2nd Annual Funding & Investment Summit

Subscriptions, Freemium, Microtransactions & Virtual Goods Models

London, UK - 14 October, 2 - 5.30pm

SPEAKERS

Conference Chair - Guy Fraser-Sampson

Guy Fraser-Sampson has over twenty years’ experience of the private equity industry, much of it at a very senior level, such as setting up and running for several years the international operations of Horsley Bridge. He also spent time living in the Middle East as Investment Controller with the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority. He is the author of various books including the best-selling “Private Equity as an asset class”, which has been translated into several different languages, and designs and teaches various modules at Cass Business School in the City of London.

Tony Pearce - CEO, Player X

Tony Pearce co-founded Player X in 2004. Player X is a mobile media company specializing in games, applications and mobile TV & video. It is part of Zed Group, the leading mobile entertainment company, by revenues and geographical footprint. Player X distributes mobile content worldwide via its international distribution network of global operators, portals and handset manufacturers reaching a potential audience of 1.8 billion people through more than 150 channels. Headquartered in the UK, the company operates across five continents and has offices in all key territories including a dedicated 50-man tech-house in Pune, India. It has two operating divisions: Player X Distribution, which delivers content aggregation and value added services to network operators and content providers; and Studio X, its content arm that publishes mobile TV & video channels as well as games.

The company brings some of the biggest entertainment brands to mobile as part of its fully managed partner programme for its content and licensing partners and is a preferred distributor for tier one publishers and carriers alike delivering games and video content to a mass-market audience. Award winning Player X was recently named number six in the top 50 UK media companies in the Media Momentum Awards and is a Red Herring Top 100 Finalist, Europe. The management team has worked in mobile content distribution since the inception of mobile data services and has been instrumental in the launch of some of the biggest mobile brands games in the world as well as meeting market demand for new content distribution services.

Nicki Hattingh - Founder & MD, The Creative Arts Investment Network

Nicki Hattingh has more than 15 years experience as a successful business development, fundraising and sponsorship specialist in the entertainment, sport and financial sectors.
Nicki is Founder and Managing Director of CAIN – The Creative Arts Investment Network, the only business angel network in the UK specifically sourcing private equity investment for film, theatre, music, television and live events projects. Ms Hattingh is a Fellow of the RSA and sits on the Policy and Research Committee of the British Business Angels Association.

Ms Hattingh launched CAIN in 2008 after leaving The Thames Valley Investment Network (TVIN), one of the UK’s leading media and green technology business angel networks, having increased the investment rate success for presenting companies nine-fold during her tenure as Network Manager. Nicki also successfully developed and launched two TVIN branded special interest groups and a new Investment Network in London during her time at TVIN.

Prior to CAIN and TVIN, Nicki worked for several years in Professional Football, running a Charitable Trust for a Championship Club and staging large football events to raise funding for various Clubs and charitable causes. Ms Hattingh’s early career was spent working primarily within Marketing and Business Development roles with Deloitte, Haskins & Sells, PE Inbucon and The Corporate Consulting Group.

Joshua March - iPlatform (& Chair Facebook Developers Garage)

Joshua started his first company in 2005, during a university summer holiday. He quickly got involved in the technology scene, first starting an ecommerce company and then, after moving to London, building Facebook applications and social networking technology. He's Chairman of the Facebook Developer Garage London, a monthly event for social network developers sponsored by Facebook, and co-founder and CEO of iPlatform Ltd, which builds applications and social network technology for major blue chip clients and agencies, with campaigns this year for Ministry of Sound, Gumtree, Comic Relief, the Conservative Party, Moby and more.

Nenad Marovac - DN Capital

Nenad Marovac has more than 17 years of venture capital and private equity investment experience in the media, telecom and technology sectors.

Mr. Marovac is the Founder and Managing Partner of DN Capital which is a pan-European venture capital firm focusing on investments in software and digital media in Europe and the US. Mr. Marovac is a Board member of Eyeka, Shazam Entertainment, Tbricks, Dezineforce, OLX and Chairman and CEO of DN Capital.

Mr. Marovac founded DN Capital in June 2000 after leaving Advent International, one of the world's leading global private equity houses, where he was a Partner in the London office. At Advent International, he spent five years investing in European media, IT services, Internet and telecom companies. His investments include Synergon (IPO: LSE/BSE), Hogart, Internet Securities (now Euromoney) and @Entertainment (IPO Nasdaq: acquired by UPC). Prior to Advent, Mr. Marovac was a Financial Analyst in the leveraged buyout group of Bankers Trust in New York focusing on media and communications.

Mr. Marovac received an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School and a B.S. in Business Administration cum laude from San Diego State University with Distinction in Finance.

Mauro Pretolani - TLcom Capital LLP

Mauro Pretolani is a General Partner of TLcom Capital LLP, where he focuses on Telecom and Internet Protocol Technologies and Services. He is currently Chairman of CommProve, where he also served as CEO in 2005-2006. Additionally, he is on the board of Axerra Networks and Minerva Networks and was on the board of Netscalibur and Sphera Technologies.

Mauro joined TLcom at its inception in 1999, participating both in the firm's foundation and the raising of the TLcom I fund. Previously, Mauro was a Manager in Bain & Company's TMT practice, serving telecommunications, internet and media clients in Europe and Silicon Valley. Before joining Bain, he worked in the Marketing and Treasury departments of Procter & Gamble in Greece and Italy.

Mauro holds a Summa cum Laude Laurea Degree in Business Administration from the University of Rome "La Sapienza" and an MBA with distinction from Harvard Business School.

Andy Tait - Pembridge Partners LLP

Before joining Pembridge Andy co-founded Superscape Group plc (subsequently acquired by Glu) where he held roles as; executive director and vice president of sales, business development and strategic relationships. He was instrumental in the rapid growth from small game developer and publisher to fully listed plc operating in consumer and commercial sectors across the globe. Andy has a track record of building business through market development and asset exploitation in the UK, Europe, USA and Asia Pacific. Much of his experience lies in licensing IP to some of the world’s greatest IT companies such as Microsoft, Intel, IBM, Nokia and ARM plus consumer products to companies such as; LEGO, Taito, THQ and Eidos. He has also played integral roles in fundraising of over £60m from high net worth individuals, corporate and financial institutions.

In 2005 Andy co-founded and secured launch funding for Mobstar Media, a mobile marketing and TV production company. He helped build the business winning global distribution contracts and concluding ground breaking deals with ITV and Endemol. He also has experience in publishing with the Virgin Group and was the first ever external manager hire at HMV introducing computer games to the chain.

Nick Parker - Parker Consulting

Nick has sixteen years experience in the video games industry, serving at executive level for Nintendo, Sony PlayStation and Atari. For the last six years, Nick has been running Parker Consulting, a strategic business consultancy which specialises in offering sound business practices and strategic advice through research, planning and forecasting techniques, as well as assistance with online strategies. Clients include start-ups seeking help with business plans to raise capital or more established companies requiring additional resources to improve financial performance and operational efficiencies. Nick is also a partner and founder of GameVision, the industry standard in consumer intelligence in Europe.

Before consulting, Nick was VP Strategic Planning Europe for Sony Computer Entertainment for six years, launching PlayStation in 1995 then PlayStation 2. In 2000, Atari (Infogrames) invited Nick to set up a new online division to develop a casual gaming site called Gamenation. His strategic planning career started at Dixons Stores Group in 1989, after which, in 1992, he became head of Business Analysis for Nintendo for three years.

Natalie Tydeman - GMT Partners

Natalie joined GMT in 2007 as a Senior Advisor, with over 10 years experience in digital and traditional media. She was previously at Fremantle Media where she was Senior Vice President, Business Diversification. Prior to joining Fremantle Media in 2003, Natalie was Managing Director, Online & Interactive at Fox Kids Europe, Director of Business Development at Discovery Communications Europe and part of the start-up team for Excite Europe.

Natalie is both a non-executive director and angel investor in a number of traditional and digital media businesses. She has an MBA from Harvard Business School and a BA Hons in Mathematics from Oxford University. She is a British citizen.

Dorian Bloch – GfK Chart-Track

Dorian is Business Group Director at GfK Chart-Track. He spent his early years working his way through the 1980’s ZX81/Spectrum, C64/Amiga & BBC Model B (for Elite, naturally). By the early 1990’s the infection had spread into console systems such as Sega’s Megadrive right through to Dreamcast and of course, Playstation.

Aside from gaming, early passions included electronics, maths and astronomy but his interest in games continued through to a degree in International Marketing, with a thesis in 1991 entitled ‘The Home Computer Leisure Industry and the challenge it faces in the 1990’s’.

He was a founding partner of Chart-Track in 1996, the well-respected UK independent specialist entertainment research firm that recently became part of the GfK Group.
Recently he helped set up an exhaustive database of game developers (every game sold in the UK in the past decade) from which ‘The Develop 100’ is founded and he has been instrumental in the formation of a new panel tracking mobile phone game downloads. Currently he is exploring the world of PC game digital downloads with a view to producing some meaningful research for the digital download community, developers and publishers.

Gina Fegan - South East Media Network

Gina took on the role of setting up South East Media Network following three years as the founding Chief Executive of the lottery backed regional screen agency Screen South.

Prior to Screen South she spent two years as Director of the Kent International Film Festival (October 2000 and 2001) and Manager of Cinema 3 in Canterbury. During this time she also set up Kent Hothouse - a media development agency. With a background in construction, structural engineering and project management Gina has produced low budget drama, was the co-ordinator of the first LA Shorts Fest and subsequently spent a year in Los Angeles developing two feature films. Her production experience and six years in the North of France led her to be instrumental in forming the Nord-Pas de Calais Film Commission based in Lille. She also has experience in education as Head of Languages for SUPTERCOM in Arras, and examiner for the Franco-British Chamber of Commerce, Lille.

Volker Hirsch - Blue Beck

Volker recently co-founded the “new” Blue Beck together with games veteran Pete Scott. Blue Beck is a new social games creator and publisher focusing to bring back true sociality to games. It will publish to the iPhone, smartphone platforms, Facebook as well as emerging handheld distribution platforms such as PSP Minis and DSi Ware.

Volker has been at the forefront of mobile games for nearly a decade. He was General Counsel and Head of iSmartMoney at mobile applications incubator iWorld where, in 2002, he helped conceive the world’s first mobile artist services for the likes of Britney Spears, Eve and Duran Duran. He then helped Mforma (now known as Hands-On Mobile) solidify their position in Europe (inter alia through the acquisition of the “old” Blue Beck) and oversaw their licensing and business development business outside the US and China with licenses like Marvel, Hasbro, Activision, LEGO, BMW, Konami and the World Poker Tour as well as more than 250 distributor deals including tier-1 operators all over the world. In 2008, he co-led the MBO of the business from its US holding company, which included raising capital and acquiring a mobile games aggregator.

Barry Hoffman - Independant Consultant

Barry Hoffman performs the role of business development manager for GamePoint International since the successful Dutch social gaming platform for the masses(400.000+ community in the Netherlands) started expanding into Europe since 2008, before this he held several marketing and business development positions within GamePoint. Since 2006 he is also part of the European Ingress network where he is responsible for online gaming and currently coaches two global sports federations on their community strategy and how to transform their massive but unstructured traffic (5+ Million unique users per month) into sources of revenue. Next to this he advises both gaming portals(4+ Million unique users) and Fortune500 companies on social media, community building and consumer revenue driven business models

Prior to Ingress Barry spent 2 years as online marketing manager for The Chronicles of Spellborn, responsible for the community buildup and PR from zero to a respected brand with more than 100.000 followers. Previously in the role of customer insight manager at Orange the CRM team was awarded “Best CRM Award in the Netherlands” of 2004 by delivering the best customer program to its 2 million customers. He began his career as Customer Intelligence consultant at IBM during which years he was brought into contact with social network analysis and customer insight at major banks, media companies and telcos in Europe.

Barry is very excited to share his experiences on growing active niche and mass communities into profitable enterprises. His tools of choice are social network analytics, efficient data mining and market research, coaching instead of consulting, consistent program management, online events and setting up strong partner networks.

Andrew Romans - The Founders' Club

Andrew Romans is an advisor and shareholder of numerous gaming and virtual world ventures. He is a General Partner of The Founders’ Club and a Managing Partner at Georgetown Venture Partners (GVP), a venture capital corporate finance boutique where he has raised funds for companies and advised on scores of M&A transactions in the US, Scandinavia and Europe advising companies, VC and private equity firms.

Previously, Romans co-founded and led The Global TeleExchange (The GTX), a 90-person (PSTN-VoIP) telecom minutes exchange. As President Romans facilitated a $25 million vendor financing package with Lucent and raised additional cash funding of over $50M from VCs. At GVP Romans receives hundreds of business plans each year from technology companies seeking to raise venture capital funding and has developed strong relationships with most active technology VC funds in North America, the UK, Scandinavia and Europe with a few select funds in Asia.

Romans began his career in New York City and Silicon Valley and remains equally active in North America and Europe. Romans is a regular public speaker on topics such as Venture Capital, M&A and specific technologies at conferences such as Red Herring / ETRE and Web2.0.

Nic Brisbourne - DFJ Esprit

Nic has been in venture capital since 2000. In that time he has worked in London, Europe and Silicon Valley. His main areas of focus have been software and media. Prior to DFJ Esprit he was with Reuters Venture Capital.

Nic's investment experience includes buy.at (sold to AOL for $125m) and UltraDNS (acquired by Neustar - NYSE NSR). He currently manages DFJ Esprit's investments in Zeus, WAYN and Tribold.

Prior to joining Reuters Nic worked for Operis, a software and services start-up, and Cap Gemini. Nic also authors a blog commenting on the European technology and venture capital markets.

Previous speakers have included:

Alex Chapman - Sheridans LLP

Alex Chapman is an intellectual property expert and leading lawyer in the interactive entertainment, leisure and creative industries.

He has an especially strong reputation in computer games and digital media, with first hand knowledge of the sectors as part of the development teams on a number of successful projects before taking up the law.

He now acts for some of Europe's top developers and publishers and is regarded by the UK legal directories as "a star", "worth every penny" and "a leading authority on IP law pertaining to computer games" (Legal 500) and "an expert in the computer games sector" rated for "fighting his clients' corners well" (Chambers and Partners). Alex is also listed in Develop Magazine's 25 most important people in the UK games development industry.

Paul Fisher - Advent Venture Partners

Paul’s areas of focus are digital media & internet, convergence technologies, software and services. Paul was previously Associate Director and an early investor in First Capital, where he helped to build this European leader in technology investment banking and advisory for the venture capital market.

He has also worked in a number of early stage technology companies, including Rawflow, Reevoo.com, OmniPerception and MintDigital and also on M&A for Cassium Technologies, Smart421 & Aim Software. Before First Capital, Paul worked in investment banking at Citibank and Salomon Smith Barney where he worked on the equity -backed derivative market. Paul is a graduate of Warwick University and a member of the Securities Institute where he studied corporate finance.

Ian Livingstone - Eidos

Ian Livingstone is one of the UK’s founding fathers of interactive games and books. In 1975 he co-founded Games Workshop and launched Dungeons & Dragons in Europe. He is the co-author of the hugely successful Fighting Fantasy gamebook series that sold over 16m million copies worldwide. He was one of the co-founders of Eidos Interactive in 1995 and instrumental in the launch of Lara Croft:Tomb Raider. In 2002 he was given a BAFTA Special Award and in 2006 he received an OBE for his contribution to the computer games industry.

Robert Johnsson – Media Consultants Ltd

Robert Johnsson is the CEO of Media Consultants Ltd, where he focuses on online gaming and game funding. He is currently consulting for several companies within these sectors. Previously he served as an Executive at SBS (today ProSieben) and Verisign, Global Business Director at Bigpoint GmbH and CEO for Astrum Online Entertainment GmbH, both in the online games segment..

Today through his company he represents Hattrick Ltd, football manager game from 1997, plus a handful of other online gaming developers and publishers.

Robert has worked in the entertainment industry for over 14 years and also been a member of the Swedish Vencap organization in Stockholm and also today a member of NATPE and MipTV. He holds a Degree in Media and Communication from the University of Kalmar.

Sebastian Funke - sMeet Communications GmbH

Sebastian Funke, Co-Founder and Head of Marketing at sMeet Communications GmbH, coordinates both the presswork and the strategic and operational marketing for sMeet.
Before joining sMeet Sebastian Funke was founder and Co-CEO of a small German-based online and media entertainment company.

While completing his management studies at the renowned WHU (Koblenz, Germany and universities in the USA and Spain) he was already working for multinational companies such as JP Morgan and McKinsey. It was during this period he began developing new StartUp ideas and following the development of the internet very closely.

Jochen Hummel - Metaversum GmbH

Jochen Hummel is CEO and one of the founding members of Metaversum. He has more than 20 years of international experience as a founder and executive manager in the software industry. His first venture Trados gained Microsoft’s first direct investment in a Germany company. He relocated the Trados’ HQ from Stuttgart to Virginia, acquired later UniScape, a Silicon Valley competitor and built a $35m software business, world leader in its domain. As founder and chairman of Trados he worked in Germany, Belgium, Virginia and Silicon Valley, USA.

Sian Brereton - Technology Strategy Board

Since August last year Sian has been a lead specialist at the Technology Strategy Board, where she is responsible for developing and implementing the strategy for the Creative Industries. Initiatives to date include the funding of a national knowledge transfer network - The Creative Industries Technology & Innovation Network (CITIN) and the launch in March of a £10m call for creative industry R&D projects. Prioir to this Sian has held various Marketing, Business & Strategy Development and Knowledge Transfer roles in a diverse range of industries from Fast Moving Consumer Goods through to Transport, ICT & Scientific Research & Development.