Martin Stiksel

Martin Stiksel is founder of Last.fm, an Internet radio station and music recommendation system. Last.fm is one of the worldwide largest Online Communities, such as MySpace or Facebook. The system builds a detailed profile of each user’s musical taste, showing their favourite artists and songs on a customizable profile webpage, comprising the songs played on its stations selected via a collaborative filter, or optionally, recorded by a Last.fm plugin installed into its users’ music playing application.

Last.fm received funding from Index Ventures, a European venture capital firm with a record of backing such Internet companies as Betfair and Skype.

Last.fm’s music catalog recognizes over 40 million unique tracks. Last.fm is committed to promoting new and unsigned music and currently has more than 8,000 independent artists and music labels using Last.fm. In contrast to many sites and services with the objective of helping customers find new music, Last.fm does not use editorial content. Due to the sheer amount of people using the service, Last.fm’s music data is far superior to the amount of knowledge that any music journalist could come up with claims Mr. Stiksel, who used to be a music writer and DJ himself.

Last.fm has received multiple international Awards.

Simon Willison

Developer at Yahoo! Technology Development team and responsible for the Yahoo! User-Interface Library (Open Source AJAX) and Yahoo! Web Services API, which allows for programmatic access to Yahoo! services, such as Flickr photo sharing, Delicious Bookmarks, Yahoo! Search and Maps.

Simon is the co-founder of the Web Application Framework Django, a Web 2.0 application framework used mostly for professional news organizations – Washington Post, Toronto Life, World Online, Scripps Media Group. Guido van Rossum, inventor of the Python programming language and engineer at Google, calls Django his favourite Web 2.0 application framework.

Simon is an experienced client- and server-side developer (Javascript libraries, Python, CSS, PHP) and maintains a well-known technical weblog, which many consider to be in the top 100 of blogs.

Joachim Graf

Joachim Graf is CEO of HighText Publishing, publisher of iBusiness and Speaker of the Board of FIWM (Munich Network for IT & Media), Munich. Since 1991 the Hightext Publishing Group publishes corporate services, case studies, and diverse information studies. With over 130.000 registered users Hightext is one of the largest specialized information services focused on companies operating in the triangle of technology, media and strategy.

Mr. Graf worked as Configuration Control Manager at the “Deutsche Forschungs- und Versuchsanstalt für Luft- und Raumfahrt” (DLR). In 1998 he joined the magazine “Happy Computer” und later was responsible as Editor in Chief. He also managed the German Jouth Press Operative (Deutsche Jugendpresse e.V.).

Herr Graf studied sociology and political science at University of Munich. He writes books about computer use and is a lecturer at the University of Applied Sciences Offenburg and Bielefeld in Germany.

Genevieve Kunst

Genevieve Kunst is Amazon’s European Head of Business Development for Digital Media, responsible for publisher relationships in the area of digital text, driving such initiatives as Search Inside The Book!, Amazon’s online browse and full-text book search offering, as well as other digital text initiatives being developed for the European market.

An American, Genevieve has been with Amazon since 2005 and has spent the last 7 years working in Germany and the UK in the Media, Telecom and Internet sectors for companies such as Bertelsmann and T-Mobile. Prior to that, Genevieve was a management consultant at A.T. Kearney.

Genevieve holds a MBA from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, as well as a Master of Arts in International Studies from The Lauder Institute at the University of Pennsylvania.

Ernst Hecht

Ernst Hecht is the legal director at GEMA in the Department Industry & Multimedia, responsible for contract law and a specialty in Internet law. GEMA is Europe’s largest music-rights organization. At University of Erlangen, Germany, he studied law and later received his Masters of Law (LL.M.) at University of Sydney. He has gained experience as an attorney, primarily concerned with Internet law since 1995. He had been an advisor for well-known Internet service providers. Since 2000 Mr. Hecht working for GEMA.

John Buckman

John Buckman, CEO and Founder, Magnatune. In May 2003, John Buckman launched an independent, profitable online record label Magnatune, with the motto "We are not evil". Magnatune selects its own artists, sells its catalog of music through online downloads and print-on-demand CDs and licenses music for commercial and non-commercial use.

Frustrated by the music industry’s unfair treatment of artists, Buckman decided to create Magnatune as an artist-friendly record label that shares profits equally with musicians and allows them to retain the rights to their work. Magnatune has successfully used Creative Commons and Open Source principles to establish a new kind of business model for the music industry.

Prior to founding Magnatune, Buckman founded Lyris Technologies in 1994. Lyris sells software for email newsletters and spam prevention. The company was generating $12m in annual revenues when Buckman sold it in 2005. Previous employment includes The Discovery Channel and The Academy for Advanced and Strategic Studies in Washington, D.C.

Steve Turnidge

Steve is a founder of and chief evangelist for Weedshare – a digital media distribution sytem. Weedshare allows content producers to hand out their media on a trial basis! Customers can try out files in a secure way up to 3 times in full length, before being asked to purchase files. The ecommerce function is embedded within the “weedified” file itself. Their great idea is to reward people, who recommend files to their friends, by including them with a percentage on final sales. Thereby, customer recommendations become part of marketing operations.

Steve Turnidge has a wide ranging career in the audio field and wears several hats. He has 20 years in the Pro Audio electronics industry specializing in mixed digital and analog circuit PCB design (with a specialty in FireWire designs). Steve is also a noted mastering engineer at Ultraviolet Studios with dozens of albums and thousands of licensed music tracks to his credit. In addition to being the Vice-Chairman of the PNW Section AES committee Steve is a voting member of the Recording Academy. Found out more about him on this weblog – Arsdivina

Tom Dyson

Tom is a founder of and Technical Director at Torchbox, a UK-based software company which builds online tools for socially progressive organisations. His work takes in large-scale content management, combining XML, relational databases and full-text analysis.

Tom’s technical interests include localhost web servers, lightweight publishing, natural language processing in social software contexts. Recent projects include an email-to-RSS web service, a ‘live’ web stats analyser, a MySpace parser and Dolphy, a forthcoming full-text search engine in Python. His past work with John Gray on XML functionality for PostgreSQL, provides developers with the most advanced XML capabilities of any open-source RDBMS.

Tom graduated from Balliol College, Oxford, in 1995. He keeps an occasional blog at throwingbeans.org.

Björn Behrendt // Berlin

Björn Behrendt is Senior Manager Platform Solutions at eBay GmbH in Berlin. He is responsible for the developer program and the Ecommerce API Interface at eBay Germany.

Mr. Behrendt studied at the University Hamburg and in parallel he lead the student consultancy “Hanseatic Consulting”. During that time he also founded the Startup “Everseven” shortly before the bubble burst. He went on to work for KPMG Consulting in systems integration for transaction banks. Today he works as Senior Manager Platform Solutions for eBay Germany.

Christian Ehl

Christian Ehl is CEO and Owner of Hillert und Co. Interactive und Mobile Marketing GmbH. The integrated ad agency works for clients like BMW, MINI, Microsoft, Oracle, T-Systems, Gore with focus on developing international, cross-media campaigns. Main focus are digital media and mobile marketing strategies and campaigns.

Christian is a digital media specialist from the beginning. At the chip manufacturer Intel, Christian was responsible for E-Business strategies and has thorough experience in gaming and the entertainment market. In addition Christian was CEO at the Internet agency Virtual Identity and CEO of the Internet start-up alltoys. Christian hold a degree in Electrical Engineering at the Technical University of Munich and an MBA of Wake Forrest University, SC, USA.

Horst Weidenmüller

The record label !K7 was founded as a music TV production company in 1985, working on festival documentaries and live videos of bands. 1992 saw the release of the first X-Mix Edition; the idea being to release digital video clips along with specially mixed DJ sets. In total, !K7 produced approx 2000 computer animated video clips with it’s international team of computer artists – a unique documentation about the development of electronic art. !K7 launched the DJ-Kicks series in 1993 (described as “the Rolls Royce of DJ mix compilations”). The label currently enjoys a global network of offices offering a local presence in all key markets, and employs 25 staff with offices in Berlin, Hamburg, London, New York City and Sydney.

!K7 opened its own distribution company in the US, Studio Distribution, distributing 35 labels with a staff of 35. It is the only specialized electronic and dance music distributor in the US that has full access into all chain stores. Under the Rapster/BBE brand, international urban artists like Pete Rock, DJ Jazzy Jeff, King Britt and a.m.n. are signing their world wide rights to !K7 and enjoying Top 2OO US-Billboard chart positions.

Horst is a Board member of Impala and was invited to joint Popkomm’s advisory board, of which he is now Chairman. He is on the committee of AIM Digital UK and was involved in the launch of the initiative respect the music copy protection .

Umair Haque

Umair Haque is Bubblegeneration’s Principal – an innovative Internet Strategy Consultancy. Umair studied neuroscience at McGill, did an MBA and econ/strategy research with Gary Hamel at London Business School in 2003, and began working towards a PhD in strategy and innovation at Oxford in 2004. Umair has spent time working in finance/economics, at a KP startup, and as a strategy consultant. Recently, he put his postgraduate work on hold to pursue Bubblegen full time.

Werner Starz

Werner Starz is Director for Marketing & Communication at Eurosport in Munich. Eurosport has differentiated itself with their web portal in the sports media scene. Especially their streaming service of video sports-content over the web is one of Eurosport’s innovations.

Werner is an experienced veteran of the Munich media scene and has a M.A. in Communication Studies from the University of Munich.

Ibrahim Evsan

Ibrahim Evsan, CEO of Sevenload GmbH , the Web 2.0 pioneer of video and photo-sharing sites in Germany.

Ibrahim has been toying for years with the idea of video on demand. During his education as an advertising buyer he started his first company. In 2000 he was project manager at RWE AG for the project “video on demand through power grids” (Internet from the socket).

In 2005 he developed the concept of a photo and video-community using Web 2.0 building blocks. In April 2006 the platform sevenload went Online and already has visitor frequencies of 10 million pageviews per month.

Andy Bell

Andy founded Mint Digital in 2004 with the goal of creating interactive media that fuses the participation of the web with the buzz of TV. Mint’s philosophy is encapsulated by the tagline ‘Unmute your audience’. Mint believes there is a market opportunity for web firms that develop content ideas with as much rigour as TV/ advertisers. Mint’s first commission is ‘Buried Alive’, an innovative web/TV format, which takes an entertaining new approach to the BBC archive and won a BBC Content 360 Award.

Building on the experience and expertise with user-generated content, Mint is launching BloomBox.tv, a reskinnable software application that allows publishers, broadcasters and advertisers to create and deploy best-of-breed user-generated formats with a minimum of technical hassle.

Andy has a B.Sc. (1st Class) in Economics and an M.Sc. in Computer Science. From 1999 to 2004 Andy was Head of RDF Interactive, producing over 25 projects for Channel 4, ITV, Discovery Communications and for RDF. Andy’s economics background, coupled with 7 years at a highly successful TV company gives him a feel for the internet as a media platform.

Chris Dumke

Chris is Principal at Mergd Consulting. He started Mergd in 2003 as an Internet development and consulting company. Previously, as a Search Engineer at Definiens AG in Munich, he constructed a large financial ontology called EconomyNet for the Question-Answering System PolyMind together with Dr. Juergen Klenk, presenting to company founder Nobel laureate Prof. Gerd Binnig.

Chris is known in the Munich media scene for starting Blockbeat Music, an online music portal in 1999. He has also gathered extensive experience as a statistical research assistant for Prof. Dalia Marin at University of Munich from 1999-2002, working on the largest European survey of foreign direct investment in Eastern Europe. Chris has his B.A. in Economics from University of Munich and is currently pursuing a Masters degree at University of Waterloo, Canada.

Chris is an organizer of the Media in Transition Conference and contributor to several Internet related projects. He likes technologies, such as Ruby on Rails, Django, XML and AJAX.

Matthias Köhler

Matthias Köhler started Oszillation Records and Studios Munich, an Online Musiclabel and Media Distribution company in 1999. The goal is to create a portal for niche interests in music and video and use the interactive nature of the web to create community based content.

Oszillation extended it’s reach in the years between 2001 and 2005, partnering with iTunes, eMusic, Rapsody and other distro services on the web, and can now offer producers and customers the access to a truly global media pipeline. Further, Oszillation teamed up with the technology behind Weedshare Shared Media Licensing and created a top download platform for media files – Weedis, offering a new way to market into P2P networks.

His productions “Impulse”, “Postal Delivery” and “India Roots” got top 10 rankings on international music download sites. He created filmmusic for documentaries and the German TV series “Tatort” (the popular TV police series), and around 25 released albums and singles.

Matthias has a B.Sc. in Economics and IT from the University of Augsburg, Germany, and a classical training as a pianist, including music theory and composition. He is an expert with studio technology and audio recording gear. Further, he has gained extensive experience at Oracle Headquarter Central Europe, Creative Labs and ARRI Headquarter. Matthias is the organizer of the Media in Transition Conference 2006.