Today we’re revealing the eleventh group of speakers for our third annual GamesBeat 2011 conference. Our newest batch of speakers illustrates the wide variety of speakers and topics we’re getting for our event on July 12-13 at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. We’ve got 66 speakers signed up and more are coming soon (see agenda).
Our new speakers include Brian Selzer, president of Ogmento; Suli Ali, CEO of mobile game maker TinyCo; and Dennis Ryan, executive vice president of worldwide publishing, PopCap Games.
Brian Selzer is the co-founder, president and chief creative officer of Ogmento, a developer of geo-social, augmented reality games and entertainment. He will be one of the panelists on our breakout session on augmented reality games, one of the hot spots of mobile gaming. Ogmento is a venture-backed company that is looking to combine mobile location features and gaming. Selzer made his career pushing the boundaries of digital media and interactive entertainment for over 15 years. He has created, produced, marketed and distributed online and mobile content to a client list that includes Fox, Universal, Warner Brothers, Sony, Activision, EA, Marvel, Hasbro, Nike and Lego.
Suli Ali is the co-founder and CEO of TinyCo, a hot mobile gaming company that raised $18 million from uber-investor Marc Andreessen’s Andreessen Horowitz venture capital firm. He will serve on our panel on investing in social and mobile games. TinyCo has become an investor in mobile game developers itself by setting up the TinyFund, a $5 million fund aimed at helping indie developers get their games to the market. He’ll talk about why he’s both making games and investing in game makers at the same time.
Dennis Ryan joined PopCap Games in 2005 and runs global marketing, sales, business development, social business operations, and product management. Prior to PopCap, Ryan was an executive at Click Commerce, where he ran a business unit for a software-as-a-service CRM solution. He was CEO at Allegis Corp. for five years as it pioneered on-demand SaaS for the enterprise. He was also CEO at Net-It Software, which developed intranet document management software, and was a vice president at EO. Ryan will serve on our panel on the Rise of Cross-Platform Games. PopCap has become one of the hottest game publishers thanks to titles such as Plants vs Zombies and Bejeweled. The company plans to go public in the second half of the year.
Our previous announced speakers include Keith Lee, CEO of Booyah; Peter Farago, vice president of marketing at Flurry; Eric Eldon, editor of Inside Network; Daniel Terry, CEO of Pocket Gems; Michael Pachter, managing director and gaming analyst at Wedbush Securities; Lars Buttler, CEO of Trion Worlds; Mark Friedler, game industry consultant; Kevin Chou, CEO of Kabam; Joe Kraus, partner at Google Ventures; Shervin Pishevar, managing director of Menlo Ventures; Peter Driessen, CEO of Spil Games; Julian Farrior, CEO of Backflip Studios; Kris Duggan, CEO of Badgeville; Jeferson Valadares, general manager of games at Flurry; Gabe Leydon, chief executive of Addmired; Lou Fasulo, chief operating officer of Z2Live; Dave Castelnuovo, CEO of Bolt Creative; David Marcus, founder and CEO of Zong; Rich Wong, a partner at venture capital firm Accel Partners; Chris Bergstresser, executive vice president of online gaming portal Miniclip; Neil Young, founder and CEO of Ngmoco; Andrej Nabergoj, founder and chief executive of Outfit7; Jason Citron, founder and chief executive of OpenFeint; Steve Perlman, chief executive of games-on-demand firm OnLive; Trip Hawkins, chief executive of Digital Chocolate; Peter Relan, chairman of YouWeb and chief executive of CrowdStar; Si Shen, chief executive of PapayaMobile; David Ko, senior vice president for mobile at Zynga; our keynote speaker, longtime game entrepreneur and founder of Atari, Nolan Bushnell; Tim Chang, partner at Norwest Venture Partners; Bing Gordon, partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and former chief creative officer at Electronic Arts; Suli Ali, CEO of TinyCo; Sana Choudary, CEO of game startup accelerator YetiZen; and Tim Merel, managing director of Digi-Capital.
Each year, GamesBeat follows a big trend. In 2009, we focused on how All The World’s a Game, with the explosion of games onto a global stage. Last year, GamesBeat@GDC focused on Disruption 2.0. This year, our theme is Mobile Games Level Up, and it focuses on the busy intersection of games and mobile technology. We’ll focus on everything from smartphone games to tablets and handhelds.
Console games dominated the news in the past, but the center of attention is rapidly shifting toward mobile as more and more users play games on the run. While there are hundreds of millions of gamers on Facebook, analysts believe the number could be much higher for mobile games. Our speakers are right at this intersection of gaming and mobility. GamesBeat 2011 targets an audience of CEOs, executives, entrepreneurs, investors, marketers and other key figures in the game business. Stay tuned for more speaker announcements.
We’ll be exploring the most disruptive game technologies and business models at our third annual GamesBeat 2011conference, on July 12-13 at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. It will focus on the disruptive trends in the mobile games market. GamesBeat is co-located with our MobileBeat 2011conference this year. To register, click on this link. Sponsors can message us at sponsors@venturebeat.com. Our sponsors include Qualcomm, Flurry, Greystripe, Nexage, Tapjoy, Fun Mobility, TriNet, Zong, Sibblingz, OpenFeint, Spil Games and WildTangent.