DMEC

Lots of exciting things have happened behind the scenes and our conference is shaping up quite nicely.  We’re happy to announce our keynote speakers this year!

What are you doing?  Biz Stone helped you and your friends answer that question by co-founding Twitter Inc.  He also helped make Xanga, Blogger, Odeo and Obvious.   An expert in social media, he has published 2 books about social media, Blogging: Genius Strategies for Instant Web Content (New Riders, 2002) and Who Let The Blogs Out? (St. Martins, 2004).  Join us in the morning to see what he has to say about today’s media environment.

In the afternoon, Shane Kim, Corporate Vice President of Strategy and Business Development, Microsoft Interactive Entertainment will give us a different perspective on his assessment of the media environment. Previously, as the corporate vice president of Microsoft Game Studios, Kim led the delivery of many of the industry’s biggest Xbox 360 and Windows games franchises, including “Halo” and “Age of Empires.”  Even though Kim went to undergrad at Stanford, we will still welcome him to the Berkeley community with open arms.

Hi there,

I am Alex and I am one of the organizers for Social Communications Panel at Play.

Our panel is all about how do people connect online, how did they connect in the past and how are they going to connect in the future. If you think about it, the first online people interaction was over email, then chat and IM came in and that was it, up until a few years ago. Today we have social networking as the main way to connect with people. Going on Facebook you see that posting on the Wall for everyone to see is what users increasingly do. So we went from private emails to public walls – pretty interesting change, I would say What’s the future going to look like? What will happen to email and IM? Let’s see what our panelists have to say about that!
We just finished getting 99% of our panel in place so I am kind of excited to anounce them here.

We got a great  line up with people representing almost every way of online communication out there.
We got  Konstantin Guericke, CEO of Jaxtr, to bring in the VOIP perspective, Bhaskar Roy, co-founder of Qik, to bring in the video perspective, John Poisson, CEO of Tiny Pictures (Radar), to bring in the photos perspective (yes, this startup is all about people connecting through photos), Chris Szeto, PM at Meebo, to bring in the IM perspective and we got Andrew Trader, EVP of Business Development at Zynga, to bring in the social gaming perspective. And to answer the question you all must be thinking about – yes, we are hoping to have Facebook too!

And our star moderator, Noah Kagan, is going to spice up our panel. He got his experience working in established companies such as Microsoft and Intel, hot startups such Facebook and Mint, and is now building online “awesomeness” at kickflip.com. You can check him out at http://okdork.com

So that’s it, we are looking forward to our panel and hoping all of you out there will join us and give our panelists some tough questions to answer!

Alex.

We’ve been working on putting together panels for >play since April. I’m excited to announce that we have a great lineup of moderators and panelists across seven different panel topics, check out http://www.playconference.org/panels.html for more details. Some questions that we hope to explore:

Creativity has been a great driver of the Internet but how has the Internet changed how creatives create, distribute and monetize their art?

The brand conversation is moving steadily online but what are the perspectives on the front line, agencies and brand marketers?

New options to watch TV are springing up all around us but what does the consumer want?

What are the disruptive technologies that are hitting the telecom industry?

Games are getting harder and harder to categorize as the gaming industry evolves, what seperates the trends from the fads?

Social media is an integral part of our lives but what does it mean to be always connected?

Athlete blogs, streaming video, fantasy sports, fan communities – Has digital media made the sports fan more engaged?

Buy your tickets for >play and join in the discussion!