Monday, November 14, 2011

Thanks Cyberposium Staff!

A huge thanks to everyone who worked on this year's conference.


Co-Chairs
Genevieve Sheehan, Co-Chair
Elizabeth Trongone, Co-Chair
Matt Thurmond, Co-Chair
 
Keynotes 
Frida Polli, VP of Keynotes
Gaurav Jain, Dir. of Keynotes
Melody Koh, Dir. of Keynotes
Ruth Wang, Dir. of Keynotes

Marketing
Jason Lorentzen, VP of Marketing
Yilin Lou, VP of Marketing
Chip  Peinado, VP of Marketing
Saket Agrawal, Dir. of Marketing
Lilly Deng, Dir. of Marketing
Stephanie Frias, Dir. of Marketing
Feifei Hu, Dir. of Marketing
Mary Knudson, Dir. of Marketing
Dina Mehrez, Dir. of Marketing

Operations
Erin McCann, VP of Operations
Shereen Khanuja, Dir. of Operations
Glenn Thrope, Dir. of Operations
Wendi Zhang, Dir. of Operations
Adelyn Zhou, Dir. of Operations

Sponsorships
Juliet  Grabowski, VP of Sponsorships
Jeanne Hwang, VP of Sponsorships
Jason Donahue, Dir. of Sponsorships
Chris McNett, Dir. of Sponsorships
Morgan Kruger, Dir. of Sponsorships
Neil  Chheda, CFO

Panels
Mark Lockwood, VP of Panels
Ishan Sachdev, Director of Panels
Angela Wise, Director of Panels
William Wu, Director of Panels

Mukul  Bafana, VP of Panels
Stacie Chang, Director of Panels
Julia DeIuliis, Director of Panels
Karen Robinson, Director of Panels
Cass Gilmore, Director of Panels
Kelvin Low, Director of Panels

Jocelyn Whittenburg, VP of Panels
Anthony D'Souza, Director of Panels
Jeremy Schreiber, Director of Panels

Jeffery  Buening, VP of Panels
Matt Guilford, Director of Panels
Amol Shah, Director of Panels
Peter Vu, Director of Panels






Monday, November 7, 2011

Thanks!

A huge thanks to EVERYONE who participated in this year's conference.  We couldn't have dreamed it a bigger success, and thank you all for being a part of it and helping to make it special and memorable.

Saturday, November 5, 2011

Morning Keynote Slideshow Available



Thanks Intuit for making a copy of CEO Brad Smith's presentation available.

Special Thanks to Conference Co-Chairs!

On behalf of all Cyberposium staff, a big thanks to Genevieve Sheehan, Elizabeth Trongone, and Matt Thurmond for leading Cyberposium 17: Sky's the Limit?

Amazing job!

Left to right: Matt Thurmond (HBS '12), 
Genevieve Sheehan (HBS '12), and Elizabeth Trongone (HBS '12)


Final Keynote: Jack Tretton, CEO, Sony Entertainment

Welcome back Jack Tretton to Boston!

We hope you have a love weekend in New England, with lots of seafood and a great Patriots game :)


Heard @Cyberposium:
  • PlayStation name origin: power of a workstation for play
  • Looked at a 10 year product development cycle (instead of 5) - much easier to amortize development costs over 10 years than over 5.  Also better for retailers, so retailers wouldn't be reliant on selling new releases as loss leaders.
  • Sony had a very strong hardware legacy, but no software credibility.  But now, Sony Worldwide Studios has 2,700 employees and 16 studios worldwide
  • Originally launched in 1995, 120M sold in 10 years.
  • PlayStation 2 - true entertainment system with more mainstream adoption and online gaming.  Revolutionary because 2 generations co-existed.
  • 1 in 3 US Homes used PS2 as their primary DVD player.  US DVD sales went from $1B to $10B in the 2 years following PS2 release.  PS2 had a huge impact on a non-gaming industry (movies) following its release.
  • They could have done PS2.5, but opted for PS3 instead to swing harder and go bigger.
  • PS3 built in HD, Blu-ray, HD, WiFi, HDMI...they built these in mind in 2006 that were not relevant then, but were building in mind.  Since 2006, 55M units sold since inception.
  • PS3 accounts for 46% of Blu-Ray Player sales.  Before PS3, there was a Blu-Ray vs. HD DVD struggle...PS3 defined the category by adopting Blu-Ray
  • Over 1.6B pieces of content downloaded through PS3 system
  • PS3 is #1 device for Netflix


Where are things headed?
  • PlayStation actively part of the social economy: 17.6M facebook likes, 1.1M twitter followers, 113M YouTube views
  • Demand for blockbuster titles increases (Uncharted 3, Call of Duty, et al)
  • Many consumers saying that they don't have as much time for gaming, so people are shifting to some shorter games like Angry Birds.  But once someone is a gamer, they're hooked on gaming, and they're 
  • PS Vita - debuts February 2, 2012 - new way to play on a handheld device
  • PlayStation - 3M YouTube views in 24 hours after launch, 10M views in first month.

The PlayStation Path
  • Having a long-term vision
  • Taking smart risks and having the agility to adapt
  • Listenint to others, but not letting the detractors sway our vision
  • Staying 100% focused on innovation










Want to continue the conversation?  Tweet @cyberposium and @Jack_Tretton and @PlayStation.

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Panel: Bridging the Online/Offline Disconnect

Bridging the Online/Offline Disconnect Panelists

Sponsored by:
Groupon
Moderator:
Matt Witheiler, Principal, Flybridge Capital Partners

Panelists:
Peter Boyce II, Community and Business Director, Skillshare
Rob Eroh, Head of Product, eBay Local
Vipin Goyal, Company Co-Founder & CEO, SideTour
Alex Leichtman, Groupon

Heard @Cyberposium:
  • Tickemaster has been doing online/offline for 15 years.  But the events have changed themselves.  So now EventBrite has allowed smaller venues and individuals to find a market for themselves.  Airbnb is a good example of that.
  • Unlocking a new inventory of skills
  • Tracking online behavior with offline transaction
  • TaskRabbit - marketplace for tasks - microtransactions on your phone for $6, $7, $8.
  • PayPal will be rolling out into stores
  • Challenge of creating a reputation system across platforms as a buyer and seller across eBay, Etsy, and others.  How do we make this scalable?
  • The depth of local business is much greater than we expect.  We all go to the 10 places we always go to, but it's hard for us to discover new places.  Things like Groupon allow for the small business discovery process today that doesn't exist anywhere else. 
  • There are a lot of things besides just bring a customer into the door.  We can do buy and shopping in a lot of ways.  One of the hopes is that we can let the shopowner who loves framing art to spend more time framing art, and we as online/offline businesses can take care of the rest.
  • In any commerce site, there is a user funnel.  We pay attention to the velocity of new users we bring onto a platform.  We try to move inventory faster online than it can do offline.
  • Many businesses set up a facebook page for the first time when they run a Groupon because it's a new way to introduce themselves to customers.
  • Unlocking customer recommendation value.  You may be spending half your money on things you don't love - but bridging the disconnect will help you spend 100% of your money on things you love.


    Want to continue the conversation?  Tweet @cyberposium and the panelists: @flybridgecap, @badboyboyce, @roberteroh, @vipingoyal, @groupon

    Panel: Mobile Gaming

    Mobile Gaming Panel

    Mobile Track sponsored by:

    Panel sponsored by:

    Moderator:
    Rob Go, Partner and Co-Founder, NextView Ventures

    Panelists:
    Samir El Agili, VP of Production in US & Latin America, Gameloft
    Justin Cinicolo, GM of Mobility, Zynga
    Harlan Crystal, CTO and Co-Founder, Pocket Gems
    Jennifer Lu, Director, Business Development, TinyCo
    Chris Gibbs, Executive Producer, EA Mobile
    Jim Cox, Director of Produce Planning, Microsoft

    Selected conversation topics:
    • Many games are derivative of other games because there are big, universal themes.  We've all seen animals, we've all seen cities.  We know how to interact with animals and cities.  We could make a game about airports, but people don't related as well to an airport as they do to a city.
    • Twitter has been integrated with the newest iOS.  Worth looking into.
    • TinyCo has a tiny fund - $5M - to support developers who don't have the distribution or marketing dollars to get their product out
    • Apple is the winner at the moment.  The iPhone opened up gaming, because before gamers had to get partnerships with Verizon et al, which was much more difficult.  Now it's much easier.
    • Freemium is modern day shareware.  Freemium works depending on who your audience is.  If you're going niche, you probably do want a paid model and get your money upfront.  On the flip side, many games that do well are freemium because you get mass market + upside.
    • Many markets are just acquiring smartphones.  Understanding mobile payments models and how they evolved will impact mobile gaming.  For example, 90% of Apple iPhones in China are jailbreaked.  We shouldn't fall into the trap of looking at US/Western Europe and thinking that's a model we can take to the rest of the world.
    • Games are competitive, and our consumers are passionate, so this is an industry it really matters to say ahead.
    What role do MBAs have in mobile gaming?
    • "Gaming economies are pieces of mathematical genius, and HBS grads are geniuses at this"
    • MBAs are great at managing creative types
    • Freemium space has made MBAs even more relevant, because now you need people who really understand capitalizing on growth.  Games are more considered as business units - it's finished, but not really because it can be updated every month - so you need really intelligent people who can run these businesses on a dynamic, ever-changing basis
    • If you want to get in, be passionate.  Anyone can code or run a SQL query.  We need people who love using games to be social.  Blow us away.

    Want to continue the conversation?  Tweet @cyberposium and the panelists: @robgo, @selagili, @cinicolo, @harlancrystal, @jenlufer

    Afternoon Keynote from Katie Mitic, Director, Facebook


    Thanks Katie for joining us from facebook.  Katie is an HBS alum and now Director of Plaform and Mobile Marketing at facebook.  Welcome back to HBS!

    Selected topics from her speech today.

    Part of the facebook mantra is taking risks. 
    • What would you do if you're weren't afraid?
    • Move very fast and break things
    • Hackathons still happen at facebook, and a lot of good ideas come out of these hackathons
    Social aspect of facebook
    • A lot of people have more fans on facebook than on their websites, because it's a place where they are social and it's natural 
    • We've look at getting people to the magic number of friends, at which point it's worth it to them to keep logging back on the site.  It was important enough that Mark put people on this to just focus on this problem - how do we get people to have at least the magic number of friends
    Competitive Landscape
    • The companies that have been most successful in the Valley have strong product focus and dedicated company mission
    • Companies live and die by product.  You can have a great product and nothing else, and still be okay.  The inverse isn't true.  You can have great monetization, but without a great product, you're  nowhere.
    Other Thoughts
    • facebook doesn't editorialize on apps, it lets the people get the word out about apps
    • facebook is successful, in part, because everyone at the company is so social and so dedicated to the mission
    • Something to think about is, "If I was starting a product in a garage today, without the assets of facebook, how would I build it?"



    Come check out Sony Entertainment in Spangler Hall


    Panel: Emerging eCommerce

    Emerging eCommerce Panelists

    Moderator: 
    Tom Eisenmann, Howard H. Stevenson Professor of Business Administration, Chair, MBA Elective Curriculum, Harvard Business School

    Panelists:
    Haley Barna, Co-Founder, Birchbox
    Scott Friend, Managing Director, Bain Capital Ventures
    Chris Morton, CEO, Lyst
    Tim Riley, Director of Online Experience, Warby Parker
    John Volturo, CMO Beachmint

    Cyberposium Audience

    Selected topics from this panel:
    • Copycats - you can outsmart copycats by focusing on vendor relationships, capturing and leveraging customer data, and offering brand partners the best ROI possible
    • Outsourcing - there's value to getting your hands dirty in the beginning and understanding that it makes a difference how you fold tissue paper and what length the ribbon should be, so you can share those learnings with an outsourced provider later
    • Unfair Advantage - make sure you have some unfair advantage that you really believe in, whether it be IP or something else niche
    Advice for Entrepreneurs 
    • Just do it, try it, test it.  You may think you need $1M before you do anything, but you don't.  In fact, you may not even need technology to just prove the concept.  It may not scale, but you prove that customers want it, and that's really important to investors. 
    • Find a great co-founder.  
    • Find people who are geeking out to what you are interested in.  You need something that you're going to love from the moment you wake up to the minute you go to sleep. 
    • Just because you can create a company today for really cheaply doesn't mean you should.  There's a lot of value in spending a year in a startup before you do your startup.

    On a side note, this panel had participants overflowing out of the door - keep the awesome energy of the conference up!


    Want to continue the conversation?  Tweet @cyberposium and the panelists:
    @birchbox, @baincapvc, @chrismorton, @warbyparker, @volturo

    Panel: Cloud Wars

    Cloud Wars Panelists
    Panel sponsored by:

    Moderated by:
    David Fachetti, Managing Director, Globespan Capital Partners

    Panelists:
    Alex Chriss, Director - Intuit Partner Platform, Intuit
    Peter Coffee, VP/Head of Platform Research, Salesforce.com
    John McEleney, CEO, CloudSwitch

    Cyberposium Audience




    Key ideas from today's panels:

    • You don't want seatbelts on your servers.  It doesn't matter what color it is, it doesn't work.
    • Why should people ever have to enter in data?  So now we're thinking about big data, data for delight.  $3 trillion dollars of data running around that we can now bring into the cloud.
    • The conversation about cloud for the last 10 years has been IT replacement.  The future is about working closer to where the data is originating.  It's a really important perception change for classical IT.  It's about where your customers live and where your business processes are happening.
     Want to continue the conversation?  Tweet @cyberposium and the panelists:
    @GlobespanCap, @acce, @petercoffee, @cloudswitchcorp, @john_mceleney

    Panel: The Evolution of Social

    Evolution of Social Panelists
    Moderator:
    Alex Taussig, Principal, Highland Capital Partners

    Panelists:
    Steve Cheney, Head of Business Development, GroupMe
    Julie Farago, Engineering Manager, Google
    Brett Martin, Co-Founder & CEO, Sonar
    Brad Mauney, Sr. Product Manager - Search & Social Graph, Linked In
    Steve Spurgat, Founder/CEO, VYou
    Ari Shahdadi, General Counsel and Assisant Secretary, Tumblr

    Cyberposium Panel Audience
    Topics from this morning's conversation included:
    • Verified Identity - how do advertisers think about this?  When is anonymity good?  Tension between quick signup / less info vs. longer signup / more info
    • Facebook - how has facebook pushed users beyond their users beyond their comfort level?  
    • Privacy - Look under the rocks and see what's there - 10 years ago it would have been crazy to enter your credit card number on the internet.
    • Gaining Traction for Small Networks - You need to iterate.  Read Eric Ries' The Lean Startup.
    • Monetization - "Cash rules everything around me".  How much is a "like" worth?  What is the lifetime value of a "like"?  EventBrite did a great study on the value of a "share" and tying sharing a post to driving a ticket sale.
    • Post-PC World - More connections with strangers - currently leveraging existing communities, but in the future we'll be creating new communities.  Contrarian view: when all you have is a screen, you only want to see the three most relevant updates, and you want to be able to get cross-platform data to get relevancy, which is based on your existing communities.  LinkedIn, for example, has an app that overlays information with your social network to tell you what the most important topics are for you to be reading that day

    Want to continue the conversation?  Tweet @cyberposium and the panelists:
    @stevecheney, @ataussig, @brett1211, @bradmauney, @spurgat, @arishahdadi

    Social Media @ Cyberposium

    Morning Keynote from Intuit CEO Brad Smith

    A very warm welcome to Brad Smith, CEO of Intuit, market leader for financial software for small businesses and individuals.  

    Phenomenal speaker, innovative leader, and clear visionary for the future.

    Brad Smith, CEO, Intuit

    Highlights, paraphrased here, from Brad's speech:
    • When first becoming CEO, the advice given to Brad was resoundingly similar.  First, listen.  Second, get an outside in view.
    • Intuit didn't have first mover advantage.  But it was 47th mover.  But it understood easy of use and understood the customer and what was important for them to improve their financial lives.
    • "Social, mobile, global" didn't become popular because it rhymed.  It became popular because it was a vision that was so inspiring that people knew what to do, even if we were not yet there.  It was a soccer net at the end of a field where everyone could clearly see the goal.
    • No team should be bigger than one that 2 pizzas can feed
    • It took only 3 people to build the TurboTax app (1 pizza could feed them).  It was so popular that it displaced Angry Birds during the tax season!  

    Brad also shared a few pieces of wisdom from others as key takeaways, paraphrased here:
    • Mark Twain once said that a wise man learns from his own mistakes but a genius learns from the mistakes of others.
    • JFK was better than a great communicator.  He was a translator of dreams.   
    • Warren Buffet invests in great companies that even monkeys can run, because if you wait long enough, a monkey will run it. 
    • Peter Drucker: The bottleneck is always at the top of the bottle.  Brad Smith: As a leader, ask who is getting in the way.
    • Steve Jobs: My favorite products are the ones we didn't build, because that's what made the ones we built even more special and impactful.  Brad Smith: First lesson we have to learn - put our wood behind fewer arrows.

    Finally, a joke from the Valley to leave y'all with.  

    Q: Why was it so easy for God to create heaven and earth in seven days?  
    A: Because it didn't have to deal with an installed base and legacy technology

    Big smiles from the Cyberposium team - we hope the rest of the day is as great as Brad's speech this morning!






    Audience looks on during Brad Smith's speech


    Taxes can be innovative!!

    So impressed with Intuit's huge leaps in mobile and digital innovation.

    You can do taxes through your mobile app - the app pulls out data from a photo that you take of a W2, helping you do your taxes in 10 minutes. "It was so popular it displaced Angry Birds in the app marketplace during tax season." They made taxes sexy.

    Just one of so many examples. Thanks for leading innovation, Intuit.

    Ask and vote for questions!

    Ask and vote for keynote questions for Cyberposium through http://live.pigeonhole.sg on your mobile, laptop, or tablet! password: CYBERPOSIUM

    And they're off!

    Spangler Hall was buzzing this morning with leaders, entrepreneurs, students, and community members interested in the Tech/Media space.  We'll be on the blog all day covering the highlights.  

    Below are the first pictures of the day from registration.  See y'all at the conference!




    Which Panel Are You Most Interested In Seeing?

    Cyberposium staff wants to know what panel YOU are most interested in seeing today!  Please leave your reply below.

    Happy Birthday Cyberposium Staffer Saket Agrawal

    A very special birthday shout out to Saket Agrawal, Director of Marketing, whose birthday is during Cyberposium.  If you see him, do be sure to say a birthday hello!

    Friday, November 4, 2011

    Sponsor Spotlight: Sony Entertainment

    A special thanks to our sponsor Sony Entertainment!

    Sony Entertainment will be giving away two PlayStation 3s, a large screen Sony 3D TV, and more!  Check out a sneak preview of the prizes Sony Entertainment gave us, complete with HBS insignia.  Thanks Sony!



    Live Blogging @ Cyberposium

    The Cyberposium staff will be live blogging throughout the conference tomorrow, and also tweeting at our twitter account @cyberposium.  Please follow the blog and twitter if you haven't done so already for all live updates!

    Also, if you're a speaker, panelist, or participant, feel free to send me a blog post to publish as a guest blogger.  Email me directly at Lilly Deng, ldeng@mba2013.hbs.edu.  

    Looking forward to seeing everyone tomorrow for an amazing conference!

    Wednesday, November 2, 2011

    FLASH SALE! Reduced Ticket Prices Ends 11:59PM Tonight

    For a limited time until 11:59pm tonight, Cyberposium will be offering reduced ticket prices.

    If you haven't purchased your ticket yet, get your ticket here while the sale lasts!

    Tuesday, November 1, 2011

    5 Reasons to Attend Cyberposium

    1. The hottest companies
    • 3 keynotes, ~60 panelists, ~40 companies represented
    • Facebook, Google, Groupon, Dropbox, Microsoft, Zynga, many more
    2. The scrappiest startups
    • Chegg, TinyCo, Birchbox, Warby Parker, Boxee, Ustream, Pocket Gems, etc.  
    3. Top VCs, Service professionals
    • Bain, Bain Capital, Globespan, NEA, Highland Capital, Lightbank, Digitas, etc.
    4. Multi-industry focus
    • Retail, media, business operations, outsourcing, publishing, payments, advertising
    • Panels: Emerging Content Models, Mobile Advertising, Mobile Payments, eBooks, Emerging eCommerce, Cloud Wars, Future of Web Advertising
    5. Explore the biggest trends in society today!
    • Mobile, social, local
    • Device acceleration & penetration, offline – online convergence, consumer sharing
    • The cloud, SMB web services

    Meet A Featured Startup: Sonar

    Every year Cyberposium consistently unites some of the brightest in the tech, media, VC, finance and startup communities. Who will YOU meet? 

    One of our featured startups, Sonar, an app for iPhone, aims to add a new layer of technology to your networking by revealing connections you share with attendees that you’d perhaps have otherwise missed. Sonar can tell you that the gentleman at the next table during lunch is a VC looking to fund a startup just like yours, or that the CTO of the company at which you’re interviewing is three rows back, or that the startup founder on stage right now shares fourteen of your Facebook friends and also loves LCD Soundsystem.
    If you’re attending Cyberposium in hopes of meeting a particular type of new contact or friend, and you appreciate the boost a little extra social context lends to conference small talk and between-panel banter, download Sonar before you get to Cyberposium. You won’t have to leave it to chance that you’ll meet the right person just by virtue of proximity to the peanuts.

    To get started learning about how you’re connected to other people at Cyberposium on Sonar:
    1. Download the app from the iTunes Store: http://bit.ly/m7A2qO
    2. Sign in with your Foursquare account (you can create one within the app, if you do not already have one – don’t worry, your location is safe unless you share it!)
    3. Add your Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn accounts to see the most about the connections you share with other attendees
    4. When you arrive at Cyberposium, pop open Sonar and find the Cyberposium venue – you’ll see a list of folks there, in order of their relevance to you, based on shared Facebook friends, LinkedIn contacts, and interests on Twitter.
    5. If you see someone you’re interested in meeting, you can send them a message via Twitter with a couple clicks.
    Let us know about who you meet by posting on our Facebook wall or on Twitter.


    Announcing Exciting Panels

    We are excited to announce our panel line-up for Cyberposium.  For full list of speakers, please visit the website.

    Topic: Consumer Web

    Panel 1: Emerging E-Commerce
    New models of ecommerce are taking the market by storm. Web-based sharing, collaborative consumption, professional curation and new subscription offers are growing users and attracting VC funding. Which new models will make it to critical mass and which are simply fads? Will larger incumbents respond with their own offers? 

    Companies:  Lyst, Birchbox, Beachmint, Bain Capital Ventures, Warby Parker

    Panel 2: Bridging the Online/Offline Disconnect
    New business models and mobile proliferation are unlocking powerful new services that connect online and offline behaviors. Consumers are increasingly integrating the internet into their everyday lives and receiving real-time services and information. How are “online” tools evolving to impact, enhance and disrupt our “offline” lives? How are business able to capture this value? Are these services too complex to benefit mass-market consumers? 

    Companies: Groupon, Skillshare, eBay, Side Tour, Flybridge Capital Partners
    Panel 3: Evolution of Social
    Social networking continues to change as user engagement increases and the number of friendships and ancillary web applications explodes. New models such as micro-networks and enterprise-networks are already gaining traction. How will we interact differently with social networks going forward? Which players are best positioned to benefit? 

    Companies: GroupMe, Highland Capital Partners, Google, Sonar

    Topic: Digital Media

    Panel 1: The Future of Online Advertising
    New and powerful online advertising models are opening up. Social advertising is competing with search, web video ads are competing for TV spend and browser tracking is becoming the norm for enhanced targeting. How are advertiser’s mindsets changing and what are the largest near-term opportunities in this ecosystem? What threats will slow future growth? 

    Companies: Lightbank, Greystripe, Google, Digitas, AOL

    Panel 2: Emerging Content Business Models
    Digital content is now ubiquitous and, for every type of media, new models are emerging. How will access to news, magazines, music and video evolve? Which business models are working and which aren’t? How are tablets and other emerging devices being leveraged? How should content owners adjust their distribution strategies going forward? 

    Companies: Sugar Inc., Cisco, Bravo, Activate

    Panel 3: Online Video
    Web video is becoming mainstream and the trend of cord-cutting has already started. How will traditional studios and cable networks survive the shift without sacrificing revenue? Will cable operators or emerging digital content aggregators ultimately dominate web video distribution? How will web-enabled televisions impact the ecosystem? 

    Companies: Boxee, Ustream Inc., Sony Network Entertainment, Entreprenuers Roundtable Accelerator, NBC Universal

    Panel 4: eBooks - From Print to Digital
    Traditional “print” materials are increasingly being consumed via digital devices. How will e-content be published and licensed in the future? Which devices will the mass-market adopt for their e-reading needs? Will paper-based books and traditional retail models interact with e-books going forward? Who wins and loses as ereading gains critical mass? 

    Companies: Chegg, Random House Publishing Group, Byliner Inc., HBS, BarnesandNoble.com

    Topic: Enterprise

    Panel 1: Cloud Wars
    Large platform and application providers are battling for dominance in the cloud. Software players, datacenter providers, web companies and new entrants are all competing for contracts with large enterprise customers. How are customer preferences evolving around pricing, scalability and interoperability? What will it take for successful cloud players to dominate and achieve scale?

    Companies: Globespan, Dropbox, Intuit Inc., Cloudswitch, salesforce.com

    Panel 2: Cloud Apps for the SMB
    Cloud services are radically transforming how small businesses operate. Web-based services like filesharing, video conferencing, CRM and social networking are being adopted at lower costs and with no training requirements. Which new entrants and emerging opportunities have the greatest distruption potential? How will revenue models evolve?

    Companies: Intuit Inc, oDesk Corp, Polycom

     Topic: Mobile

    Panel 1: Mobile Payments
    Mobile payments are making the leap from E-Commerce into physical retail. Services like virtual wallets, shopping assistants, mobile self-checkout and dynamic couponing are gaining traction. Which competitors are moving toward critical mass and which aren’t? How will partnerships contribute to a platform’s success and who will extract the most value? 

    Companies: Intuit Inc., LevelUp, AisleBuyer, Where, MoreMagic

    Panel 2: Mobile Advertising
    The next phase of mobile advertising has already begun. Location-targeted offers, in-app interactivity and rich media are increasing user engagement and boosting ad prices. Which new ad types and practices are gaining the most traction? How will privacy concerns or device and platform fragmentation slow future growth? 

    Companies: Ogilvy & Mather, AisleBuyer, New Enterprise Associates, Razorfish, Localytics, Microsoft

    Panel 3: Mobile Gaming
    The mobile device is on its way to becoming a mass-market gaming platform. Multi-player and social features, freemium games and tablet versions are increasingly populating the market. How big will this market get and how are gamer demographics changing? Who will own the underlying platforms and will they implement tougher terms for game developers? 

    Companies: Pocket Gems, TinyCo, Zynga, Gameloft Inc., Nextview Ventures