Today we’re revealing the second set of speakers for our third annual GamesBeat 2011 conference. Our slate of speakers will include David Ko, senior vice president of mobile games at Zynga, the world’s largest social game company; Si Shen, chief executive of mobile social platform company PapayaMobile; and Peter Relan, founder of YouWeb, the incubator that has created such social/mobile gaming companies as OpenFeint, CrowdStar, iSwifter and Sibblingz.
This GamesBeat 2011 conference takes place July 12-13 at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco.
We’re delighted to have Zynga at the event because it has disrupted traditional game markets and found new audiences with its social games on Facebook, where it has more than 247 million monthly active users. But in mobile games, the market is wide open and the company needs a good strategy as it expands into mobile.
David Ko will do a fireside chat entitled, “Mobile as the Next Evolution for Social Gaming.” Ko will discuss the incredible opportunities for innovation in mobile social gaming, as well as different business models and their respective challenges in the market. In the online social gaming space, immense growth and adoption on the PC has led to a natural extension into mobile – the largest opportunity for the market. Social gaming companies are rapidly innovating and developing experiences that leverage the unique attributes of the mobile device to better engage users and reach critical mass. Ko will provide an overview of this evolution.
PapayaMobile’s Si Shen will talk about creating mobile social tools such as her company’s platform for creating Android games that are more easily monetized and discovered. Shen’s Beijing-based company raised $18 million in April and seeks to expand its ecosystem in the U.S. and Europe. Shen co-founded PapayaMobile in 2008. Before that, she was a member of Google’s team in China. She was the product lead for mobile at Google in Beijing and was a product manager for search and mobile advertising in Google’s Mountain View, Calif. headquarters.
Peter Relan has helped create some of the most disruptive companies of the social gaming era. CrowdStar was one of the pioneers of social games on Facebook, scoring tens of millions of users for titles such as Happy Aquarium. Now the company has raised $23 million in funding and is poised to expand worldwide into mobile and social markets. OpenFeint has recruited thousands of developers to its mobile social platform for the iPhone and Android mobile operating systems, and the company was recently acquired by Japan’s Gree for $104 million. Sibblingz is trying to create the Holy Grail tool that allows games to be written once for any mobile or social platform. And iSwifter is making it possible for games created in one format, such as Flash, to run on another platform that wouldn’t otherwise be compatible.
Relan will do a fireside chat about the global opportunity in mobile social gaming. He will touch on YouWeb’s strategy in launching social and mobile startups without a huge amount of funding. And he’ll talk about what his company is trying to do to clear out obstacles and pave the way for a huge payoff in mobile games.
Our previous announced speakers include Steve Perlman, chief executive of games-on-demand firm OnLive; Bart Decrem, head of mobile games at Disney and former chief executive of Tapulous; and Trip Hawkins, chief executive of Digital Chocolate.
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. GamesBeat 2011 targets an audience of CEOs, executives, entrepreneurs, investors, marketers and other key figures in the game business.
We’ll be exploring the most disruptive game technologies and business models at our third annual GamesBeat 2011 conference, 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 2011 conference this year. To register, click on this link. Sponsors can message us at sponsors@venturebeat.com. To pitch a startup at the Who’s Got Game contest at GamesBeat 2011, click here.