Today we’re revealing the tenth group of speakers for our third annual GamesBeat 2011 conference. This group is a set of veterans who have spoken at our past conferences and have meaningful updates for our event on July 12-13 at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. We like when our past speakers show up again with more to say.
Our new speakers are Keith Lee, CEO of Booyah; Peter Farago, vice president of marketing at Flurry; and Eric Eldon, editor of Inside Network. These are three more of the more than 70 speakers you’ll see at GamesBeat 2011, which is co-located with MobileBeat 2011 this year.
Keith Lee has had some ups and downs as the CEO of Booyah, which got early funding from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. The company has gone through an evolution, starting first with an iPhone app that let you create an “achievement system for your life.” It was an early gamificaiton app, but it didn’t take off. So Booyah created the Monopoly-like MyTown location game. That app took off and Lee built Booyah into a bigger company. But the company has launched more games and is evolving again. Lee and Booyah’s other founders were instrumental in making games such as Diablo II at Blizzard Entertainment. Lee has spoken with us numerous times about his transitions.
Lee will talk about what he’s learned from his efforts in mobile gaming in a fireside chat with journalist Eric Eldon. Eldon edits the news sites of Inside Network, which was recently acquired by WebMediaBrands, a New York media company. Prior to working with Inside Network, Eldon was the first employee at VentureBeat, starting in 2007. He became an editor and the lead writer for social networking. Before VentureBeat, Eldon co-founded WriteWith, a writing software startup.
Peter Farago will speak on a panel on July 12 about monetizing mobile games. Farago has spoken at our past events such as DiscoveryBeat and is familiar to our regular readers. He has talked with us about mobile analytics and Flurry’s recommendation engine. Before Flurry, Farago was product marketing director at Digital Chocolate and a senior product manager at Electronic Arts. He also worked at Microsoft and Pacific Sun Industries.
Our previous announced speakers include 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, Spil Games and WildTangent.