Speakers

Christine Songco

Technical Program Manager in Developer Relations, Google, San Francisco, USA

Christine works as a Technical Program Manager in Developer Relations, evangelizing Google’s developer products and APIs to SE Asia. Christinepreviously worked on Blogger, Google Code, Google Narratives & Google Friend Connect in the 7 years she’s been at Google. Before joining Google, Christine worked as a software engineer at IBM and a Sales Engineer at GlobalCenter/Exodus Communications. Christine enjoys traveling, scuba diving, snowboarding, reading and cooking.

Colin Charles

Advisor, Open Ocean Investment

Managing Director, Grok, Malaysia

Colin Charles is an open source software hacker and entrepreneur. Based in Kuala Lumpur, he is working at Monty Program Ab, on MariaDB, and Open Ocean Investments on Web of Trust, and MoSync. He was previously an early employee of MYSQL, which was aquired by Sun Mircosystems.

Michael Francis Smith Jr

Director , Yahoo, South East Asia

Director of the Yahoo Developer Network (developer.yahoo.com) in Southeast Asia, Michael Smith Jr. is responsible for creating the technical evangelism programs for developers as well as working with startups and government agencies to help foster internet/mobile growth across the region. Prior to Yahoo!, Michael has been living in Thailand studying Thai, working within the technology startups across Southeast Asia and consulting with various companies across the region on their social media strategies. Before moving to Thailand Michael worked for BEA Systems, Inc. in Hong Kong while managing their developer marketing strategies for Asia Pacific.

Aaron Tan

Brisbane Lead, MEGA (Mobile Enterprise Growth Alliance), Australia

Aaron Tan chaired Apple’s iphone keynote panel at Apple’s CreateWorld 2009. In 2010 he recently just chaired another Apple keynote for the latest released iPad.

He has also worked on developing Google’s App Inventor for Android platform together with Google.

He also chaired the HCSNet (the ARC Network in Human Communication Science) Workshop on Mobile Applications for Communication Disorders &. He also presented at HCSNet Workshop: Communication in Autism & HCSNet Summerfest 2009 on mobile technology.

Aaron is a trained robotics engineer and a space-nut. His previous projects focused on Human Factors and Artificial Intelligence in the field of Aeronautics and Astronautics. He conducted research in the Man Vehicle Laboratory at Massachusetts Institute of Technology(MIT). In 2009, he taught University of Queensland’s inaugural course in designing mobile applications.

Simone Brunozzi

Technology Evangelist, Amazon – Web Services, Asia Pacific

Simone Brunozzi is a technology enthusiast, involved in IT and computing since an early age.

He joined Amazon.com in March 2008 in the role of Web Services Evangelist, traveling across Europe and vicinity to showcase the innovative new solutions by Amazon Web Services and help developers build businesses and applications. He is following the “Cloud Computing” paradigm shift since 2006, and believes that it is going to replace the traditional computing model in a few years.

In January 2010 he relocated to Singapore, becoming the first AWS Technology Evangelist for the APAC region. Of Italian origins, Simone loves traveling, meeting people and connecting with them. He is a Linux and Ubuntu passionate, loves blogging on http://www.brunozzi.com, and has interests in the environment, clean energies, and technology in general.

Dr. Serkan Toto

Writer, Tech Crunch, Japan

Dr. Serkan Toto works as the first and only Asia-based writer for the TechCrunch network, mainly covering Japan-related technology and web companies for TechCrunch, CrunchGear and MobileCrunch.

Full-time, Serkan is working as a web industry consultant for venture capital companies, hedge funds and tech startups worldwide.

He is sept-lingual, holds an MBA and is a PhD in economics. Serkan is a German of Turkish descent and lives in Tokyo.

Patrick Chanezon

Cloud Developer Relations Team Manager , Google, San Francisco

Brian Wong

Business Development, Digg.com, USA

CEO, Followformation.com, Singapore

Brian is an entrepreneur and a global  inspirational speaker. Bachelors of Commerce graduate from the Sauder School of Business at the University of British Columbia. He began his career by creating the world’s first automated categorized Twitter discovery tool: followformation.com.

Followformation was featured in Mashable, The Huffington Post, Fastcompany.com, The Examiner, The Georgia Straight, The Vancouver Sun, and recently on the popular internet television channels Building43.com and Intruders.tv. Followformation has been touted as one of the best Twitter user discovery tools, and recently crossed its 500,000th follow milestone.

Brian has spoken at the Tweethouse in Los Angeles and in Austin, TEDx Miami, the F5 Expo in Vancouver along with Malcolm Gladwell, Digital Hollywood LA, the Youth Marketing Conference in Singapore, TagMe Medellin in Colombia, and was recently lauded in the Vancouver Sun as a “a budding internet visionary”.

He was also recently the recipient of the Top 20 Under 20 Award in all of Canada. Since graduating, Brian has travelled to multiple international cities to meet with world-class VCs and entrepreneurs, forging his own path through the social media space through restless learning and growing. Along with his travels came an opportunity to work at one of the tech world’s hottest companies, Digg.com.

Brian is now based in San Francisco, and helped develop key partnerships for Digg. He recently launched Digg’s latest Android mobile application, helping grow Digg’s rapidly rising mobile presence.

Hugh Mason

Co-Founder and CEO of JFDI.asia, Singapore

Hugh mentors and invests in marketing, media and technology businesses and helps to build wealth for nations, regions and communities as a consultant to public sector intervention programmes. Beginning his career as an electronic engineering apprentice, went on to read Physics at Bath University, a science TV producer for BBC’s Science TV Show (Tomorrow’s World), set-upInvincible Films, a successful independent TV production business making primetime shows for broadcasters around the world. In 2001, Hugh co-founded Pembridge Partners to provide finance and advice to marketing, media and technology companies.

Hugh relocated to Singapore full time with his young family in January 2009. He now works with a wide variety of marketing, media, and technology enterprises to help their owners create, build and realise value. He is alsoco-founder and CEO of JFDI.asia, a digital business seed accelerator.

Dr. Gang Lu

CEO, Kuukie, Founder, Mobinode, China

Co-Founder, Open Web Asia Workgroup

MSc, PhD in wireless communications, Internet expert, known speaker, co-founder of Open Web Asia Workgroup. Open Web Asia is the first independent workgroup focusing on Asia Internet industry, and is also the organizer of Open Web Asia conference which is the first truly pan-Asia web technology event bringing together executives, entrepreneurs and venture capitalists from throughout Asia.

Gang Lu was the Asia Business Development Director of Netvibes.com, the world leading personalized homepage and widget technology provider. Prior to joining Netvibes, he was in charge of research and development of Multimedia Messaging Service platform and 3G applications in Dialogue Communications Ltd. a leading mobile messaging service provider in UK.

He is the guest editor of the world top web 2.0 blog ReadWriteWeb.com, and his personal blog Mobinode.com covers the Internet market news in Asia especially in China, was also voted as the best China Tech Blog in 2007.

Mohan Belani

Director E27, Singapore

Mohan Belani is passionate about the startup and web technology scene in Asia. He is the Co-Founder of Mobret; a mobile social gaming startup based in Singapore. He is also the Director of e27 at Optimatic Pte. Ltd. where he recently ran Asia’s leading web technology event, echelon 2010. Apart from events, he ran all business development and media related activities. Prior to e27, Mohan spent a year in Silicon Valley as the Marketing Manager for iStorez (which got acquired by Shopping.com), an online shopping platform.

Prof. Wong Poh Kam

Chairman, BANSEA (Business Angels Network SEA)

Director, NUS Entrepreneurship Centre, Singapore

Wong Poh Kam is concurrently a Professor at the School of Business, as well as Director for NUS Entrepreneurship Centre. He has published in numerous international refereed journals on innovation policy, industrial and competitiveness policy and technology entrepreneurship, and has also consulted widely for international agencies such as the World Bank and Asian Development Bank, various government agencies in Singapore such as A*STAR, EDB and IDA, and many high tech firms in Asia.

An entrepreneur who co-founded three companies prior to joining academia, he is now an active angel investor and/or board member of several high tech start-ups in Silicon Valley, Singapore, China and Malaysia. He was a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at U.C. Berkeley and a visiting researcher at Stanford University and KTH, Sweden. He received a Public Administration Medal (Bronze) from the Singapore Government in 2005.

Dr. Bernard Leong

Co-Founder, Chlkboard

Founder, Singapore Entrepreneurs,

Director Thymos Capital, Singapore

Dr. Bernard is the co-founder of Chlkboard where he currently serves as the CTO and is instrumental in developing a mobile-web ad delivery system to help small and medium enterprises to market promotions. Prior to Chlkboard, Bernard was a founding partner in Thymos Capital LLP.

In his stint as an early stage investor, he has guided his portfolio of companies (iHipo, AzukiSoft and Eteract) mainly on product development and business strategies, follow-up investments and expansion into China and Japan. He has recently received the accolade of Young Professional of the Year from the Singapore Computer Society (SCS) IT Leader Awards 2010.

He currently contributes as a writer on SGEntrepreneurs.com  and also as a host on This Week in Asia, a podcast dedicated to web/tech and mobile news in Asia which he has co-founded both online media enterprises.

Aaron Tan Dani

Chairman & Co-Founder, IASA, Asia Pacific

Aaron is co-founder and the Chairman of International Association of Software Architects (IASA) Asia Pacific since 2004 and was actively involved in setting up and leading IASA Chapter across Asia Pacific countries. Aaron is well connected with the industry leaders and government bodies in the respective APAC countries.

Aaron was previously working as a Director of Financial Services Platform Strategy with Microsoft for more than 6 years and prior to that he was a Regional Chief Architect with one of UK’s leading IT and business strategy consulting firms based in Singapore. He holds a Master of Technology from the National University of Singapore and a Bachelor of Computer and Mathematical Sciences from the University of Western Australia.

Roslan Bakri Zakaria

Director, IDD, Multimedia Development Corporation (MDeC), Malaysia

Roslan has been a driving force in promoting technopreneurship among Malaysians and Malaysians companies to the world. With an interesing career that spanned over 12 years across various roles and start-ups, Roslan was the Chief Executive Officer to INNOVASIA and known for his passion for Islamic Content.

Roslan is a strong believer of the power and the influence of the Web which led him to organize a few Malaysian delegation to champion Malaysian innovation in events such as Web2.0 Summit

Premesh Chandran

CEO, Malaysia Kini, Malaysia

Around 10 years ago, Premesh Chandran and Steven Gan founded what is known as model for online independent journalist across the world. MalaysiaKini covers mostly local political news attracts over 37 Million page view and it is one of the top sites that helped changed the political landscape in Malaysia. Malaysiakini has been recognised with awards from Asiaweek, Businessweek, International Press Institute and many more.

Premesh was selected by TED.com as one of the 40 TED Fellows 2010. He was invited to present at TED in Long Beach California in 2010.

Premesh also lead South East Asian Centre for E-media (Seacem) which is a not for profit organization that aims to assist and grow online media in the region.

Preetam Rai

Distinguished Educator, Technologist & Traveler, India

Preetam Rai is a technologist and educator from India now based in South East Asia. He was also the South East Asia regional editor at Global Voices Online, a large aggregator of social media content. Preetam Rai is always on the move, at events across Asia and beyond looking at trends and ideas. He has been talking and writing about Asia and African start-up and tech scene for the last couple of years.

Chang W. Kim

Product Manager , Google, Korea

Chang W. Kim is currently serving as a product manager at Google, overseeing UGC (user-generated content) product development for Korean market. Chang joined Google when TNC, the company he served as the CEO (sharing the post with the original founder, Chester Roh), had been acquired in September 2008.

TNC was Korea’s leading blog solutions and services company. Prior to TNC, Chang developed mobile web strategies at Samsung Mobile, in partnership with world’s leading wireless carriers and content providers. Chang is also actively involved in introducing Asia’s web innovations to the world, as a conference organizer (Open Web Asia) and as a blogger (Web 2.0 Asia).

Bikesh Lakhmichand (Mike Smith)

CEO, iTrain, Malaysia

Bikesh or better known as “Mike” is the co-founder of iTrain and has been in the IT industry for the past 12 years. Bikesh has vast experience in the developer’s world. He has been voted as one of the Best Speaker in TechEd SEA since his debut in 2004. In the last TechEd conference he was the only speaker with a record of 7 presentation sessions.

He delivers talks and workshops on counter-hacking and creating trust within networks utilizing open source tools throughout Asia Pacific. He has delivered such content to corporations like Frost & Sullivan, StarHub, SingTel, the Singapore Police Department, DBS Bank, HP Singapore, KPMG Philippines and various other local government and law enforcement agencies.

Bikesh leads the development team of iTrain’s subsidiary iCode (M) Sdn Bhd which develops and consults on large scale custom solutions mainly for the government sector. He is regularly sought after as the leading developer trainer/consultant for new technologies in most major development houses and corporations in the SEA region (Monster, INTEL, ING, RHB, Bank Negara, etc)

Bob Chua

Group CEO of Pulse Group, Malaysia

The recipient of the prestigious ‘Ernst & Young Emerging Entrepreneur of the Year Award 2008, Bob Chua co-founded Pulse Group which grew from start-up to a listed company in London’s PLUS market in a mere 33 months. Pulse Group is a leading provider of research process outsourced (“RPO”) services within the Asia-Pacific region predominantly to market research and media companies, based anywhere around the world, wishing to conduct research within the region.

Lichi Wu

APAC Sales & BD Former Admob, Singapore

Licchi was involoved in the Asia PAC Sales & Business Development for AdMob which is the mobile advertizing platform company which was recently aquired by Google. Prior to that he was with Google as the AdWords Account Manager for the Southeast Asia region which spanns across Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, Vietnam, Philippines, Sri Lanka, Tahiti, and more. Currently Lichi is the VP in a Singapore startup called Foound.com.

Paul Moss

General Manager, Platforms, Technology and New Business, AltMedia, Malaysia

Paul works with AltMedia in strategising, developing, acquiring and implementing digital & new media products for Media Prima’s family of traditional media brands. He was formerly the General Manager for the Network Media Portals in Media Prima Berhad, Malaysia and a Network Brand Director for a Malaysian television channel, 8TV.

Stefan Pertz

Group Managing Director, Launchpad, Malaysia

Stefan spent his career working in Business-to-Business (B2B) companies in marketing departments and as an account director for a B2B Advertising agency. Launchpad provides outsourced marketing management, training and project management for SMEs across Southeast Asia. This boutique firm also assists European companies to market their products in the region

Passionate about marketing, Stefan has practiced what marketing textbooks teach. He set up direct distributions in Singapore and Sydney, helped to open offices in Hong Kong and Malaysia. The successful launch of a new brand under his supervision resulted in the client, a postal service, being nominated among the top 10 direct marketing providers. The name Launchpad (Your marketing lift-off in Asia) depicts the sole reason for its existence: the company boosts companies in the region to new marketing heights.

Pratyush Prasanna

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