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Aleks Krotoski

Nick Wilson — Sat, 03 May 2008 18:26:45 +0000

Aleks Krotoski has been working inside Second Life since 2003, ﬁrst as a researcher examining the effects of online representation on ofﬂine self, then as a PhD candidate examining the social networks of the virtual space, and most recently as a research analyst at Linden Lab, exploring Resident segments, social networks and technological innovation. She is a columnist, podcaster and blogger at The Guardian newspaper in the UK.

Presentations

April 2008 - Human-Centered Research for Avatars: Qualitative and Quantitative Best Practice

Alex Helphetz

Nick Wilson — Sat, 03 May 2008 18:34:33 +0000

Alex Heiphetz received Ph.D. in geophysics from the University of Pittsburgh. After working for a consulting ﬁrm he started an independent company in 1997. Delta L Training specializes in business and training services to corporate and educational customers: creating training simulations, training management software, publishing, audio and video production.

Presentations

April 2008 - Panel: Corporate Training in Second Life

Barry Joseph

Caleb Booker — Mon, 05 May 2008 22:30:43 +0000

Barry came to Global Kids in 2000, holding a BA from Northwestern University and an MA in American Studies from New York University. He has developed innovative programs in the areas of youth-led online dialogues, video games as a form of youth media, and the educational potential of virtual worlds, combining youth development practices with the development of high proﬁle digital media projects that develop 21st Century Skills. Barry served on the steering committee of the MacArthur Foundation's Digital Media and Learning initiative and his writing appeared in the Foundation's Ecology of Games volume.

Presentations

April 2008 - Doing Well by Doing Good: Supporting Nonproﬁts and Philanthropies in Virtual Worlds

Ben Lorica

Nick Wilson — Sat, 03 May 2008 18:36:31 +0000

Ben Lorica is the Senior Researcher in the Radar Group at O'Reilly Media, Inc.. He has applied Business Intelligence, Data Mining and Statistical Analysis in a variety of settings including Direct Marketing, Consumer and Market Research, Targeted Advertising, Text Mining, and Financial Engineering. His background includes stints with an investment management company, internet startups, and ﬁnancial services. At O'Reilly, Ben works on custom research and consulting projects, open source data warehousing and analytics. An ex-academic, he was an Assistant Professor at U.C. Davis and was the founding Department Chair for Statistics and Mathematics at C.S.U. Monterey Bay.

Presentations

April 2008 - Are Virtual Worlds Important? Trends and Tips from the O'Reilly Radar

Benjamin Duranske

Caleb Booker — Mon, 05 May 2008 22:31:54 +0000

Benjamin is an intellectual property attorney and a writer. He is the author of the book, Virtual Law: Navigating the Legal Landscape of Virtual Worlds (2008, ABA Publishing). He co-chairs the ABA's Committee on Virtual Worlds and Multiuser Online Games of the Section of Science & Technology Law. He also founded the SL Bar Association in the virtual world of Second Life, and writes on legal issues associated with virtual worlds at Virtually Blind.

Presentations

April 2008 - Panel: Virtual Worlds and the Law

Bryan Carter

Caleb Booker — Mon, 05 May 2008 22:33:08 +0000

Bryan works in the Corporate Communications Department for Avnet, Inc. as Director of Multimedia Services and handles a variety of tasks on behalf of the CCO. Part of his duties involves the examination trends and the viability of future communications methods that can be used by the business for both internal and external communications. He has done extensive research in Social Media/Web 2.0 technologies, and created a virtual tour of a real-world museum in Second Life.

Presentations

April 2008 - Understanding Social Media’s Place in Business

Chris Collins

Caleb Booker — Mon, 05 May 2008 22:36:39 +0000

Chris Collins leads the companies initiatives in taking server systems offerings to corporations in large enterprises and complex infrastructures as well as current Second Life in world offerings to corporates. Before joining Linden Lab, he was Founder and CEO of Zudora, a job search engine. Prior to Zudora, Chris was the Managing Director of The Solution Base, a CRM software and consulting company in the UK, where he succeeded in turning the company around from a loss to a proﬁt within his ﬁrst year. Chris has worked as a consultant and an accountant in Australia, Europe, and the US; he has a Bachelor of Commerce in Accounting and Finance from the University of Western Australia.

Presentations

April 2008 - Panel: Virtual Worlds, Meeting the Needs of the Enterprise?

Chris M. Collins

Caleb Booker — Mon, 05 May 2008 22:34:22 +0000

Chris Collins is an IT Analyst in the UCit Instructional & Research Computing department at the University of Cincinnati. She currently manages the campus-wide podcasting and Second Life projects at the University of Cincinnati, and serves as the Second Life Ambassador for the Ohio Learning Network, a consortium of 80 colleges and universities in Ohio.

Presentations

April 2008 - Selling the Idea of Virtual Worlds to Stakeholders

Dave Elchoness

Caleb Booker — Mon, 05 May 2008 22:37:56 +0000

Founder and CEO of VRWorkplace, Dave is an experienced attorney and HR consultant. While serving as counsel to Qwest Information Technologies, he was asked to establish and manage IT vendor relations, outsourcing and offshoring functions. There, Dave witnessed the challenges faced by organizations that struggle to maintain and improve productivity and efﬁciency despite distance, cultural differences, and tight travel budgets.

Presentations

April 2008 - Panel: Virtual Worlds and the Law

David Fenech

Caleb Booker — Mon, 05 May 2008 22:38:59 +0000

David Fenech is Senior Director of eBusiness for Kelly Services, a Fortune 500 global stafﬁng services company headquartered in Troy, Michigan, USA. Dave is responsible for Kelly’s global Internet and intranet initiatives, providing sales and operational support, as well as development of Kelly’s virtual world strategy. Since joining Kelly in 1997, Dave and his teams have managed hundreds of online properties and received numerous awards for interactive marketing initiatives. His pioneering online initiatives have garnered millions of dollars in revenue. Dave developed his ﬁrst corporate Website in 1996. Engaging diverse teams across sales and marketing and IT, he continually advocates the merging of traditional marketing with digital marketing - an arena he refers to as “tradigital marketing.” Dave’s previous positions include digital marketing, product management, strategic marketing, and market development with companies including Computer Science Corporation and DuPont. Fenech holds a master’s of Business Administration with emphasis in Marketing and Information Systems and a Bachelor of Science degree from Oakland University.

Presentations

April 2008 - Breathing Second Life Into Your Brand
April 2008 - Panel: Second Life for Business: Risks and Opportunities in the Virtual World
April 2008 - Kelly Services Announces Virtual Staffing

David Naylor

Caleb Booker — Mon, 05 May 2008 22:40:12 +0000

Partner at Field Fisher Waterhouse (UK) and current president of the SL Bar Association, David Naylor specializes in working with technology, media, communications and IP-focused businesses and investors. He advises businesses at all stages of development, from early-stage ventures to multinationals. He has experience in sectors including media and entertainment, internet and e-commerce, software, consumer devices and electronics, information technology, and communications. He also advises technology and IP-rich businesses active in other areas including automotive, energy, healthcare and life sciences, ﬁnancial services, recruitment and travel.

Doug Wolf

Caleb Booker — Mon, 05 May 2008 22:41:05 +0000

Doug Wolf is Co-Chair of the Trademark Group and Chair of the Start Up Group at Wolf, Greenﬁeld & Sacks. He practices primarily in the areas of trademark prosecution and litigation, patent portfolio management, infringement and patentability analysis, licensing, and Internet issues. Doug also provides due diligence and acquisition analysis to venture groups on target companies and technologies. He works with large and small trademark clients, including several portfolios comprising hundreds, sometimes thousands, of trademark registrations throughout the world. Doug was named one of the top 25 lawyers in the nation for U.S. trademark ﬁlings by NameProtect’s Trademark Insider magazine and was named to the Boston Business Journal’s 40 Under 40 list, an award program recognizing 40 of Boston’s brightest business and civic personalities.

Presentations

April 2008 - Panel: Virtual Worlds and the Law

Eilif Trondsen

Caleb Booker — Mon, 05 May 2008 22:42:00 +0000

Eilif Trondsen is the Research and Program Director of the Virtual Worlds Consortium for Innovation and Learning (VWC) at SRI Consulting Business Intelligence (SRIC-BI) in Menlo Park, California. The focus area of his research and consulting at SRIC-BI—a spin-out of SRI International (formerly Stanford Research Institute)—is the use of technology for business performance improvement and learning. He has 29 years' experience at SRIC-BI and at SRI International, leading or contributing to a variety of projects for U.S. and foreign clients in the private and public sectors. For ten years, Eilif held the position of Research Director of the Business Intelligence Program (now the Scan program) at SRI and currently leads VWC (www.sric-bi.com/vwc). In his tenure at SRI and SRIC-BI, Eilif has given numerous presentations on various eCommerce, eLearning and virtual worlds topics at conferences and to SRI clients around the world.

Presentations

April 2008 - Collaborative Work in Virtual Worlds

Erica Driver

Caleb Booker — Tue, 06 May 2008 15:53:28 +0000

As a principal analyst at Forrester Research, Erica Driver serves information & knowledge management professionals. She is a leading expert on enterprise collaboration strategies and platforms and Information Workplace strategies and platforms, and covers Web3D – using virtual worlds, immersive workspaces, and serious games to get real work done.

Presentations

April 2008 - The Emergence of Web3D

Fiona Gallagher

Caleb Booker — Mon, 05 May 2008 22:44:05 +0000

Fiona has been with Sun Microsystems for over 10 years, currently working in their global brand and advertising group traveling between the US and the UK. She specializes in non traditional marketing and her various projects have led to a number of awards including M&M Awards 2004 Best Corporate Campaign, Computing award 2005 for Best Ad Campaign, B2B Awards 2005 Best Integrated Marketing Campaign. While working as Sun Business Manager on the recent U2 tour, she applied Sun’s technology to help Bono seek fan support of the various Make Poverty History Campaigns. Part of this endeavor took them into Second Life, where Fiona began looking at the possibilities for Sun in the virtual world.

Presentations

April 2008 - Panel: Second Life for Business: Risks and Opportunities in the Virtual World

Greg Nuyens

Caleb Booker — Mon, 05 May 2008 22:45:12 +0000

Greg has more than twenty-ﬁve years experience as a high tech entrepreneur, including founding and executive roles at both private enterprises and large public companies. Before Qwaq Forums, as CEO of Devicescape, Greg was responsible for creating and executing the business plan leading to the company's Wi-Fi embedded strategy culminating in OEM deals with Sharp, Epson, NEC and other leading consumer electronics ﬁrms. Devicescape's venture backers include Kleiner Perkins Cauﬁeld & Byers and August Capital. Greg holds a Master of Science degree in Computer Science from Stanford University and a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science from Carleton University.

Presentations

April 2008 - Panel: Virtual Worlds, Meeting the Needs of the Enterprise?

Howard Vickers

Caleb Booker — Mon, 05 May 2008 22:46:21 +0000

Avatar Languages was founded by Howard Vickers, who is a qualiﬁed English teacher with international TEFL teaching experience including with the British Council in Spain and private language schools in Russia and Bolivia. His educational background includes a Bachelors in foreign languages (German and Russian), a Masters in development economics and an MBA. Howard has also spent some years working in International Development in Latin America and the Ex-Soviet Union. This extensive international background has enabled Howard to approach the foreign language market as a truly global venture.

Presentations

April 2008 - Panel: Corporate Training in Second Life

Jeremy Hunsinger

Caleb Booker — Mon, 05 May 2008 23:05:38 +0000

Jeremy Hunsinger is completing his Ph.D. in Science and Technology in Society at Virginia Tech. He has taught courses centered on digital media and archives, library 2.0, political economy, and internet policy. His research agenda unites theory with critical technical practice in the realms of political economy, ethics and cultures of the internet, learning environments, cyberinfructures, higher education and research. This research centers on the transformations of the modes of production in the information age. At Virginia Tech, he was one of the founders of the Center for Digital Discourse and Culture and a 2006 Scholar Fellow. He attended the Oxford Internet Institutes 2004 Summer Doctoral Programme and was Graduate Fellow of the NSF Workshop on Values in Information Systems Design. He is an Ethics Fellow at the Center for Information Policy Research at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee in 2007-2008. He is currently collaborating with researchers around the world on a diverse array of projects including the co-editing the International Handbook of Internet Research (Springer, 2007/8), the Australian Creative Resources Online project and Learning and Research in SecondLife.

Presentations

April 2008 - Panel: Perspectives on the Future of Second Life and Other Virtual Spaces for Education

Jeremy Kemp

Caleb Booker — Mon, 05 May 2008 22:47:30 +0000

Jeremy W. Kemp is an instructional designer at San José State University and started teaching online in 1999. He keeps the ofﬁcial wiki for educators using the Second Life immersive environment — www.simteach.com. His instructional technology project connecting Moodle and Second Life has attracted hundreds of participants from around the world — www.sloodle.com. He is a doctoral student at Fielding Graduate University in Santa Barbara, CA working on educational and social issues in immersive environments. Kemp has master's degrees from Stanford and Northwestern University and has been awarded "Picture of the Day" twice on Wikipedia.org.

Presentations

April 2008 - Panel: Perspectives on the Future of Second Life and Other Virtual Spaces for Education

John Boring

Caleb Booker — Mon, 05 May 2008 22:48:17 +0000

John is the founder and CEO of Accelerate Technology, Inc. A Silicon Valley veteran, he is a highly experienced organization development executive known for his abilities to source, hire and retain great talent. His expertise lies not only in Team/Organization Development and Change Management, but also in building corporate training functions. John founded Accelerate in 2004 with the aim of providing all the outsourced services of a corporate university to their clients. He was hired by Netscape to establish Human Resources function in Engineering and build the initial Product Development team. He has held senior positions at Atari Games, Netscape, Portal Software and Apple/Apple University, and consulted to ChevronTexaco, AT&T, Silicon Graphics, HP and Yahoo!, to name a few.

Presentations

April 2008 - On-Boarding New Hires With Virtual Worlds

Jonathon Richter

Caleb Booker — Mon, 05 May 2008 22:49:17 +0000

Jonathon Richter, Ed.D., of the University of Oregon, is an educational technology research scientist, educator, and futurist. Dr. Richter's research interests include the use of technology for enhancing critical, creative, and futures thinking, particularly for exceptional children with diverse learning styles and using democratic collaboration and creative tools, such as wikis, blogs, and other Web 2.0 tools. One of Jonathon's particular interests is in assisting formal educational institutions to frame and negotiate change through the development of Personal Learning Environments, Electronic portfolios and Multi-User Virtual Environments (such as Second Life or Active Worlds) and connecting those learning environments with Learning Management Systems such as Blackboard, WebCT, eCollege, or Moodle.

Presentations

April 2008 - The Salamander Project: Combining Learning Object Repositories and Second Life

Larry Johnson

Caleb Booker — Mon, 05 May 2008 22:50:27 +0000

Laurence F. Johnson, Ph.D. is Chief Executive Ofﬁcer of the New Media Consortium (NMC), an international consortium of more than 250 world-class universities, colleges, museums, research centers, and technology companies dedicated to using new technologies to inspire, energize, stimulate, and support learning and creative expression. He is an acknowledged expert on the effective application of new media in many contexts, and has worked extensively to build common ground among museums and universities across North America and in more than a dozen other countries. He is the author a number of important books on the topic, and dozens of monographs, chapters, and articles exploring emerging trends and issues related to that work.

Laura P. Thomas

Caleb Booker — Mon, 05 May 2008 22:52:21 +0000

Laura (Pevehouse) Thomas has worked in and around the Dell family for more than seven years, primarily in the areas of corporate communications, employee communications, public relations, community affairs, branding and online communication. She is currently part of the Global eCommerce group and is responsible for the home page of Dell.com, as well as all Dell.com content from Investor Relations, Corporate Communications, Sustainable Business, Human Resources, Legal and other corporate functions. She also assisted with the creation of Direct2Dell, and oversees web feeds and podcasts on Dell.com. In her spare time she led Dell into the metaverse with the creation of Dell Island in Second Life.

Presentations

April 2008 - Dell in Second Life: One Year Later

Mark Bell

Caleb Booker — Mon, 05 May 2008 22:53:42 +0000

Mark Bell is a PhD student in the Indiana University Telecommunications department. He studies virtual worlds and social networking with the Synthetic Worlds Intiative. Previous to that, he spent 15 years in the software development industry. Mark is highly involved in the Second Life research community, managing the SL Researchers mailing list and presenting at several conferences including NCA and AoIR. Mark has published on web 2.0, Second Life, graphic novels and technical books.

Presentations

April 2008 - Human-Centered Research for Avatars: Qualitative and Quantitative Best Practice

Monty Sharma

Caleb Booker — Mon, 05 May 2008 22:54:52 +0000

With extensive experience in hosted services, broadband, and networking e-business models and markets, Monty Sharma is uniquely qualiﬁed to serve as Vivox's vice president product management and marketing. Before joining Vivox, Sharma was vice president of business development at Jamcracker, Inc., where he extended Jamcracker's market share as a leading provider of IT management platforms. Prior to Jamcracker, Sharma served as vice president of Novell Service Provider Network at Novell, Inc. and played a key role in creating an independent business unit and brand that provided software and professional services to carriers, ASPs, and Novell's extensive reseller channel.

Presentations

April 2008 - Panel: Second Life for Business: Risks and Opportunities in the Virtual World

Nic Mitham

Caleb Booker — Mon, 05 May 2008 22:56:16 +0000

Founded in 2006, K Zero is a leading virtual worlds marketing consultancy. CEO Nic Mitham is a seasoned strategic marketer with agency and client side experience including seven years in the Telecoms sector. Nic is a regular speaker at virtual world events and developed the ﬁrst strategic frameworks for real world brands looking to move into the virtual space. K Zero developed and deployed the recent ground-breaking campaign in Second Life for L'Oreal Paris.

Presentations

April 2008 - Taking Brands Into Virtual Worlds

Nicole Yankelovich

Caleb Booker — Mon, 05 May 2008 22:57:22 +0000

Nicole Yankelovich is a Principal Investigator in Sun Labs focusing on user experience research. She currently leads a project called Collaborative Environments. This umbrella project involves designing and prototyping technologies to help people working together remotely. Several technologies developed under this umbrella are focused on improving distributed meetings. For example, the Sun Labs(TM) Meeting Suite augments audio conferences with high-ﬁdelity, stereo audio as well as with the names of the people who are speaking. The Connected Conference Room solves problems for people in distributed meetings that involve one or more conference rooms.

Presentations

April 2008 - Panel: Virtual Worlds, Meeting the Needs of the Enterprise?

Robert Bloomﬁeld

Caleb Booker — Mon, 05 May 2008 22:58:27 +0000

Prof. Bloomﬁeld, has been studying the business and policy of virtual worlds, and is host of Metanomics, the premier business interview show in Second Life. He has written articles on virtual world economic matters for Technology Review, National Post, and has been featured in the Business Week, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and Christian Science Monitor.

Robert Gehorsam

Caleb Booker — Tue, 06 May 2008 16:47:44 +0000

Robert Gehorsam has more than 20 years of management experience in the online games and entertainment world. In recent years, he has applied that experience to leveraging commercial game technology for national security applications. Robert has participated in several government studies on this subject and speaks frequently on the topic. Before joining Forterra Systems he served as Senior Vice President, Programming and Production at Viacom's CBS Internet Group, where he was responsible for content, creative, production and operations for CBS.com, CBSnews.com and related wholly-owned CBS internet properties. Prior to joining Viacom, he was Senior Vice President for Programming and Production at Sony Online Entertainment (SOE).

Presentations

April 2008 - Panel: Virtual Worlds, Meeting the Needs of the Enterprise?

Sandra Kearney

Caleb Booker — Thu, 08 May 2008 16:44:25 +0000

Sandra Kearney is IBM’s Global Director for 3D Internet and Virtual Business. She is a qualified Business Analyst with over 25 years experience in complex organizations and operations, including military and civilian strategy, aviation, futures planning, and logistics. Sandy has in depth knowledge of Virtual environments and Emotive Network building -- leading a large IBM community. She has in depth experience in Aviation Operations, Operations Research, Industrial Engineering and Logistics. This experience spans multiple industries including aerospace and defense, automotive, financial services, logistics and media. Her depth of experience includes significant time dedicated to military, civilian -- part 121 and part 91 aviation operations, operations analysis, project and program management, customer service, service lifecycle management, testing, alternative futures, security & privacy and transition planning. She has published studies for IBM Research, IBM’s Institute of Business Value and guides and articles for the US Government in the area of alternative futures and strategic alternative planning. She earned her Master of Science degree in Computer Science from Villanova University and a Bachelor of Science degree in mathematics from Grand Canyon University.

Presentations

April 2008 - 3-D Internet

Sarah Robbins

Caleb Booker — Mon, 05 May 2008 19:20:47 +0000

Sarah "Intellagirl" Robbins is a PhD candidate at Ball State University, Muncie Indiana and a contractor to Indiana University. Along with her partner, Mark Bell, Sarah recently published Second Life for Dummies (Wiley) and is now the editor of Linden Lab's Second Life Education Blog (www.sl-educationblog.org). Her research focuses on communication mechanics in virtual environments such as Second Life, There, Kaneva, World of Warcraft and others. After being featured in the New York Times, USA Today, and the Chronicle of Higher Education, Sarah has spent the last two years traveling the world helping higher education understand the impact of Web 2.0 and virtual worlds.

Presentations

Scott Randall

Caleb Booker — Mon, 05 May 2008 22:59:47 +0000

Scott Randall is President of BrandGames, which helps top companies improve employee engagement and articulate employer branding through videogames, occupational simulations(tm), and Virtual Worlds. Scott consults diverse clients on preparing the next generation workforce through virtual learning experience, for talent acquisition, new hire orientation, sales training and leadership development.

Presentations

April 2008 - The War For Mindshare

Steve Prentice

Caleb Booker — Mon, 05 May 2008 23:01:01 +0000

Since March 1997 Steve has been working with Gartner, looking across the entire spectrum of technology to identify trends and disruptions. Previously he was with GPT Ltd, where he was Director of Marketing with the payphones group. Prior to GPT, he held a variety of marketing-oriented roles with both software and hardware vendors, including seven years with Logica Ltd., undertaking a wide range of client-based consultancy and market research in the IT and Telecommunications sectors.

Presentations

April 2008 - Panel: Virtual Worlds, Meeting the Needs of the Enterprise?

Susan Wurtz

Caleb Booker — Mon, 05 May 2008 23:01:59 +0000

Susan holds a Ph.D. from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and teaches human resource management at the University of Northern Iowa. Her major research focus is training and development in business with special interest in the use of virtual world environments.

Presentations

April 2008 - Panel: Corporate Training in Second Life

Thomas Samson

Caleb Booker — Mon, 05 May 2008 23:03:08 +0000

Thomas Samson is Senior Consultant and founder of Teamwork Dynamics, a consulting ﬁrm that works with senior executives to help them develop the management team leaders they need to deliver signiﬁcant and sustainable results. He has more than three decades of executive management experience, and now works with executive leaders to implement tools that address the key success factors of effective teamwork.

Presentations

April 2008 - Panel: Corporate Training in Second Life