Here is a list of speakers in agenda order:

James Pearce, Vice President of Technology, dotMobi

James Pearce is Vice President of Technology at dotMobi, where he is responsible for domain name technologies, content tools, the company’s developer community and applicable open standards. He brings more than 10 years of experience in the mobile technology sector to the dotMobi team. In addition to his work on ensuring the quality of content, Pearce is a mobile standards expert and has worked with a number of standards bodies, including the W3C Mobile Web Best Practices Working Group, which aims to bring a better mobile Internet experience to consumers.

Prior to dotMobi, Pearce served as CTO at Argogroup, a position he held following the 2001 acquisition of AnywhereYouGo.com, a top destination for mobile developers. While at Argogroup, Pearce specialized in user experience optimization for mobile and converged applications. He assisted mobile operators, handset manufacturers and content providers in testing, monitoring and developing their applications and services to improve the quality of the mobile experience. At AnywhereYouGo.com, Pearce launched the Wireless Internet Lab, a professional services environment that allowed mobile developers to test and validate their mobile applications before launching.

Pearce has a Masters degree with Honors in Physics from the University of Oxford.

Claudia Backus, Director, Ecosystem, Motorola, Inc.

Claudia Backus leads Motorola’s global Ecosystem team responsible for developer outreach, the MOTODEV program, business development and software operations. Prior to joining Motorola, Claudia held marketing and product management positions in leading technology companies including Palm, TiVo, eBay, Creative Labs, and Cybermedia. At Palm, her team was responsible for solutions product marketing, market development, and the Palm PluggedIn Developer Program.

Thibaut Rouffineau, Director of Developer Engagements, Symbian

Thibaut leads Symbian’s engagements with the Symbian developer community through the Symbian Academy, and the Symbian Affiliate programs. Prior to this, he was in charge of the relationship with the Eclipse and developer tools community. Thibaut joined Symbian in 2005 and before that worked for 5 years as a product and partner manager in the Telecom and Telecom software industry.

Steve Glagow, VP of Marketing Operations, Orange

As VP of Marketing Operations, Orange, Steve Glagow is responsible for three areas within Orange: Commercial Operations, Project Management and Implementation, and Orange Partner.

Orange Partner is a dedicated global programme for existing and potential partners of Orange and the France Telecom group, helping them provide compelling products and services using the Orange network and devices. The programme offers free tools and information required to build solutions that satisfy the requirements of a 100 million-plus customer base across the globe. Over 55,000 members of the programme are supported with free development tools, information, testing and signing, on-line support, and access to the Orange Partner global development centres.

Steve joined Orange in December 2003 from Hewlett-Packard where he was director of software developer programmes. His background is predominantly in the marketing, technical and communications area with senior roles at: Coopers & Lybrand (director of strategic business services), Digital Equipment (director of marketing), Sequent Computer Systems (director of telecommunications), Silicon Graphics (director of marketing for telecommunication and media), and Bluestone, which was later acquired by HP, (VP of international marketing operations).

Steve sits on the board of directors of EEMA, a European Commerce and Security Association and also on the board of ISUG, the international Sybase User Group.

Mikael Nerde, Head of Accessory and Developer Programs, Sony Ericsson

Mikael has been with Sony Ericsson since its inception in October 2001 and is Director of Sony Ericsson Application Acquisition and Content Planning, heading up the global application acquisition team with the aim to license world class applications for all mobile phones categories from selected providers. As director of Content Planning Mikael’s key areas of responsibilities include developing the strategy and framework for all pre-loaded content across the Sony Ericsson portfolio.

Mikael also headed the Sony Ericsson Developer World program for several years, which is the top-ranked online developer resource and global developer support community. Mikael’s key focus was to reinforce a framework with long-term strategic partnerships offering the serious developer technical services, support and business opportunities. Mikael was responsible for designing a program which offers a rich set of resources to assist software developers, mobile network operators, content creators and aggregators as well as enterprises world-wide. As a result of his tenure and his vision for this program, Sony Ericsson is recognized for its industry leadership and expertise in Java ME, Mobile Java 3D and UIQ.

At Sony Ericsson, Mikael has been instrumental in defining and creating a platform for developers which allows the Sony Ericsson Developer World members to efficiently and conveniently create applications and content that target mobile phones users with minimal effort and maximum profit potential. Mikael is also one of the driving forces behind designing and executing the overall application and content strategy for Sony Ericsson.

Mikael speaks regularly at mobile content and telecommunications industry events, he most recently participated at the Consumer Electronics Show, where he talked about the challenges and opportunities with pre-loaded content and applications with a major phone manufacturer. Other recent industry conference participation includes presentations at the Game Developer Conference, Symbian Smartphone Show and more.

Amy Bang, Senior Marketing Manager, devCentral (AT&T)

Amy Bang is the Senior Marketing Manager responsible for devCentral, the AT&T Developer Program http://developer.att.com. She is passionate about building community and creating programs that enable developers with their wireless development and go-to-market efforts. Previously, she had similar responsibilities at Microsoft on the Visual Studio Industry Partner “VSIP” program.

Vincent Berge, Co-founder and General Manager, Mobile Distillery

About Mobile OS and Platforms:

Facing the ever growing device and platform fragmentation (soon Android, IPhone, and others), the productivity curve of any Mobile application developer is a challenge, along the ROI. Come and discover how Customers of Mobile Distillery’s – Mobile application developers – gain great Productivity in the Development/Porting/Testing phases, for building Java & Brew applications across 750 handsets. Ideally positioned for Prototyping, Automatic Porting, and rapid development cycle on top of SUN Netbeans’ IDE, awarded Mobile Distillery’s Celsius platform brings most of pain for Mobile Development away, by developing for virtual handsets with ONE source code only ! The Mobile Productivity suite of tools includes Advanced Resource management, Advanced connectivity -handling Phone configuration errors-, Advanced Bluetooth & NFC fragmentation, and others, in addition with an easy access of Device feature database for Profiling - over 700 features and behaviors are available per phone. With all these tools, Mobile developers remain focused on Creativity, not Porting !

 

Jai Jaisimha, Vice President, Mobile Technology and Product Development, AOL

Jai Jaisimha is Vice President of Mobile Technology and Product Development at AOL, LLC, a Time Warner Company. At AOL, Jaisimha is responsible for all aspects of software development for AOL’s mobile products including Mobile AIM and AOL’s global WAP portal products. Jaisimha comes to AOL with more than 17 years of software development and management experience. Prior to AOL, Jaisimha was Vice President of Product Development for Medio Systems, a pioneer in the Mobile Search and Advertising space. While at Medio, Jai oversaw development teams that created and deployed industry leading text and voice-enabled search and advertising solutions for Verizon Wireless, T-Mobile USA, T-Mobile International, Telus Mobility, Sprint and others.

From 2003 to 2005, while at Microsoft, he was involved in connectivity solutions development for the portable digital media device market, including handsets, for the Windows desktop OS. He was also responsible for a new line of business, which included solutions for Windows Media nomadic devices in the automotive space. Working with Nokia and other mobile terminal vendors, as well as a variety of automotive OEMs and suppliers he deployed Windows Media DRM, codec and connectivity technologies.

As founder of ContentTone Systems, Jaisimha oversaw a startup focused on personalization and recommendation system technology, improving the premium-content commerce experience on mobile phones. During his more than five years at RealNetworks, Jaisimha led the company’s entry into several new product lines focused on the embedded device, digital music and service infrastructure markets, including RealJukebox, RealServer, RealEncoder, and embedded versions of the RealPlayer product.

For his research in multimedia content management and databases, document filtering and information retrieval at MathSoft, Inc. (now Insightful, Inc.), Jaisimha received research awards and grants from the U.S. Department of Defense, National Security Agency, National Institutes of Health, NASA and the NSF. Jaisimha has a bachelor’s degree in Electronics and Communications from the Indian Institute of Technology, an MS in Electrical Engineering from Tulane University, New Orleans and a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Washington, Seattle.

Vince Laviano, Director of Engineering for Client Development, CellSpin Soft, Inc

Vince Laviano is a co-founder of CellSpin Soft, Inc., where he leads the mobile client team. He has over 10 years of computer industry experience at Cisco, the Stanford Distributed Systems Group, and the GMU Networking and Simulation Lab. He holds graduate Computer Science degrees from George Mason University and Stanford University. He has published papers in the areas of distributed interactive simulation, IP multicast, and distributed filesystems.

Santtu Toivonen, Senior Consultant, Market Analysis, Idean

Santtu Toivonen recently joined Idean from VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, where he worked as a senior research scientist. Toivonen acquired his MA degree from the University of Helsinki in 1999 majoring in Cognitive Science. He has continued in the same field with post-graduate studies concentrating on the topic of supporting people’s everyday cognitive tasks with context-aware systems and applications. In 2003 Toivonen spent seven months as a visiting researcher at Stanford University in California. Topics among his professional interests include social media, context awareness, crowdsourcing, user experience, and the Semantic Web. See his 2007 report “Web on the Move” at http://www.vtt.fi/inf/pdf/tiedotteet/2007/T2403.pdf

Sean O’Sullivan, CTO, mySay and Rococo Software

As the CTO of mySay, Sean drives the company’s technical strategy and vision. Before founding mySay, he founded Rococo Software, a world leader in Java/Bluetooth technology, whose software now ships on over 100M mobile phones. From a technical perspective, his interests are distributed systems and the space where the web meets the plain old telephony system.

Bill Scott, VP Sales & Business Development, GetJar

Bill Scott has been involved in the mobile data industry since 2000, when he took responsibility for Infospace’s operations in Latin America. There he launched the first ASP mobile content/application portals in the region. Subsequently Bill held VP Latin America positions for Critical Path, HandsOn Mobile, and Openwave.

In 2007, Bill moved to Europe as VP Sales & Business Development for GetJar Networks Ltd. He is responsible for building relationships and launching new services for mobile developers and mobile operators.

Bill has a BA in Philosophy from Amherst College and an MBA from Harvard.

“GetJar believes in the Wikipedia approach to mobile application development. That is, once a beta version is developed, the beta testing community tests it, and it’s fixed; then when public gets it, they comment, and it’s fixed again. This iterative cycle though various versions of an application leads to the most successful user experience. The community approach can either be an alternative to the commercial approach, or complementary.”

Paul Poutanen, President, Mob4hire Inc

Paul Poutanen is president of Mob4hire Inc. and has been involved in the wireless space for almost 14 years. He is past president of Blister Entertainment where he developed and distributed the first location based (GPS) mobile games in North America. Paul is a professional engineer. Mob4hire is Crowd Sourced Mobile Application Testing. www.mob4hire.com

Opinion on Testing of Mobile Applications

Testing of mobile applications is difficult. You need time, money, patience and good people. There are over 7500 different handsets worldwide on 700 carriers. Each handset has its own porting difficulties and debugging can be tough. It is sometimes very difficult to get handsets. It is costly to get subscriptions in the CDMA world and the people used to test often suffer from tester bias. Each carrier can be very different in the software they load over the OS on the handset. Tester travel costs can increase because a network application needs to be tested on the network they are intended to sell to. Location based applications add their own special blend of difficulties.

David J. Marsyla, CTO & Co-Founder, Mobile Complete

David is Mobile Complete’s co-founder and Chief Technology Officer. A hands-on CTO who also maintains a deep understanding of the challenges and opportunities in the mobile industry, David is the technical mastermind behind Mobile Complete’s innovative approach to mobile handset testing. He has more than 15 years of technology architecture, management, and implementation experience, with seven of those in business and technology strategy in the mobile space.

Prior to founding Mobile Complete, David was the Chief Architect at Brience, a mobile applications company, where he was responsible for the design and implementation of Brience’s market-leading mobile server platform. Prior to Brience, David founded “Market Shark,” a provider of online stock portfolio management for active stock traders and personally created the technical analysis solutions for the firm. Previously, David held various leadership and technical positions at Informix Software, Microsoft and Cray Research. David holds a BS in Computer Science with an emphasis on Electrical Engineering from the University of Minnesota. He enjoys sailing and long bike rides.

Peter Baldwin, VP Strategic Marketing, Cellmania

Peter has a distinguished track record as a mobile pioneer with over 25 years of experience in Mobile Enabling Technology. Recently became VP Strategic Marketing at Cellmania when MSX was acquired in January 2008. At Cellmania, Peter is responsible for marketing and strategic partnering. Peter started MSX and built the company into a leader in the Mobile Subscriber Experience marketplace. Before founding MSX, Peter was the executive vice president of operations at Insignia Solutions (INSG), responsible for repositioning the company as the leading mobile technology vendor, starting the end to end system provisioning business and divesting the loss making Java Virtual machine product line. While at Phoenix Technologies (PTEC), Peter was the vice president responsible for growing the emerging businesses, including the Phoenix Information Appliance Division. From 1986 to 1994, Peter was founder and director of Distributed Information Processing Limited (DIP) who designed revolutionary software for the very first Pocket PCs for companies such as Atari and Sharp. Prior to DIP, Peter was one of the first employees of Psion Limited, Europe’s leading handheld manufacturer and lead shareholder of Symbian.

Chetan Sharma, President, Chetan Sharma Consulting

Chetan Sharma is one of the leading strategists in the mobile industry. He has served as an advisor to senior executive management of several Fortune 100 companies in the wireless space. Some of his clients include NTT DoCoMo, China Mobile, Disney, KTF, Sony, Samsung, Alcatel Lucent, KDDI, Virgin Mobile, Sprint Nextel, AT&T Wireless, Qualcomm, Reliance, SAP, Merrill Lynch, American Express, and HP.

Chetan is the author of five books on the mobile industry including the two being released in 2008 – Mobile Advertising (John Wiley) and Wireless Broadband Technology: Conflict and Convergence (IEEE Press). Chetan is interviewed frequently by leading international media publications such as Time, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, BusinessWeek, and GigaOM, and has appeared on NPR and CNBC as a wireless data technology expert.

Chetan is a sought-after strategist on IP matters in the wireless industry. He has advised clients with some of the biggest patent portfolios in the world and has worked with players across the wireless value chain. He has been retained as an expert witness and advisor for some of the most prominent legal matters in front of the International Trade Commission (ITC) including Qualcomm vs. Broadcom and Ericsson vs. Samsung.

Chetan is an advisor to CEOs and CTOs of some of the leading wireless technology companies. Chetan is a senior member of IEEE, IEEE Communications Society, and IEEE Computers Society. Chetan has MS from Kansas State University and BS from the Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee.

John Phillips,VP of Business Development, Astraware

John is a premier developer and publisher of award-winning games and entertainment software across a range of smartphone platforms including Windows Mobile, mobile Linux, and Symbian UIQ and S60. Prior to his move to Business Development, John was in charge of the company’s Marketing and PR functions, having joined Astraware from the marketing department at Game (Stores) Ltd, the UK’s largest dedicated video games retailer.

Raised in the North West of England, John attended Manchester University and gained a First Class Honors Degree in English Language. Before settling in Marketing and Business Development, John had a varied career path which included time as a freelance Radio Journalist, and several months at Europe’s Premier Leisure Park where amongst other roles he performed daily in a giant dog suit!

Opinion on Getting to Market/Channels

As mobile developers we are all aware of the major, big-money routes to market but have you ever thought there may be another way, a third way if you will. A route that requires no carriers, no aggregators, no distributors and not even a pair of “ACME Rocket Skates”", all it takes is some server space, some web skills, a smattering of ingenuity, lots of hard work and some really good friends.

Of course it also requires a great product in the first place, but once you have that, plus a sprinkling of the requirements listed above, you will not only have a successful product, you will also have the carriers, the aggregators and the distributors knocking on YOUR door… how… let’s talk about it.

Stanley Kao, Aplix

Stan is the technical lead on shared libraries and application life-cycle management for MIDP 3.0. He has a wide range of experience on all aspects of mobile application development. Before working for Aplix, he worked for HI/Mascot Capsule, a Japanese company specializing in 3D graphics engines for mobile devices. There he worked on the Mobile 3D Graphics API (JSR 184) implementation for Motorola iDEN devices and on the BREW platform. He has experience in application development in BREW and Java ME as well as in middle-ware implementation for various mobile development platforms. With his vast experience, he will be able to provide insights to discussions in this area.

Asokan Thiyagarajan, Technology Evangelist, Motorola

Asokan Thiyagarajan serves as a technology evangelist at the Ecosystem & Market Development team of Motorola. As an evangelist, he is responsible for recommending strategies to address market and technology trends as well as strategic alliances with key developers. He is a respected speaker at international conferences on technology. He authors technology and visionary articles for leading magazines around the world.

Asokan has over 18 years of international experience in high technology sectors, developing software and communication systems. Asokan has skills blended in technology, business, engineering and management, and is very effective in Technology Management.

Prior to Motorola, Asokan held a variety of senior development, operations and strategic management positions at companies such as Nokia, Ericsson and Compaq (HP). He also has entrepreneurial experience, having co-founded a technology company.

Asokan holds a Bachelors Degree in Computer Science, from Madurai University, India.

Greg Gamp, Senior Solutions Engineer, Funambol, Inc.

Greg Gamp is a Senior Solutions Engineer for Funambol, Inc., the leading mobile open source project with two million downloads and 40,000 contributors around the world. Greg works with a diverse variety of users, ranging from Global 100 companies to open source developers, helping them with their technical mobile challenges, architectures and deployments. He is well versed in all aspects of Funambol’s commercial and open source technology that supports 1.5 billion mobile handsets.

Prior to Funambol, Greg has extensive technical experience in the mobile industry and tech startups. He previously worked at Visto, a pioneer of mobile email for enterprises, as well as several other start-ups in Silicon Valley. He started his professional career on the business side of things but then found that working in tech start-ups was a lot more fun. He’s been working at Funambol for two years and according to Greg, Funambol starts with fun and the fun has not stopped yet.

Opinion on Open Source in Handsets

What is the real potential and role that open source software can play on mobile handsets? The industry has seen a number of developments, from SyncML (OMA DS) that is built into one billion phones and is an open standard, to Google Android, which is a complete open source mobile software stack. In between, there are various shades and flavors of open source software, from open source handsets, such as OpenMoko; operating systems, such as the different versions of Mobile Linux; frameworks, such as TrollTech; and applications, such as Funambol’s open source Java ME (also called JAM, coincidentally) push email client for mass market handsets. There are also many open source developers working on mobile projects for new devices such as the iPhone. There are many issues related to open source on mobile handsets, principally among them getting a critical mass of a development community behind a platform to make it meaningful, getting certified to work on mobile devices and networks to make for a good user experience and security issues. I look forward to discussing these topics and others at this Mobile JAM session.