe, he is also a specialist in Google AdWords; from a reseller, agency and advertiser’s perspective.
Ben’s areas of expertise include:
- Strategic advisory services for digitising traditional media businesses
- Project coordination and implementation
- Google AdWords Reseller programs
- Marketing, sales and product strategy within Local Search
- Business turnaround
- Operational Due Diligence
Ben was a founder member of Thomson Directories’ Internet department and a key member of the team that developed WebFinder.com, Thomson’s PPC engine. He set up and managed WebFinder’s dedicated sales, account management, customer service, partner management and business development teams. He was also responsible for the commercial and operational management of their Google Reseller programme. He can manage or assist with all aspects of establishing and running a service with products that are highly usable by the sales force and customer base alike.
Ben is a full member of the Chartered Institute of Marketing. You can also find Ben posting on the Akesios blog.
October 21, 2009 | Written by simonbaptist
James is currently responsible for overseeing the development of BBC Local, the BBC’s online news and information service across the UK, and location services across BBC Online including mapping and location based technology.
He spent four years as Assistant Editor for the local ‘Where I Live’ websites in England and has worked on many new initiatives for the development of news gathering operations and enhancing BBC journalism output on new platforms, including the increasingly role of user-generated content.
He has been working in regional and local broadcasting in the UK since 1998, initially as a strategy analyst covering the audience reporting and strategic positioning of regional television and local radio services across England.
Local Social Summit Speaker Biography Footnote: As set out in this post, our policy is to publish Speaker Biographies as is.
October 20, 2009 | Written by simonbaptist
David spent around 10 years in traditional business directory firms (Thomson, Scoot, BT) before joining a file sharing startup in 2006 which provided the bridge from traditional publishing to the peer-produced model.
In 1996 he led the development and launch of a mass market e-commerce solution for SMEs at the directory company Scoot, and went on to head up all product management for an international e-procurement company during the early 00s. He’s consulted on digital asset management products at Sony and on strategies for monetizing BT’s online
directory enquiries service on BT.com.
In 2005 he joined a file sharing start-up to head up product strategy and saw that grow from 3 people to a team of over 30 on both sides of the Atlantic, before starting www.brownbook.net with Marc Lyne in2008.
Local Social Summit Speaker Biography Footnote: As set out in this post, our policy is to publish Speaker Biographies as is.
October 19, 2009 | Written by simonbaptist
Andrew Burke is CEO of Amino Technologies Plc which specialises in digital entertainment solutions for IPTV, Internet TV and in-home multimedia distribution. He has overseen the acquisitions of AssetHouse, digital proposition management experts, and Tilgin’s IPTV set-top box division. Andrew is Chairman of Crisp Thinking and a non-executive director at the IT Forum Foundation. Previously, he was CEO BT Entertainment where he devised and ran the company’s IPTV initiative (BT Vision), chaired their Premium Rate Services activity, pioneered their Digital Media Services and led BT’s relationships with the media world. Prior to that, Andrew was Director Online Services and responsible for all value-added services developed to complement Broadband in the UK. Before BT, Andrew was founder & CEO of eVerger, an eMarketing focussed venture fund created in 2000 by Aegis Group, and Warburg Pincus, which together committed $100m to the venture. Previously, Andrew was COO of eVentures, the Internet incubator owned by News Corporation and Softbank, founder and CEO of LineOne, the Internet service provider now known as Tiscali UK, and established News International’s initial Internet presence back in 1994.
Local Social Summit Speaker Biography Footnote: As set out in this post, our policy is to publish Speaker Biographies as is.
October 16, 2009 | Written by simonbaptist
Sebastien Provencher will be coming from Montreal, bringing with him a wealth of hard-earned experience to Local Social Summit ‘09. Sebastien will be talking on the Local Get Social panel but we are particularly looking forward to his leadership of the close of summit lab session: “What does the Perfect Local Media Company Look Like in 5 Years Time”.
Biography
Sebastien Provencher
Co-founder, Praized Media
Sebastien is Praized Media’s intrepid explorer and ambassador. He has more than 12 years’ experience in local search, interactive entertainment and online media. From 1999 to 2007, Sebastien played an instrumental role in formulating Yellow Pages Group’s online strategy. He developed their most successful online advertising product ever (DirectoryPlus), struck a strategic partnership with Google, and created a vision around local search.
Sebastien co-founded Praized Media (www.praizedmedia.com) in 2007 to help Local Media companies tap into the growing potential of online word-of-mouth and social media.
He writes about traditional media, local search and social media on his blog at blogs.praized.com/seb and tweets at @sebprovencher.
Local Social Summit Speaker Biography Footnote: As set out in this post, our policy is to publish Speaker Biographies as is.
