Joachim Helfer, Business Development Online, Müller Medien Unternehmensfamilie, Nuremberg, Germany

Joachim Helfer has been with Müller Medien since 2005 and is co-ordinating all pay-for performance-activities with the company family that contains various businesses from directories, local radio and tv stations books and direct distribution divisions in Germany and other EU marketis. Joachim Helfer is involved in all major partnerships with directory properties and very present in the international directory community.

He is also representing the p4p initiative of the German directory publishers and in this role responsible for the local PPC ad network “Lokale-Internetwerbung” with integrations into the Germany online directories like dasoertliche.de, dastelefonbuch.de andgelbeseiten.de, as well as suchen.de and t-online. Prior to his job at MM he headed the international product development and marketing department of the international ad rep firm ad pepper media in Hamburg and Nuremberg for 5 years and before the online media unit of the multimedia agency ID-Media in Hamburg. He has a degree in Business and Management from FH Mainz and University of Ulster, Coleraine, Northern Ireland. The 37-year old online expert is married and has a 13-month old little daughter.

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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.

Local Social Summit Speaker Biography Footnote: As set out in this post, our policy is to publish Speaker Biographies as is.

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.