We’re excited to announce new speakers and program content for DiscoveryBeat, VentureBeat’s event exploring how to get apps noticed in an age of noise. The event takes place Dec. 8 at the Automattic Lounge on Pier 38 in San Francisco. We’ve got a maximum capacity of 200 and we expect the event will be sold out. Our newest speakers will be discussing app discovery, analytics, and monetization. Here they are:
Alex St. John, president and chief technology officer of hi5, will be speaking on the panel “Discovery 3.0: Bringing in the big guys,” about how brands are breaking into apps and how they can get their apps noticed. St. John has big plans to introduce more social games and entertainment to hi5’s audience of 60 million users worldwide. He was previously founder and chief executive of Wild Tangent, which pioneered a lot of web-based, ad-supported games and platforms on the Internet. And he was also the games evangelist at Microsoft who helped the software giant become a powerhouse in the games industry. St. John is very opinionated, having predicted in 2007 that the video game console industry would die as other kinds of web-based games take off.
Neil Young, chief executive of Ngmoco, is joining the panel “Discovery 2.0: Moving to the next level,” about how leaders in social and mobile games are poised to take discovery to new levels. Young founded Ngmoco in 2008 to focus on iPhone games. His company has produced a string of hits from Rolando to Eliminate Pro, and it has also launched Plus+, a platform for developers that socializes iPhone apps and helps them get noticed through cross promotion. Young was formerly an executive at Electronic Arts, where he was in charge of the production of numerous hit franchises from The Lord of the Rings to The Sims.
Joining St. John on the Discovery 3.0 panel (alongside Jon Vlassopulos of Moderati) is Michael Chang, chief executive of Greystripe, a rich media mobile advertising network. Chang is responsible for Greystripe’s market vision and execution. He previously worked at Incubic Venture Capital and invested in software companies. Greystripe recently announced a new ad model where developers advertising apps will pay only per download of apps that are accessed via Greystripe’s ad network.
We have also had some speaker changes. Randy Angle, design director at SGN, will replace Randy Breen of SGN as a speaker on the panel “Discovery 1.0: Starting from Scratch.” And Ge Wang, chief technology officer at Smule, is back with us again, replacing Jeff Smith of Smule on the same panel. For the complete speaker lineup, see here.