Ralph Simon is regarded as one of the founders of the modern mobile entertainment industry.  Over the last decade he has been a global trailblazer and innovator, playing a central role in the growth of the global mobile entertainment & content industries.

Dubbed the ‘father of the ring tone’, he and his team created and developed the first ring tones in the USA, Europe, Africa and Australia in 1998.  Simon was the first to advise and guide mobile operators, media & film companies, TV networks, brands, ad agency groups and platform providers worldwide on how to create and grow mobile revenues and content on mobile phones.

Simon co-founded the independent Zomba group of music companies & leading record label, Jive Records in the 1970’s, building them into the music industry’s leading independent music company.   He became the Executive Vice President of Capitol Records and Blue Note Records in Hollywood, where he started  EMI Music’s global New Media division in the mid-‘90s.

Simon correctly predicted that mobile phones would become the indispensable voice/social networking-and-music companion for mobile consumers and their increasingly mobile lifestyles.   Significantly, Simon persuaded US music publishers to embrace this new mobile medium and grant ring tone rights which spurred a whole new mobile entertainment industry in the USA and internationally.  In the late 1990’s he founded the influential Mobile Entertainment Forum – Americas (MEF) for which he now serves as Chairman Emeritus.

In July 2005, Simon was the mobile producer of the Live 8 global concerts working with Sir Bob Geldof, Bono and the Live Aid organization.  Simon was also the mobile producer of the successful Al Gore/Live Earth global event in July 2007.  Mobile Entertainment magazine voted him among the world’s Top 50 executives in Mobile Entertainment in 2005, 2006 and 2008.    In 2007 he received their special award, for his Outstanding Contribution to the global Mobile Entertainment Industry.

In May 2008 he was the global mobile producer of TED Conference’s Pangea Day worldwide event and project.

In 2009 he became the mobile strategy advisor to Irish rockers, U2 and helped create their global partnership with Blackberry to tie in with U2’s highly successful world touring cycle.

He is involved as the mobile producer of the 2010 World Cup "Celebration” music event, which will take place as the kick-off global TV event for the World Cup on June 10th in Johannesburg, and  will feature some of the world’s leading recording stars and launch the global “1 Goal – Education for All” campaign led by Queen Rania of Jordan. 

Simon heads the London-based Mobilium Advisory Group, providing high level strategic advice and guidance on how to create and grow revenues and impact from the usage and distribution of mobile content, messaging, mobile media technology and applications.  He serves on the Advisory Board of the Wireless Life Sciences Alliance 

He is popular as a speaker on mobile phone usage and culture internationally, and recent speaking engagements have  included the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona 2010, as well at major mobile conferences in the USA, Canada, Australia, Spain, South Africa, France, Germany, Norway, Iceland,  India, Israel, Finland & the United Kingdom. 

He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, Commerce & Manufacture in the UK and a member of the Academy of Recorded Arts & Sciences in the USA.

Henrik Byström has a long and distinguished career in international business and management. He has experience and a proven track record as CEO, senior management positions and consulting from a number of industries as well as in government related organizations and diplomacy.

He is also an accomplished entrepreneur, currently being the Chairman of an early stage SNS company in China. He is a recognised expert in business and development in Asia, having lectured in many Universities and also acting as advisor to the committee that wrote the Official Swedish Asia Strategy adopted by parliament.

Mr Byström has over 30 years of international business experience. He has worked and lived in Sweden, France, Philippines, Pakistan, Hong Kong and Mainland China. He has been responsible for operations covering all of Asia including the Middle East.  In this work he has led and developed a number of complex organisations and faced many challenges. He has shown endurance and commitment leading very competent organisations to great success under challenging conditions.

Over the past 20 years Mr Byström has led over 200  assignments involving mainly SMEs seeking new overseas markets in Asia. The assignments represent a wide range of industries but Information Technology and other high tech industries clearly dominated.

Mr  Byström has worked 17 years for multinationals, 7 of those as an CEO and country manager in Asia, He has been Trade Commissioner for Sweden in Hong Kong and Taiwan and was for 7 years SVP ASIA at the Swedish Trade Council, where he also headed the SME programmes. For the past two years he has been an entrepreneur in the internet business.

P1.CN, which Mr Byström chairs  is a Social Community by invitation only for exceptional people. The site encompasses all the standard features of successful SNS like a feed where members share news comments and pictures, a blog section for members blogs, a magazine with editorial material about life style issues like fashion, food, night life, travelling. The site caters to about 5% of Chinas urban population. Presently the site has some 1.7 million members with a very rapid growth. There is a very elaborate revenue generating business model. Location based services constitute an important part of the business model and membership value provided.  

One of the 'Top Ten mobiThinkers' and '50 Most influential People in Mobile Entertainment' globally.

Neeraj Roy is the Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer of Hungama Digital Media Entertainment Pvt. Ltd. Under his leadership, Hungama today is South Asia's largest digital and mobile entertainment company. He is also the Chairman of the Asia Board of the Mobile Entertainment Forum (MEF), and was recently voted amongst the 'Top Ten mobiThinkers' and '50 Most influential People in Mobile Entertainment' globally. Neeraj was also awarded the Sun Microsystems-Economic Times Young Leader award in 2001 and voted as 25 young leaders in the new millennium by Business India. He has been nominated four times in a row, to the list of 'Top 50 Executives in Mobile Content' by the ME magazine in the UK.

Hungama Mobile is the largest aggregator, developer and publisher of BOLLYWOOD content in the world. Hungama has developed a digital distribution network spanning 37 countries with over 150 partners across Mobile, Internet, Cable VOD and IPTV services, representing over 300 original content owners across Music, Movies, TV, Sport, Lifestyle content.

Hungama Mobile has now launched a Bollywood channel with over 150 operators in 37 countries on networks such as SingTel, Maxis, MTN, O2, Telis etc and also internet based services such as Apple iTunes, MSN Music, Yahoo! Music etc

Hungama are the owners of the three biggest entertainment portals in South Asia, Hungama.com and BollywoodHungama.com, The # 1 Bollywood portal in the world and GamingHungama.com

Hungama Mobile has an active Mobile Entertainment and Marketing/Applications business, which has been engaged with over 300 brands and developed over 1000 interactive campaigns.

Hungama has won over 60 awards in Digital Marketing, including 4 ABBY Golds, PMAA-Singapore and the Globes in Miami.

Neeraj was one of the founders of TiE in India and has been on the Board of TiE Mumbai chapter for several years. He is also an active speaker at various international forums and on several domestic and international committees advising on the global Mobile Entertainment opportunity.
 

Dr. Beth Coleman's work focuses on the role of human agency in the context of media and data engagement, she looks at the intersection of the public, the civic, and the poetic.

She is the Director of City as Platform/XRML, Amsterdam, and is currently a Harvard University Faculty Fellow at Berkman Center for Internet and Society and a visiting Professor at the Institute of Network Cultures, Hogeschool van Amsterdam.

From 2005-2011, Coleman has been a Professor of Comparative Media Studies at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she is the primary investigator of the Pervasive Media research and design lab.

As a visual artist and media designer, Coleman has a long history of international exhibitions in venues such as the Whitney Museum of American Art, P.S.1/MoMA, Musée D'art Moderne Paris, and the Waag Society Amsterdam. She is also the cofounder of SoundLab Cultural Alchemy, a formative x-media performance platform founded in 1994. Her text, audio, and digital artifacts have been published widely. Coleman's book Hello Avatar: Rise of the Networked Generation (MIT Press) looks at the mobile, real-time, post-web world we are building.

Fritz Demopoulos has been an entrepreneur and investor in the Chinese media and internet industries for over a decade.

Fritz is a founder of Qunar.com, China 's largest travel portal with over 40 mln monthly unique visitors and ventured-backed by Mayfield, Tenaya, GSR and Granite Global. This past July before leaving Qunar as CEO, Fritz sold a majority stake in Qunar to Baidu, making it the largest private transaction in the history of the Chinese internet. Qunar means "where are you going?" in mandarin Chinese.
 
Prior to Qunar, Fritz co-founded Shawei.com, China 's largest sports portal which means "brave shark" in Chinese.  After securing investment from Intel, Softbank and IDG, the company was profitably acquired by Tom.com.

Fritz was also the SVP of Corporate Development for Netease.com, one of China 's largest online game platforms and was the best performing equity on the NASDAQ exchange from 2001 to 2003.
 
He first came to China with the News Corporation at which he was responsible for a range of BD projects for News Corp businesses including Twentieth Century Fox, NDS, ChinaByte and STAR TV.

A native of Southern California, Fritz was educated at UCLA, Cal State Fullerton, the University of Heidelberg in Germany , and the Chinese University of Hong Kong . He has lectured frequently on entrepreneurship and the Chinese market at Stanford, Harvard, Tsinghua, Beijing University , UCLA and the Communist Party College in Nanjing .
 He is a supporter of the Arsenal Gunners of the English Premier League.

Kei is the Founder and CEO of Infinita Inc, a multinational mobile research, consulting and development firm located in the heart of Tokyo. His company is one of the very few companies in Japan that covers the 3 business areas all under one roof, consists of a multinational team and possesses in-depth working knowledge of the worlds most advanced mobile market. Their goal is to help clients across the globe create world-class services on connected devices.

Kei was born in New York and moved to Japan in the late 80's. After graduation, he has worked for Panasonic, Lucent Technologies and Cybird, all leading companies in their respective industries. Kei is fully bilingual in Japanese and English, and is a regular keynote at industry events such as the Mobile Marketing Forum (New York, Singapore), Ad:Tech (Tokyo), CommunicAsia (Singapore), Mobile 2.0 (Silicon Valley), Telecom Asia (Singapore) and has spoken in over a dozen countries around the globe.

His passions, aside from work, include playing tennis, snowboarding, travelling, cooking with his wife and collecting mobile devices from around the world. His collection includes the Magic Cap, first generation Sony Clie and Sharp Zaurus.

Infinita clients include Dentsu, DK, Docomo.com, Funai Electronics, IBM, Itochu, France Telecom, Mig33, NetBiscuits, Paypal, Samsung,  Softbank Mobile, Turkcell and many more.

Rubedo are an art practice and a think tank founded in London in 2005 by Dr Vesna Petresin Robert and Laurent Paul Robert who have collaborated since 1994.

Vesna trained in architectural engineering and fine art and earned her Ph.D. in 2002 for a dissertation on temporal aspects of composition in architecture, art and music.

She has worked as an artist, theorist, performer and designer.  Having produced international competitions that led to artists taking over military barracks across countries of Eastern Europe, she continued using broadcasting as a medium of radical theory, directing online actions and short TV programmes.  She also worked with Hypersurface Inc, an office for speculative architecture founded at Columbia GSAPP exploring digital design and manufacturing methods (The Moebius House, Hypersurface Interfacing, Hypersurface Architecture: The Age of Electronic Baroque), as well as with contemporary British artists Mark Wallinger and Jane & Louise Wilson.

An academic since 1997, Vesna developed multi-disciplinary courses and has lectured in architecture, visual theory, film and design, most recently at the University of the Arts London and at the University College London.  A research fellow to Cecil Balmond, the Deputy Chairman of Arup since 2003, she produced innovation strategies and co-curated the acclaimed exhibition The Frontiers of Architecture at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark, bridging aesthetics, engineering, acoustics and number theory.

Vesna is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

Her publications include Power Movement Multiplicity Transformation, Perception of Order and Ambiguity in Leonardo's Design Concepts, Solutions for a Sustainable City, Radicalising the Habitat, award-nominated Dimension of Time in Architectural Composition, and Colour in Visual Culture.  With Laurent-Paul Robert, she published Distructuring Utopias, The Double Moebius Strip, Trans_Form: Form Generation Using Particle Physics and Cybercity - an Urban Matrix of the Information Society.  With Cecil Balmond, she wrote Inform - a manifesto on emergent aesthetics, and is currently writing on Quantum Space and Sound.

About Rubedo

Research and Development
Combining experience in art, architecture, visual theory, music film, games, education, psychology, engineering and IT development, Rubedo also operate as a think-tank providing creative solutions.

Their research and development in adaptive environments, parametric modeling, digital manufacturing, acoustics and bionic design has contributed to patents and projects including Serpentine Gallery Pavilions, Ebbsfleet Landmark, Oscar-winning Hollywood films, AV midi devices and the world's first non-commercial satellite.

Artist Statement

The work of Rubedo crosses disciplinary boundaries, emerging as a single experience integrating sound, form, movement and narrative.

Using cutomised media - cross-modal networks, allows expressing the cross-modal synaesthetic nature of our senses.

The work takes arts outside the 'white cube' experience and explores sound in relation to space, time and user interaction.  It is supported by the technique of multimedia mapping, referred to as harmonography.

Rather than putting together a sum of specialist views, Rubedo aim at connecting senses, concepts and media.  Bridging a variety of disciplines allows us to resolve problems and express ideas at any scale.

Just as Renaissance thinkers were also artists and scientists bringing attention to universally shared humanistic values, so today, in the time after the digital revolution, the role of the artist may also be an innovator, philosopher, engineer, humanitarian and social reformer.

Rubedo have recently featured at Tate Modern, Vienna Secession (Vienna Art Week), Royal Academy of Arts (with Brian Eno and Tom Phillips RA), Royal Festival Hall (with Scanner), Casa da Musica, Venice Biennale, Beijing Biennale of Arcitecture, Cannes International Film Festival and the World Architecture Festival.

Laurent-Paul Robert is an artist, film director, photographer and musician.

From 1987 - 1992, he was part of the Swiss art group Graffichik, exhibiting and performing internationally. While also working in broadcasting, he began to use media as a means of radical theory, and was later mentored by the cult director Alejandro Jodorowsky.

He developed a practice in 3D animation in the and became lead art director and senior artist for computer games in 1995, collaborating with Moebius, Philippe Druillet and Paulo Coelho. He developed a 3D/4D and real-time technique for architectural visualisation and also designed the first artistic (non-commercial) satellite.
He has been a foresight and innovation consultant to Ove Arup and Partners, providing real-time technology solutions for iconic architectures such as the Serpentine Pavilion.

As technical director and lead artist, Laurent has created innovative visual effects for TV advertising with The Mill as well as Hollywood films produced by Warner Bros., Universal, 20th Century Fox and Dreamworks, with Double Negative; these films won a string of awards including Oscar, BAFTA, VES and Palme d’or.

Laurent-Paul Robert is also director of Rubedo, an art practice and a think tank he founded with Dr Vesna Petresin Robert in London in 2005.

Rubedo explore the relations between aesthetics, complex geometry, acoustics and synaesthesia, through performance, installation and artefact.

The work integrates sound, space, moving image and narrative using customised digital and analogue tools and trans-disciplinary methods. It takes art outside the ‘white cube’ experience and explores sound in relation to space, time and user interaction. Rubedo use their ‘harmonographic’ technique of mapping audio visual data networks, as well as composition methods based on aleatory, emergent patterns and particle fields.

Rubedo have recently featured at the Royal Academy of Arts, Royal Festival Hall, Casa da Musica, Venice Biennale, Beijing Biennale of Architecture, the Critics’ Selection at Cannes International Film Festival and Vienna Art Week.

Their combined experience in art, architecture, visual theory, music, film, games, education, psychology, engineering and IT, allowed Rubedo to pursue research and development in adaptive environments, parametric modeling, digital manufacturing and bionic design.

Ferhan Cook is the Co-founder and President of London based Any Screen Productions Ltd. She has 25 years of experience in multimedia, electronic publishing, interactive content and mobile entertainment.

Any Screen is an angel investor and an international business development partner to mobile technology companies. Any Screen also publishes MobiAd News, a popular Internet newsletter and website, with 60,000 monthly readers.Cook kicked off her career as the first international multimedia evangelist and (Newton) tablet publishing director at Apple Computer, where she worked for 11 years, in California and in Paris between 1983 and 1994. After Apple, she worked at Razorfish, a leading digital agency, as Vice President of Interactive Television & Broadband. 

Since 2003, Cook has been a strategic consultant as well as a designer and executive producer of cutting-edge digital events for the last 10 years, especially growing the MIPTV Digital Conferences, Mobile TV Awards, Content 360 Festival, in Cannes, France since 2000. She also programmed the PICNIC 09 Creative Festival in Amsterdam, and has been serving on international content juries such as the Interactive Emmys, Korean GMCA awards, and Mobile Entertainment Awards (MEFFYs) since 2003.

Cook is currently working on building digital creative and technical collaboration opportunities between Asia and Europe. She is the curator and programmer of a TEDx event to be launched in Istanbul in 2012, called TedxSilkRoad”, with the theme of Collaborative Creativity & Commerce, exploring the cultural, societal and global economic impact of mobile internet and the cross border collaboration and commerce that it enables.

Mike has an almost unrivalled  experience  in mobile content.  He managed the MUmobile business for Manchester United between 2004 and 2009 delivering many firsts and record breaking services in mobile, servicing fans whilst supporting the club’s wider commercial strategy. 

This included: Direct to  Consumer   services,   operator   portal   services,   subscription   services, mobile games and downloads,  early iPhone apps and the use of mobile to promote club products and services.

Previously  he  had  worked  for  Lucent  Technologies,  managing  Voicemail,  Text  and  messaging services and bids for full telephone networks. He then worked as Data Product Manager for one of the original 3GSM license winners before moving to Vodafone where he managed mobile content services such as mobile games, sports services, location based services and user experience for Blackberry and other devices. Many of the propositions and services he was developing are now commonplace in today’s smartphone world.

He set up MD Media Consulting in 2008 with the vision of helping brands and organisations maximise their mobile potential. He has since worked with a number of top football clubs and brands including Liverpool FC, Arsenal, Real Madrid, Vodafone, IGT/Barcrest. This has ranged from wider digital consultancy to assisting in delivering mobile service including distribution across Europe, Asia, Africa and  the  USA.  He  has  worked  with  many  of these  clubs  on delivering  some  of the  first  branded football iPhone Apps becoming the biggest grossing sports apps in the UK. He has also assists other brands with Smartphone App strategy and published No1 Apps in his own right.

Mike now also provides Masterclass and Mentoring services. He is a Business Graduate and an Associate of the CIM
 

Annika Lidne is one of the most well-known people in the social media, start up and Internet spheres in Sweden.  She the founder of Disruptive Media and an advisor to a number of large companies and organisations around digital business development, social media and online strategy. She is also a highly sought after and popular speaker on those subjects.

Annika has been working with the Internet since 1994 as well as working in the advertising, journalism, film production and the music industries. She founded her first company in 1995 and in her long and varied career as an agency co-founder and CEO, managing director of the world's oldest newspaper that is still in publication, co-founder of the the internet-based legal news service PointLex and managing director for a business information agency. She has been working within digital business development, social media and online strategy in her own company since 2006. Since 2007, Annika has organized Scandinavia's foremost meeting place for social media - the Disruptive Media Conferences. She is also the founder of Stockholm Social Media Club and Dramatify.

Currently Annika works as a consultant and mentor, she seeks for a new startup that is still in the very early stage, as well as co-writing a book on disruption and business evolution entitled The Disruptive Leap.

Certified Future Strategist and Experienced Mobile Entrepreneur, with track-records in both sectors.

Trond graduated from the Norwegian School of Management (BI) and University of Greenwich (London) with a Masters in Marketing Science, before joining the Advertising Industry (1993).  He later formed a trend spotting lab, Fishnet, and future strategy firm, Future Rewind (1997). 

Trond has developed scenario-based strategy projects for clients like Tetra Pak, Posten, DnbNor Telenor, and the Norwegian Government Department of Education - which resulted in the book Scenario.edu (2000)

The 1998 scenario project for Telenor about "How 3G will impact people´s everyday life in 2010" kick-started a path as Founder, CEO and investor in various Mobile initiatives, resulting in credentials such as 2005 - Social Network Millionaire, 2007 - Awarded IDG Entrepreneur of the Year 2007 and 2009, Golden Mobile Awards nominee 2007, 2008, 2009 and 2010, Dragon´s Den Winner 2009, and Retail Awards winner 2010.

Today Trond is combining his Future Strategist and Mobile Entrepreneur experience as management consultant for hire.

Trond is an owner / board member in the following companies where LBS is central: Superlocal, Lociloci, Manna från himlen and The Mobile Life.
 

Jason Van Anden’s expertise spans disciplines and industries including consumer facing mobile, robotics, music, fine art and video games. He brings a creative edge and unique visual sensibility to the technologies he develops. His clients include some of the most recognized brands in the world as well as some that are sure to join their ranks.

He blends an artistic vision with the elegance of engineering and software architecture to produce an array of technology oriented products including human scale emotive robots, visual mobile music management software and machines that quantify beauty. His creations are used in industry, exhibited in institutions worldwide and enjoyed by consumers.

Van Anden’s work has been touted in a publications such as Wired magazine and USA Today, who compared his video game Farklempt!, to the Sims, stating that "You will not see another game like this one for many a day, we suspect, unless someone finds a way to squeeze a copy of The Sims until the pure essence comes out." Van Anden has also published a scholarly explication of his interactive robots in the MIT journal Leonardo. He recently exhibited his tech art at the San Jose Museum of Art.

He is the founder of two startups, BubbleBeats, a visual music management system that allows users create endless graphics based playlists. He is presently working on a new micro-network app, Tethrd, a new twist on location based social networking, focusing on the creation of intimate mobile and location-based relationships.

Jason is an active participant in the NYC entrepreneurial community where he is currently a Resident Technologist at the Entrepreneurs' Roundtable Accelerator. He lives and invents in Brooklyn, NY.

TAT is a group of designers and developers within Research in Motion who are famous for designing and developing visionary user interfaces.

Dan works within the innovation team that created the prototypes and design visions that used to be TAT’s marketing material. Today, the videos on the TAT YouTube channel have been viewed millions of times and have inspired people both within and outside the tech world. By combining design and storytelling, Dan has helped bring visions of digital trompe l’oeil graphics, 2D-to-3D transitions and face recognition concepts to the masses.

With more than 12 years’ experience in concept and interaction design, Dan has worked with everything from digital pens to audio-based computer games. Today, he continues to make up and mock up futuristic user interfaces together with the TAT team at Research In Motion.

Johan's background is in media, design and the marketing industry where he has served as the CEO for several companies. Johan is also one of the founders and board members for the World Internet Institute which is conducting research on the use and impact of digital communication technologies on people and society.

The World Internet Project conducts over 60.000 interviews in some 30 countries around the world every year to gain knowledge about the effects and use of Internet. Johan was recently appointed “European Cluster Manager of the year”, by the European Union.