Today we’re revealing the seventh group of speakers for our third annual GamesBeat 2011 conference. Our newest slate of speakers will be part of a panel on the free-to-play mobile gaming market. They include Peter Driessen, chief executive of Spil Games; Julian Farrior, CEO of Backflip Studios; and Kris Duggan, CEO of Badgeville.
The GamesBeat 2011 conference takes place July 12-13 at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco.
Peter Driessen made an early bet on HTML5, the increasingly popular format for mobile games. He co-founded Spil Games as an online game company in 2004. Now the company has more than 130 million visitor to its game sites each month. Driessen believes that HTML5 will enable publishers to create games once that can run across a variety of mobile platforms. Driessen will speak on our panel on the Rise of Cross-Platform Games.
Julian Farrior is a veteran of several of our GamesBeat and DiscoveryBeat conferences. We like him because he always tells us the straight stuff about the Boulder, Colo.-based company’s progress in mobile gaming and he has keen insights into the business models that work. Farrior recently disclosed that the company’s games have been downloaded more than 100 million times. Backflip has produced one hit after another, including Paper Toss, Ragdoll Blaster, Ninjump, and Strike Knight. Farrior previously served as an executive at Earthscape and spent seven years at Yahoo in various management roles. He will speak on our panel on the Rise of Tablet Gaming.
Kris Duggan likes badges. He’s the CEO of Badgeville, which makes a social loyalty platform that makes it easy for businesses to increase customer loyalty and engagement Badgeville is one of the fast-growing companies in gamification, or making non-game applications more fun with game-like features. Prior to founding Badgeville in 2010, Duggan worked in roles at companies such as WebEx. He will appear on our breakout session on Gamifying Mobile Apps.
Our previous announced speakers include 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; Bart Decrem, head of mobile games at Disney and former chief executive of Tapulous; 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; Daniel Terry, co-founder of mobile game maker Pocket Gems; and Bing Gordon, partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and former chief creative officer at Electronic Arts; Jennifer Lu, director of business development at 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 atsponsors@venturebeat.com. To pitch a startup at the Who’s Got Game contest at GamesBeat 2011, click here.