Speakers

We have an exceptional line up of speakers who will be sharing their knowledge, experience an insight into the Asia web industry.

*Speakers' names are in an alphabetical order.

 

Jason Calacanis
CEO of Mahalo

Jason McCabe Calacanis is the founder and CEO of Mahalo.com, a human-powered search engine. Prior to Mahalo.com's launch in May, 2007, he was an "Entrepreneur in Action" at Sequoia Capital, a position he held since December 2006. Jason co-founded and was the CEO of Weblogs, Inc., a network of popular weblogs that was sold to AOL in November 2005. Upon joining AOL, he was appointed senior vice president. In addition, he was named general manager of AOL's Netscape. Prior to forming Weblogs Inc., Jason was the founder of Rising Tide Studios, which sold its flagship publication to Dow Jones.

 

Arthur Chang
VP of Global Sales, Alibaba

Arthur Chang joined Alibaba.com as Vice President of Global Sales in January 2008. He is responsible for driving their global sales strategy and leading the team towards growth of their international suppliers and exporters. Arthur brings to Alibaba.com a wealth of experience in sales and marketing, business development and general management. Before joining Alibaba.com, he was General Manager and Executive Director of Green Tomato, a Hong Kong-based, value-added mobile service provider. From 1999 to 2002, he was Managing Director of VeriSign's Asia Pacific Mass Market Division, and previously was General Manager of General Data System, a joint venture between General Electric Information Services and China Telecom. Prior to these positions, Arthur worked for Jardine Office Systems and co-founded Asian Information Resources (Holdings) Ltd., a business information provider. Arthur started his professional career with IBM as a System Engineer.
Arthur holds a Bachelor of Science from The University of Hong Kong and an Executive MBA degree from the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

 

Kevin Day
CEO, Comsenz

Kevin Day is Founder and CEO of Comsenz, which is best known for developing Discuz!, a Bulletin Board System (BBS). Discuz! was founded in 2001 and by 2006 became the most popular BBS software worldwide. During seven years of growth, Comsenz has been the leading enterprise of the Chinese Internet community industry, and their main solutions Discuz!, UCenter, UCenter Home, and Manyou has covered more than 70% of Chinese market. Comsenz focuses on Internet community platforms and solutions, and has owned a series of community products and services, including Discuz!; UCenter Home, the social network solution; ECMall, the e-commerce system, and others. An open platform named Manyou has grown to be a significant business line of Comsenz since it provides a unified social network application development and runtime environment. Anyone can easily create their own applications and widgets base upon Manyou's API. These applications are being used by 700,000 community web sites and bring an integrated solution to expand their interactive services.

 

Sam Flemming
CEO, CIC

Sam Flemming is co-founder and CEO of CIC, the first and leading Internet Word of Mouth (IWOM) Research and Consulting firm in China. Sam has been a participant of China's digital evolution for over 10 years starting with Chinapay.com, the first online payment platform in China. Under Sam's leadership, CIC has built a highly qualified team of analysts who utilize proprietary Chinese language text mining technology to provide a prestigious list of Fortune 500 clients with customized reports and insights based on systematic analysis of tens of millions of BBS and blog posts written Chinese netizens.

 

Yongjoon Hyung
CEO, StoryBlender

Yongjoon Hyoung is a Korean serial entrepreneur and was the original founder of Cyworld, South Korea's first and most popular social networking community. Yong launched two other companies in Korea before relocating recently to the Silicon Valley to launch his fourth startup: StoryBlender, winner of the TechCrunch40 award in 2007. StoryBlender is an online collaborative video production platform where people can work together to "blend" their media for rich, interactive storytelling. StoryBlender's online editing tool lets users create videos by "blending" images, sound, text, and video clips. When users have created new video blends they can then share it with their friends and the StoryBlend community.

 

Yongseok Jang
Senior Director, eBay Asia Pacific

Yongseok is responsible for strategy and business development for eBay's Asia Pacific operations. Prior to eBay, he was a management consultant at McKinsey & Company focusing on high-tech and Internet industries. Prior to McKinsey, he worked as an investment banker at Goldman Sachs' Communication, Media and Entertainment practice group. Yongseok holds a B.A. from Seoul National University in Korea and an M.B.A from Harvard Business School.

 

Yozo Kaneko
Director and COO of ngi group, inc.

Yozo is Director and COO of ngi group, inc., a globally diversified operating and holding company in a range of cutting-edge, innovative, and novel ventures. He began his career in investment banking at Lehman Brothers Japan, Yozo Kaneko gained invaluable experience in fund procurement as well as mergers and acquisitions. Thereafter, he was involved with the establishment of a Japanese venture capital company in Singapore to conduct investment activities and fund procurement. Afterwards, Yozo became the only Japanese member of Draper Fisher Jurvetson, where he was responsible for investments in the Asia Pacific region. In 2002, he established and became the representative director of Upstairs, Inc., which provides incubation office services. In 2004, Upstairs was sold to NETAGE Capital Partners (NCP, currently ngi group, inc.) and Yozo became a director of NCP as well as NETAGE Group, the parent company of NCP. He is currently a director and Chief Operating Officer of ngi group, inc. Yozo is a graduate of Strategic Studies at the Fujisawa campus of Keio University.

 

James W. Kim
CEO of Yahoo! Korea

Mr. Kim is an entrepreneurial executive with substantial record of success in turnarounds and expansion of operating companies in both the United States and in Asia. He serves as CEO of Yahoo! Korea and CEO of Overture Korea. Most recently, Mr. Kim also served as CEO of Overture Japan. Prior to Yahoo!, Mr. Kim was a Partner of Palisades Advisors, LLC, a management advisory firm and was the CEO of Corcoran.com and Vivien International, Inc. Mr. Kim worked in various sales, marketing and sales management capacities at AT&T , IBM and Wang Laboratories. He received a BA in Economics from UCLA and an MBA from Harvard University.

 

Jimmy Kim
Executive Vice President, Nexon Corp.

Jimmy is Executive Vice President of Nexon Corp, and Head of Nexon's Portal (www.nexon.com) and Web Services. Nexon is one of the most successful online gaming provider, with games such as Maple Story and Kart Rider. Nexon services its games across 60 countries to an audience of 300 million. Jimmy is also the President of Innotive, where Nexon is a major shareholder. Innotive mixes passion, creativity and technology to create new interactive user experiences and innovative presentation solutions. Innotive's client lists include BMW, Infiniti, Nike Golf, Dentsu, Korea Telecom and other leading worldwide companies. Jimmy received his B.S. in Engineering from Northwestern University, and also a M.S. in Engineering from Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST). Jimmy also attended Stanford University's Graduate School of Business's Executive Management Program.

 

Taewoo Danny Kim
Full-time blogger & author of Meconomy

Taewoo Danny Kim is one of the leading IT/Web 2.0 bloggers in Korea behind qOoOp Media and Taewoo's log (Korean) and TechnoKimchi (English) blogs. He's also known as the very first full-time blogger in Korea. His passion is about informing the rest of the world about the "cool digital things" happening in Korea. He's been featured on numerous media, such as CNN, SBS, and several other newspapers. As an influential blogger, he has attended many conferences as press himself, such as Web 2.0 Expo, State of Play, and Supernova.

Danny is also the author of Meconomy, a book on the economic analysis of Web 2.0 and crowdsourcing. Prior to becoming a full-time blogger, he worked for Samsung SDS as a researcher and is currently helping Openmaru with global marketing for Springnote, an online wiki-based note-taking service. Danny holds a Bachelor of Science and Master of Engineering degrees in computer science from Cornell University.

 

Loic Le Meur
Founder and CEO, Seesmic

Loic is the CEO and visionary behind Seesmic, founded in 2007, with the goal of transforming online video into a medium for threaded, interactive video conversation. Prior to Seesmic, Loic incubated several other start-ups including four French companies: Ublog, (merged with Six Apart in 2003) and RapidSite, (acquired by France Telecom in 1999) two popular blog companies, B2L, an interactive agency in 1999 (acquired by BBDO) and LeWeb, one of Europe's leading web conferences for businesses and web 2.0 innovators in 2005. Loic serves as a board member on the RSS Advisory Board. He is also an active investor and mentor to entrepreneurs and contributes to the World Economic Forum blog, which he founded. Originally from the South of France, Loic lives in San Francisco, California. Seesmic provides anyone with an innovative way to communicate and connect online through video conversation.

 

Richard B. Kimber
Chief Executive Officer, Friendster

Richard leads the company's global business, guiding Friendster's operations in Asia as well as the U.S. Richard comes to Friendster with strong Internet credentials, a notable track record of managing operations in several international locations, a deep network and knowledge of the Asia Pacific region, experience in consumer Internet monetization and strategy, marketing and sales expertise.

Most recently, Richard was the regional managing director of South Asia at Google, where he successfully led business operations and strategic partnerships across the region. Prior to Google, Richard was the CEO for FirstDirect Bank in the UK, a subsidiary of HSBC Holdings plc, the world's largest banking group. Richard previously served as global head of eMarketing and CEO of HSBC Internet Payment at HSBC Bank USA. Additional experience includes roles as head of personal eBusiness at HSBC, founder and managing director at HSBC InvestDirect, associate director at Westpac Banking Corp., and other important positions at leading banking establishments.

Richard holds an MBA in Strategy / Finance and a BSc in Psychology / Statistics from Macquarie University in Australia.

 

Shusaku Maruko
General Manager, Corporate Strategy Department, FeliCa Networks

Shusaku Maruko received his B.S. in mechanical engineering from the University of Tokyo, Japan in 1986. Shusaku's background includes serving as an engineer for consumer electronics products at Sony Corporation, and leading nationwide real time traffic information service as a project manager at Etak Inc. (CA, USA) in the late 90's . He joined FeliCa Networks, inc. from its founding and has been in charge of the business strategy and planning department as a general manager. FeliCa Networks is striving for the creation of new lifestyle with the mobile FeliCa technologies that has been integrated in various advanced mobile phones. All services including electronic payments, transportation, coupons and ticketing could be realized on its platform.

 

Jean K. Min
Communications Director, Ohmynews

Jean K. Min joined OhmyNews as a director of international division in early 2004. Since then he programmed and executed the launching of OhmyNews International, its English language edition with an aim to replicate OhmyNews' success home on the global stage. A life-time follower of Marshall McLuhan, he experimented with various medium as a communication designer at Cheil Communications, Samsung's in-house advertising agency. He also contributed to the launching ofSeoprise.com, an influential political web zine in Korea that, together with OhmyNews, played a vital role in electing the current S. Korean reformist president Roh in 2002. OhmyNews is Korea's innovative on-line news organization that relies on the contributions from over 60,000 citizen reporters worldwide. OhmyNews International has some 5000 global citizen reporters writing stories in English from over 100 countries.

 

Akio Tanaka
Managing Partner, Infinity Ventures

Akio Tanaka is a venture capitalist focused on the digital media domain. Akio previously led Adobe's venture investment program in Asia. Prior to Adobe, he was the advisor to the CEO at Macromedia HQ as well as the CTO at Macromedia Japan. Akio holds the MA degree from the Univsersity of British Columbia. Infinity Venture Partners, based in Bejing, Shanghai and Tokyo, is a cross-border China – Japan venture capital fund, focused on the TMT sector including mobile, Internet, and digital media opportunities.

 

Bill Wang
VP of Overseas Business, Perfect World

Bill Wang has been vice president in charge of overseas business at Perfect World since April 2007. Prior to joining Perfect World, Mr. Wang served as a business development executive at Turbine, Inc., a Westwood, MA-based premier publisher and developer of interactive entertainment. Bill Wang received his MBA degree from Pennsylvania State University in 2001 and received his master's degree in finance from Boston College in 2004. Perfect World (NASDAQ: PWRD) is a leading online game developer and operator in China. Perfect World primarily develops three-dimensional online games based on the proprietary Angelica 3D game engine and game development platform.

 

Andreas Weigend
Consultant and Lecturer

Andreas Weigend, who served as Amazon.com's Chief Scientist until January 2004, is an expert in data mining and computational marketing. As an independent consultant, he now helps data-intensive organizations make strategic decisions based on analytics and metrics. As the Chief Scientist of Amazon.com, he developed data mining techniques including session-based marketing, and designed applications ranging from heuristic cross-selling to customer network and lifecycle analysis. Andreas has published more than one hundred scientific papers and co-authored six books. He received an IBM Partnership Award and a National Science Foundation Career Award. He currently teaches the graduate course Data Mining and Electronic Commerce at Stanford University, and the executive course Technology, Information and Innovation in Shanghai. Prior, he served as a full-time faculty member at New York University's Stern School of Business, and at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Andreas studied electrical engineering, physics, and philosophy at Karlsruhe, Cambridge (Trinity College), and Bonn University. He received his Ph.D. from Stanford University in physics in 1991, and was a researcher at Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) and at the Santa Fe Institute.

 

James Wei
President, Opera Asia Pacific

James is a seasoned telecommunications industry executive with more than a decade of experience in senior management roles on both the operator and OEM side of the business. His broad range of leadership encompasses the successful implementation of direct and channel sales strategies, marketing, product management, and strong general management. James joins Opera Software as President of APAC, responsible for growing Opera's leading browser technology and services activities throughout Asia Pacific. In this role, James will be responsible for managing all of Opera's integrated customer-facing activities and will lead the sales & marketing organization, technical pre-sales, and field operations. He comes to Opera Software from Teleca, where he served as Managing Director of Teleca Taiwan, one of the world's leading system integrators of mobile phone software. Before leading Teleca Taiwan, James served as General Manager of Openwave System in Taiwan for 3 years, He has also served in executive level sales & marketing and business development positions at HelloAsia and iAsiaworks. James holds a Bachelors degree in Business Administration from College of New Jersey.

 

Andy Yao
VP of 51.com

Educated in Art & Design from China and US, Mr.Yao is skilled in combining his design skill with software development experiences. He successfully started several companies in both China and US. In 1999, he and friends started an online calendar company named FamilyPlex, later sold to Nasdaq listed company Woman.com. In 2007, 51.com acquired Mr. Yao's avatar platform company and successfully integrated into 51.com. Now, Mr. Yao served as VP at 51.com, in charge of Product & Marketing.