Simon Greenman, Managing Director – Online, European Directories

Simon joined European Directories as Managing Director – Online in 2007.  His focus is on driving online revenue and usage growth across the eight operation countries, including the rollout of flagship IYP sites, video products, the social local site Tupalo.com, and the recent launch of the Skype partnership.

Simon is something of an industry veteran with nearly fifteen years of global experience in the local search and yellow pages industries. He was a co-founder of the MapQuest.com service, one of the most widely used and licensed local search services in the US. He was most recently based in the US as Head of Digital for R.H. Donnelley, a
leading Yellow Pages publisher.  He joined them with the acquisition of Dex Media, a US$1.6B publisher, where he had held the same position and was part of the team that completed a successful IPO in 2004. He was responsible for leading the group’s overall digital initiatives, including driving revenue growth with the introduction of new IYP and
SEM advertising products, growing DexOnline.com to the number one in-region consumer local search site, and establishing well recognized partnerships with Google and Yahoo!.

Mr Greenman holds a MBA from Harvard and a BA in Computing and Artificial Intelligence from the University of Sussex, England.  He has also held increasingly senior technology and management positions with Accenture and R.R. Donnelley.

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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.

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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.