Martin Stiksel // London

Martin Stiksel is founder of Last.fm, – “The Social Music Revolution”, the most successful European Web 2.0 Community and also worldwide one of the largest, with about 20 million users and a monthly growth of 20%. Last.fm was sold to CBS for 280 million USD in May 2007. 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 has received multiple international Awards.

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.

Prof. Dr. Karlheinz Brandenburg // Ilmenau

Prof. Dr. Karlheinz Brandenburg has been the inventor and driving force behind some of today’s most innovative digital audio technology, notably the audio compression format MPEG Audio Layer 3, more commonly known as MP3. These methods form the basis of today’s leading audio/video compression and distribution technologies.

He received a Dipl. Ing. degree from Erlangen University in Electrical Engineering (1980) as well as a Dipl. Math. degree in Mathematics (1982). In 1989 he obtained his Ph.D. from the Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg in Electrical Engineering for his work on digital audio coding and perceptual measurement techniques. The research results of his dissertation are the basis of MPEG-1 Layer 3 (mp3), MPEG-2 Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) and most other modern audio compression schemes. During his time with AT&T Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, USA from 1989 to 1990 he was working on ASPEC and MPEG-1 Layer 3. In 1990 he returned to the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg to accomplish further research within the field of audio coding. In 1993 he became head of the Audio/Multimedia department at the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits in Erlangen.

Since 2000, Karlheinz Brandenburg is full professor at the Institute for Media Technology at Ilmenau Technical University. At the same time he is the director of the Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Media Technology IDMT in Ilmenau. Karlheinz Brandenburg has memberships in different international standards committees. He is Fellow of the Audio Engineering Society (AES) and head of the AES Standards Committee working group SC-06-04 „Internet Audio Delivery Systems“. Prof. Brandenburg has been granted over 100 patents and more pending.

Karlheinz Brandenburg has received a number of awards including the AES silver medal award (1998), the German Internet Award NEO (2001) and the IEEE Engineering Excellence Award (2000). Together with two colleagues he received the German Future Award in 2000. In May 2004, he was honored with the »IEEE Masaru Ibuka Consumer Electronic Award« for major contributions to digital audio source coding.

Jürgen Jaron // Berlin

Jürgen Jaron is the Founder and CEO of Magix AG, Germany’s (and Europe’s) largest multimedia software company and under the top 3 in North America. MAGIX AG, Berlin, is an international provider of high-quality software, online services and digital content in multimedia communication. Since 1993 MAGIX has developed state-of-the-art technology for designing, editing and archiving digital photos, videos and music. The online services – seamlessly integrated into the software – offer comprehensive possibilities for sharing personal multimedia files over the web or via a mobile phone. Intuitive and user-friendly handling is essential for every product, which has in the meantime already been proven by more than 540 award wins. In addition, MAGIX also offers customized multimedia solutions as a one-stop shop to business partners such as online portals and hardware manufacturers.

This year MAGIX AG presents Mufin MusicFinder, the first software for music recommendation. It considerably simplifies the use of ever-growing music collections by analysing saved music tracks and calculating similarities. All the user then has to do is select a track from his collection and the program automatically compiles a selection of comparable tracks. The public test phase for the music portal www.mufin.com will soon be launched as well. Here the user can receive music recommendation for tracks similar to his own collection and thereby discover new artists more easily. At the same time the portal will enable users to build up a social network based on their taste of music.

In 2005 Magix AG (m2any GmbH) had acquired patents for the AudioID technology developed by the Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Media Technology IDMT under technical lead of the MP3 inventor Prof. Karlheinz Brandenburg. As part of the established MPEG-7 standard, AudioID serves to identify audio data, whereby no other technology is more resistant against changes to the source material. In addition, the world’s first technology for fully automatic music recommendation was developed together with Fraunhofer IDMT using AudioID. It allows users to find similar tracks using the parameters of a reference track, without having to revert to expert systems or user evaluation. Magix AG therefore exclusively owns the most advanced technology for music recognition and recommendation.

Lorenz Bogaert // Brussels

Lorenz Bogaert is founder and CEO of Netlog. Netlog is Europe’s other big web success and has more than 20 million members, 2 billion monthly page views and 25 million unique monthly visitors, dominating the European mainland in this category.

Netlog is currently available in eight languages – English, French, Spanish, German, Portuguese, Dutch, Italian and Romanian – with all other European languages to be added in the near future, remarks Netlog’s CEO Lorenz Bogaert. Similar to Facebook, it allows users to construct a profile page and list preferences, friends and classmates and ultimately mirror their social lives and relationships, making it easier to keep in touch with people.

Netlog recently received another successful Venture Capital financing round with Index Ventures, London, and is confident resisting the ongoing European market entry of the U.S. giants MySpace and Facebook. Netlog received a Red Herring 100 Europe in the year 2007, an award given to the top 100 private technology companies based in the EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) region.

Annet Aris // Fountainebleau

Annet Aris is adjunct professor of strategy at INSEAD, Fountainebleau, where she developed and teaches the MBA-course “Managing Media Companies”. She is also a guest professor at, amongst others, the Hamburg Media School in Germany and the University of Westminster, London. She is a Dutch native and received a M.Sc. from the University of Wageningen in 1984.

After acceptance in McKinsey’s European INSEAD Fellow program, she completed her MBA in Fontainebleau in 1986. She worked for McKinsey from 1985 until 2003, at first in the Netherlands and in the UK and, since 1990, in Germany. She was elected partner in 1994 and co-led McKinsey’s German Media Practice from 1999-2003 working on a wide array of topics.

Annet is the author of a large number of articles on the media industry and, together with Jacques Bughin, of the book “Managing Media Companies, Harnessing Creative Value” (Wiley’s 2005). She is an independent board member of Grupo Media Capital in Portugal and the Hansa-Heemann AG and Tipp24 AG, both in Germany

Ajit Jaokar // London

Ajit Jaokar is the founder of the publishing company Futuretext. He believes in a pragmatic but open Mobile Data industry – a vision which he fosters through his blog OpenGardens. The OpenGardens Blog was recently rated a top 20 wireless blog worldwide.

Ajit is the co-author of the book ‘Mobile web 2.0’ and is also a member of the Web2.0 Workgroup. He is a regular speaker at technology events including keynote presentations at O Reilly Web 2.0 and Java One and also talks a 3GSM Barcelona, Real-World AJAX and IMS World in Monaco.

Recently, he spoke at the European Parliament about Web 2.0, Mobile Web 2.0 and the social web. Ajit also featured recently on CNN money, The BBC digital planet, The Scoble show and spoke at the Digital visions program at Stanford University and MIT/Sloan. Ajit chairs Oxford University’s Next generation mobile applications panel and conducts a course on Web 2.0 and User generated content at Oxford University.

Ajit lives in London, UK, but has three nationalities (British, Indian and New Zealander) and is proud of all three. He is currently doing a PhD on Identity and Reputation systems.

Christoph Janz // San Francisco

Christoph is a co-founder and the Chief Product Officer of Pageflakes and has more than ten years of experience in designing software applications and Internet services for consumers. As Pageflakes’ CPO, he drives the company’s product vision and focuses on creating exceptional end user experiences and delivering continuous innovation.

Pageflakes was founded in Germany in 2006, funded by Benchmark Capital and operates out of San Francisco, California. Pageflakes is revolutionizing how we use the Internet, making it easy to customize the Internet using “flakes” – small, movable versions of Web favorites, which can be arranged on a personal homepage, functioning as an effective information dashboard. Flakes are available for thousands of uses and interests, including news, sports, e-mail, local events, search, photos, music, videos – even interactive tools such as calendars and to-do lists. Hari Gottipati of O’Reilly and Barbara Krasnoff of Information Week picked Pageflakes as the Ajax king in the “webtop” category – ahead of Google and Microsoft.

Back in 1997, Christoph co-founded German Internet startup DealPilot.com, one of the first comparison shopping services which got funded by Bertelsmann and has later been acquired by Shopping.com. Before and after that he was involved in various software projects and Internet startups. Christoph frequently posts on Pageflakes’ blog and occasionally on his private blog.

Les Ottolenghi // Atlanta

Mr. Ottolenghi has more than 20 years of experience as an entrepreneur in start-ups and as an executive in management with Fortune 500 companies. As co-founder of Intent Media, Mr. Ottolenghi has led the company to become one of the leaders in entertainment media distribution through file sharing networks. Mr. Ottolenghi has most recently, March, 2005, advised the Bush White House on new business models for authorized filesharing via P2P. Mr. Ottolenghi is widely recognized as a leader in the field of media distribution and technology and as a result has testified before the U.S. Senate, as well as the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, and has been appointed as an adjunct professor at Emory University teaching technology and business strategy.

Prior to co-founding Intent Media, Mr, Ottolenghi co-founded and was CEO of AgentWare, Inc., recognized as the leader in Travel Search technologies, with clients including Orbitz, Travelocity, SABRE, Galileo, AAA and American Express. Before AgentWare, Ottolenghi served as Vice President of Information Technology and Electronic Commerce for Carlson Wagonlit Travel where he led a team that built the ground-breaking Mercavia network tying more than 5,000 travel agents directly to travel suppliers via the Internet. Mr. Ottolenghi also led the launch of the first Internet-based reservation system in the travel industry at Holiday Inn Worldwide. In 1998, Information Week and Microsoft nominated Ottolenghi for CIO of the Year.

In the past Mr. Ottolenghi has served as the chief strategist for the Greater 15 Nations of the United Nations and was on the board of directors for the Berkeley Center for Marketing and Technology. Mr. Ottolenghi earned his B.A. from Duke University and his M.B.A. from Emory University’s Goizueta School of Business, where he received a Woodruff Fellowship and graduated Beta Gamma Sigma.

Ibrahim Evsan // Cologne

Ibrahim Evsan is the CEO and Founder of sevenload, Germany’s largest Web 2.0 media platform for photos and videos.

Ibrahim Evsan, began his professional career in 1997 at the age of 20. At the time, he was hired by RWE Powerline AG as the Director of Video on Demand projects. Between 2002 and 2005 he worked as a Creative Consultant and Technical Director for other Video on Demand projects for several new media companies.

In April of 2006, Mr. Evsan founded Germany’s leading online photo and video platform “sevenload.de” (later to be expanded internationally on other sevenload sites, including sevenload.com and sevenload.tr). The idea of having a platform based on the gradual digitalization of multi-media contents in a large social network inspired him to design and build sevenload. The thought of actively changing the traditional media landscape with a social network community comes to life with the continuing development of sevenload as a platform.

Simon Willison // London

Simon is the co-founder of the Web Application Framework Django, a Web 2.0 application framework, quoted as the big Ruby on Rails competitor in the open source world and used mostly in 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 application framework.

Recently, Simon has made a name for himself for promoting a new digital identity technology, called OpenID, promising single sign-on for all Internet services, potentially ending that brief periond in history, where users had to remember personal information.

Simon was a developer at the Yahoo! London Lab working on the Technology Development of rapid prototyping projects, involving the Yahoo! User-Interface Library (Open Source AJAX) and Yahoo! Web Services API, which allows for programmatic access to Yahoo! services.

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

Matthew Gertner // Prague

Matthew Gertner is the co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of AllPeers, a P2P filesharing application based on the Firefox platform. He is a Brit by birth, an American by upbringing and a European by choice, having spent the last 15 years living in Paris, Hamburg and Prague (where he now resides).

He has degrees in Computer Science and Linguistics and a strong interest in understanding the inner workings of the human mind and how to emulate wetware using software. He is also analyzing large scale human collaboration, determining the effects of file sharing and decentralized distribution of digital media.

In his professional persona he is first and foremost a software developer, mainly in C++ although he’s written some large applications in Java and C#. Occasionally he is also forced to interact with other people. When he’s not working he is an avid cook and a dangerously obsessive player of backgammon and golf.

John Buckman // San Francisco

John Buckman is a serial entrepreneur, Member of the Board of Directors of Creative Commons and a thoughtful writer on topics concerning digital rights and open source business models. In 2006 he launched the booksharing platform BookMooch, with thousands of contributors flocking to the online service in a matter of weeks, and in May 2003 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 Records 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.

Paul Pod // London

Paul Pod is the co-founder of TIOTI – “Tape it off the Internet” and has over 10 years experience in visual design, information architecture and design strategy. His passion for exploring the the future of TV and new media is clear from a portfolio including Aggregator.tv, Nokia, BBC, Orange and Vodafone. Prior to his work as Neuromantics, Paul held design positions at Poke, Razorfish, BT Research Labs and Xerox.

Paul lives and works in central London where he consults on design and strategy for Web2.0 and IPTV businesses.

Joachim Graf // Munich

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.

Dr. Till Evert // Munich

Dr. Till Evert, Department Business and Legal at CELAS GmbH, Administration of the European Media Rights of EMI Publishing Group for Online and Mobile markets, Munich.

CELAS GmbH stands for “Centralized European Licensing and Administrative Service” , founded and owned by the European media rights organizations GEMA and MCPS PRS.

After working for IFPI and the private legal firm CliffordChance, Till Evert completed his Ph.D. in the area of Internet media rights.

Petter Karal // Oslo

Petter is the founder and CEO of EZMO personalized music portal and search service. Petter brings extensive experience in B2C online. Since working as a consultant on the formation of SchibstedNett in 1995, he has built and led a number of Web and Mobile services. At Eniro/Findexa he was EVP and in charge of Gulesider.no, after successfully building Kvasir into a 150-person unit and increasing revenues 20-fold.

Prior to that he was VP in charge of mobile and community services at Scandinavia Online, as well as top management consultant at McKinsey & Co. He holds an MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management, a M.Sc. from the Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration and a Diploma in Psychology.

Chris Dumke // Waterloo, Canada

Chris started Mergd Consulting in 2003 as an Internet development and strategy consultancy. Next to presentations on Ruby on Rails at Barcamps (Barcamp Waterloo) in Ontario, Canada, he organizes the Media in Transition Conference.

Chris worked in 2002 as a Search Engineer at Definiens AG in Munich, Germany, where he constructed a large financial ontology (semantic network) together with CTO Juergen Klenk and presented to company founder Nobel physicist Gerd Binnig.

From 1999 until 2002 he worked as a research assistant at the Institute for International Economics at University of Munich on the largest European survey of Foreign Direct Investment in Eastern Europe. Chris has a degree in Economics from University of Munich and is currently pursuing a Masters degree at University of Waterloo, Canada.

Matthias Köhler // Munich

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.