Speaker Bios
David Helgason
David Helgason, an entrepreneur, visionary and ex-programmer, has served as the CEO of Unity Technologies since co-founding it in 2003. The vision is to democratize game development and develop technology for the next generation of the industry.
Unity Technologies is revolutionizing the game industry with Unity, its award-winning breakthrough development platform. Unity Technologies has more than 450,000 registered users worldwide — including Bigpoint, Cartoon Network, Coca-Cola, Disney, Electronic Arts, LEGO, Microsoft, NASA, Nickelodeon, Ubisoft, Warner Bros., large and small studios, indies, students and hobbyists — all using Unity to create games and interactive 3D on the web, mobile, consoles and beyond. Unity Technologies is aggressively innovating to expand usability, power and platform reach along with its Asset Store digital content marketplace and Union distribution service.
David founded and participated in startups in fields such as news and community integration, music distribution and consulting. He serves on the boards of several games and technology startups.
Peter Relan
Founder of YouWeb: a rapidly growing “Entrepreneur in Residence” program for exceptional technical founders. A wide range of innovative products and technologies are in the works in consumer and mobile internet services sectors. In the last two years, three social gaming companies were incubated at YouWeb.
Peter has spent the last 25 years in Silicon Valley in the networking, software, consumer and mobile services industry, both as product development executive at Oracle and Hewlett Packard and as a serial entrepreneur. Peter is also an active angel investor in, and board member and advisor to, a number of early stage companies.
Rizwan Virk
Rizwan Virk (aka “Riz”) possesses extensive experience as an entrepreneur, technologist, author, angel investor, and indie film producer. His areas of experience include social and mobile games, online publishing and advertising, venture capital, with a particular focus on innovative, early stage organizations.
Riz is currently CEO of Gameview Studios, which he cofounded. Gameview’s mobile games have been used by over 30 million iphone and android smartphone users. Gameview was acquired by the leading Japanese mobile/social game company DeNA. In addition, Riz has been an angel investor in many gaming and social/mobile companies, including Offerpal Media, Tapjoy, Apsalar, Pocket Gems, Telltale games, Funzio, Assured Labor, and others.
Prior to Gameview, Riz was a cofounder of a number of technology companies, including CambridgeDocs (sold to EMC), Service Metrics (sold to Exodus) and Brainstorm Technologies.
Riz frequently writes and lectures on mobile, social, gaming technologies, and entrepreneurship. Riz has also been a executive producer in a number of independent family and fantasy/sci-fi films. He has been featured in in periodicals ranging from the Boston Globe , Inc. Magazine, and the Wall Street Journal. Riz is also the author of Zen Entrepreneurship. Visit his blog at www.zenentrepreneur.com/blog
Joe Dunn
Joe Dunn is Co-Founder and CEO of e23 Games, a San Francisco-based startup concentrating on Geo-Located, Social Augmented Reality Games. Joe has a deep background in digital media tools for artists, professionals and end consumers, and was a key member of the team that built Macromedia into a successful public company. Joe co-founded e23 Games to pursue his fascination with mixed-world entertainment – building on the experience of successful social games by combining objects in the real world with social gaming rules and Augmented Reality to produce personal, connected casual fun for the mobile consumer.
Josh Rose
Josh Rose is Co-Founder and CEO of Flying Wisdom Studios. Flying Wisdom Studios is Josh’s fourth startup company; his most recent project is Lamplighter Studios, Inc. where he has built a worldwide team of 80 artists for outsourcing services generating $1.2 million in sales in 2008 before being sold to Broadcaster.com in 2008. With over seventeen years in the interactive entertainment industry, Josh is equal parts CEO, producer, game designer, and professor. At Lamplighter Studios Josh managed sales and management for projects such as Upper Deck, BioShock, Aurora Feint and numerous Zynga projects. His formative years in the industry began in 1993 at Crystal Dynamics amongst some of the industry’s most respected veterans, and he has also spent time at a few other reputable studios such as 3DO and Stormfront. His shipped games include: Solar Eclipse, Blood Omen The Legacy of Kain, Gex 2, Akuji the Heartless, Greed, and Forgotten Realms: Demon Stone.
Damon Grow
Damon Grow is CEO and Co-Founder of CrowdMob Inc., a mobile social startup that builds geolocation games for the masses. Damon has been a top serial entrepreneur and game designer for social games. He previously founded Shattered Reality Interactive (now Rocket Ninja), a venture funded social gaming company that was a 2008 TechCrunch 50 finalist. He formerly served as Creative Director of Lolapps where he built their X-Wars games, Yakuza Lords, Diva Life and Band of Heroes. Prior to Lolapps, Damon was Co-Founder and Head of Games at ROFLplay, which was acquired by Lolapps. A lifelong gamer, Damon has designed games for multiple platforms and genres, from immediate social experiences to large-scale massively multiplayer online games. His depth of knowledge in gaming and ability to spot emerging market trends within the social gaming space has earned him a top spot as one of the most respected social game designers.
Tracy Espeleta
Tracy Espeleta is currently a lead producer at Booyah where she’s worked on MyTown, Nightclub City, and most recently DJ Rivals. Previously, she worked as a producer at Electronic Arts, working on titles such as Dante’s Inferno and Dead Space.
Blake Commagere
Blake Commagere is the CEO of a new stealth company. Blake pioneered the social gaming category on social networks by creating some of the biggest apps ever on Facebook including Zombies, Vampires and many other games. Blake was also a key member of the team that created “Facebook Causes” which has raised over $15 million for non-profits on Facebook. Blake was also co-founder and CTO at Ohai – a company creating a Flash MMORPG. Before that, he was a co-founder at Mogad, focusing on fundraising for non-profits on MySpace. He sits on the Advisory Board of several companies in the Bay Area and Austin. Blake is obsessed with human behavior and is currently working on something that is, in his words, “going to be really f—ing fun.”
Curt Bererton
Curt Bererton is the CEO and cofounder of ZipZapPlay. Curt is very familiar with the acquisition procces, as his company ZipZapPlay was acquired by PopCap, which in turn was acquired by EA only a few months afterwards. Curt earned his PhD in Robotics from the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. Prior to co-founding ZipZapPlay, he gained three years of game industry startup experience at AILive, an artificial intelligence middleware company, developing innovative machine learning tools. Curt’s passion is creating something from nothing. Whether it is developing innovative products from concept to release, researching new algorithms and ideas in academia, or starting organizations, Curt is all about creating products with real-world value.
Dave Castelnuovo
A veteran flash developer, entrepreneur and consultant, and is half the team behind the iPhone sensation Pocket God. Castelnuovo founded Bolt Creative in 2001 as a flash development company and game studio, and helped to lead the indie charge onto the iPhone in 2008 and 2009. Castelnuovo has worked with a variety of internet technology companies throughout his career, as well as leading game publishers such as Electronic Arts.
Andrej Nabergoj
A Slovenian entrepreneur active in the field of social media and advertising. He helped found RSG, the first VC found in Slovenia and is an advisor to many start ups and an angel investor. In 2009, the World Economic Forum named him a Young Global Leader, an honor bestowed each year to recognize outstanding young leaders from around the world for their professional accomplishments, commitment to society and potential to contribute to shaping the future of the world.
Charles Hudson
A Venture Partner at SoftTech VC and the CEO & Co-founder of Bionic Panda Games, a mobile games company based in San Francisco, CA.
Until February 2010, he was the VP of Business Development for Serious Business, a leading producer of social games for the social web. Zynga acquired Serious Business in February of 2010. In addition to working at Serious Business, he also produces technology conferences focused on the intersection of gaming and social media. The two flagship conferences he produces are the Virtual Goods Summit and the Social Gaming Summit.
Simon Jeffery
Simon Jeffery is the Chief Publishing Officer at ngmoco:) and supervises the Mobage Third Party program. Simon has been in the videogame business for 25 years, having been President of Sega of America and President of LucasArts prior to joining ngmoco:) in 2009, also having worked in various Marketing, Biz Dev, and PD positions at Virgin Interactive and EA.
Barry Dorf
16-years game veteran Barry Dorf currently holds the position of Director of 3rd Party Product Development for the Mobage platform. Earlier in his tenure at ngmoco:), Barry produced the critically-acclaimed Adventure Bay social mobile game and ran development for the Mobage Developer portal.
Previously in his career, Barry co-founded social gaming network GameStrata after spending 12 years at Electronic Arts working on the Madden franchise and the Pogo platform.
When not delighting 3rd party developers, Barry enjoys winemaking on Treasure Island and finely tuning the Sabermetrics of his keeper fantasy baseball team, currently in its 20th season.