KlickableTV: Roger Wu, President
Roger Wu is President of KlickableTV, a simple to use interactive video platform. He not only conceptualized the product but also built the product from scratch and is now chief evangelist. Prior to starting KlickableTV, Roger worked at an interactive PR firm creating social media campaigns, videos, and microsites. He also has experience as an intrapreneur at Bloomberg LP where he was a pilot member of the Bloomberg Legal team. His experience with video extends to the turn of the century when he worked at start up, MediaOnDemand.com. He also has worked at bulge bracket investment banks Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley and holds three degrees from the University of Pennsylvania and the Wharton School, where he sometimes guest lectures. Roger also competes regularly in stair climbing competitions, food eating contests and teaches at the Fashion Institute of Technology. He is also a member of SAG and AFTRA.
Daylife: Upendra Shardanand, Chairman & CEO
Upendra Shardanand is the Chairman and CEO of Daylife, the leading media utility for the world’s biggest media companies and consumer destinations, including USA Today, Bloomberg BusinessWeek, NPR, Forbes and Time Warner Cable’s Road Runner. Daylife’s Media-as-a-Service simplifies and consolidates the tools and infrastructure for sourcing and utilizing media at scale, so editors and developers can build great sites and apps faster and cheaper.
He co-founded his first venture, Firefly Network, as a spin-off of his work at the MIT Media Lab. (Upendra’s graduate thesis centered on collaborative filtering, the recommendation technology now commonplace on the web). Firefly was acquired by Microsoft in 1998.
At Microsoft, Upendra launched Microsoft Passport, and worked on Microsoft’s privacy initiatives, serving on industry bodies to further the cause of online privacy. Following Microsoft, Upendra was a founding partner of The Accelerator Group, a venture firm with offices in New York, Los Angeles, and London. He went on to serve as the Director of Technology at Time Warner Corporate.
Mr. Shardanand also serves on the board of advisors for Treehugger, BrandKarma, and Help Remedies.
Twitter: @upe
SheFinds: Michelle Madhok, CEO
Michelle Madhok has been a pioneer in the online content industry for more than a decade. She is currently founder and CEO of SheFinds Media an online media company that publishes editorial websites about shopping for busy, professional women. With no outside funding and limited personal resources, Madhok launched SheFind’s first property, SheFinds.com, in 2004. Following this success she launched a second site in 2006, MomFinds.com. The fundamental SheFinds business model, which Madhok conceptualized back in 2003, has proven to be capital efficient and highly scalable as the company continues to expand at a rapid pace. In 2008 she raised $1.3 M for minority share of SheFinds Media from Greenscape Capital.
Madhok’s media career began in 1995 at CBS as director of entertainment. At a time when the Internet was a nascent, unproven platform; Michelle took the lead in building CBS.com into a major portal. In 1998 Madhok moved on to AOL as group director of online content. There she led a young, innovative team in creating what eventually became the world’s largest online women’s channel. After almost six years of success at AOL, Michelle moved on to create what is now SheFinds Media Inc.
Madhok is a winner of the American Express sponsored “Make Mine a Million $ Business” award. She has appeared on The Tyra Banks Show, Martha Stewart, Good Morning America, Fox National News, and ABC, NBC, and CBS. Additionally, Michelle had been featured in Inc. Magazine, The New York Times, and New York Daily News. A highly regarded expert in online shopping, Michelle is also a regular on Better.tv and is/has been a contributor to MSN, AOL, Real Simple, Huffington Post and Yahoo!. She has been a paid spokesperson for Bank of America and PayPal. Michelle earned a BS from UC Berkeley and MS IMC from Northwestern.
Twitter: @shefinds / @michellemadhok
TheOrchard: Steve Haase, EVP Business Development
Steve has been a partner in The Orchard since its inception in 1997. Steve is responsible for brokering all digital music and video retail relationships throughout the world, The Orchard’s API marketplace and The Orchard’s mobile app and OTT strategies. Steve serves on the Advisory Board of Music Intelligence Solutions, a patented, artificial intelligence platform for music discovery and predictive market analytics, where he advises the executive team on their strategic development of consumer facing and white label music applications.
MyDamnChannel: Rob Barnett, Founder/CEO
My Damn Channel is the brainchild of Founder and CEO, Rob Barnett. My Damn Channel creates original series with top talent. Harry Shearer runs the politics and satire. Don Was runs the music. Hit comedy series include Wainy Days (David Wain…over 15 million views), You Suck at Photoshop (Big Fat Brain…over 20 million views), and Horrible People (A.D. Miles). My Damn Channel just launched two series with Illeana Douglas, Spärhusen and Easy To Assemble.
Barnett was a production and a programming exec at MTV and VH1 for more than 11 years. He served tours of duty in Rock Radio in Boston, Dallas, and Los Angeles and was President of Programming for CBS Radio. Barnett has produced radio, television, film, and new media with hundreds of diverse communicators including President Bill Clinton, Mick Jagger, Oprah Winfrey, Martin Scorsese, Jimmy Kimmel, Adam Carolla and Johnny Rotten.
Twitter: @DamnRob
Magnify.net: Steve Rosenbaum, Founder & CEO
Steven Rosenbaum has been at the forefront of emerging media technologies and storytelling styles since he founded his media company in the early ‘90s. Always focused on empowering emerging filmmakers, and providing tools and outlets for new voices, Rosenbaum is acknowledged as one of the early innovators in both Video Journalism and User-Generated Video.
Magnify.net is Rosenbaum’s launch – a video publishing platform that allows web sites, media companies,
and content entrepreneurs to empower their communities to embrace User-Generated Video. Currently Magnify.net powers over 2,000 channels of User-Generated Video, and is working closely with a wide variety of media makers, communities, and publishers in evolving their content offerings to include content created by, sorted and reviewed by community members.
Prior to launching Magnify, Rosenbaum was involved in a variety of initiatives supporting the development of user generated content. In 1995 he Created MTV UNfiltered, a program that put the very first usergenerated video on MTV. During his career in mainstream media, Rosenbaum produced films for A&E, Discovery, TLC, The History Channel, National Geographic, Court TV, Trio, HBO, VH1, MSNBC, and CNN. As a feature Director, he is best known for his film “7 Days in September”, which chronicled New York’s reaction to the 9/11 attacks.
Twitter: @magnify
Flavors.me: Jack Zerby, Founder & Designer
Jack grew up in Hollidaysburg, PA. He studied design at RIT in Rochester, NY. He’s worked at Pentagram Design, Frog Design, RG/A, and Vimeo. He created and now leads the design of Flavors.me and Goodsie. He also makes music and loves his family.
Flavors.me allows anyone to create an elegant, single-page website using personal content from around the Internet. It automatically organizes all kinds of information – photos, videos, blog posts, status updates, music listening habits, travel plans, resume details – into a constantly growing, interactive visual montage. Flavors.me is ideal for personal homepages, lifestreaming, splash and microsites, celebrity fan pages, commercial promotion, brand marketing – and everything in between
Twitter: @jackzerby
HealthGuru Media: Christopher Bruno, Co-Founder & EVP
Prior to co-founding Health Guru Media, Chris worked in venture capital as an Associate with Village Ventures, Inc. In this capacity, Chris developed significant experience analyzing the operations and financial performance of early stage companies and conducting industry specific competitive and market analysis. Most recently Chris worked as a business analyst directly for the management team of Everyday Health, a leading health company on the web. Chris graduated Magna Cum Laude with Honors from Williams College with a degree in Economics and a pre-medical concentration.
HealthGuru Media: Nicola Bridges, SVP Content & Programming
Before joining Health Guru Media, Nicola was Associate VP & Editorial Director of Prevention Interactive/Rodale Inc., where she was responsible for the strategic development and growth of prevention.com. Nicola led a full re-launch of the site and implementation of new platforms resulting in a 60% increase in traffic. Previous to Rodale, Nicola was VP of Editorial Programming at iVillage.com/NBCU, where she managed the Health & Wellbeing, Diet & Fitness, and Pregnancy & Parenting channels. She joined iVillage after returning from her native UK, where she developed and produced BBC wales@work, a weekly business program. Previously in New York, Nicola co-founded Club Mom, Inc. and has also served as Editor-in-Chief of Working Mother and Managing Editor of Working Woman magazines. Nicola holds a Bachelor of Arts in Journalism, summa cum laude, from San Francisco State University. She serves on the advisory boards of Women Certified and bTrendie.com, and supports Autism Speaks in the pursuit of research, treatments, prevention and a cure for autism, which affects 1 in 110 children and 1 in 70 boys.
CBS Local: Adam Wiener, SVP Content, Community & Operations
Adam Wiener serves as the Senior Vice President for Content, Community and Operations for CBS Local. As part of the CBS Local senior leadership team, Wiener helps set and execute the Company’s local online media strategy utilizing the combined assets and digital operations of CBS’s 28 television stations and CBS RADIO’s more than three dozen news, sports and talk stations.
This marks Wiener’s return to CBS, where he began his career in television and radio production within CBS News, eventually becoming Senior Producer of a network news broadcast and Executive Producer of CBSNews.com. In 2000 he was named Vice President of Content for CBS investment property Office.com.
In 2004, Adam was hired as Senior Vice President and General Manager of Healthology, a consumer health media company, leading editorial, production and business development efforts. He conceived and built the Healthology Advertising Network (comprised of over 2,000 websites) and assisted in the sale of Healthology to iVillage in 2005.
When NBC Universal acquired iVillage in 2006, Wiener was appointed Senior Vice President for Media, responsible for business development, search and e-commerce across the iVillage Network. He also served briefly as iVillage’s Interim Chief Operating Officer in 2007. Wiener often participated in due diligence of potential investments by NBC Digital Media and the NBC Peacock Fund, and in 2008 was named Chief Operating Officer for NBC investment property driverTV. An automotive video content creator and distributor, driverTV videos were accessible in 30 million homes through cable VOD and the driverTV online network.
Wiener has also held senior management positions for the Dow Jones/IAC personal finance joint venture FiLife, and cancer support non-profit Gilda’s Club Worldwide.
Twitter: @AdamWiener
Hachette Filipacchi Media: Todd Anderman, SVP, Digital Media
Todd Anderman, named Senior Vice President, Digital Media, for Hachette Filipacchi Media U.S. in January 2008, is responsible for the company’s web sites, mobile business as well as other emerging platforms. Over the course of Anderman’s career, he has successfully built and expanded a number of brands in the digital space.
Twitter: @todda12
Surphace.com: Josh Guttman, CEO
Josh Guttman is CEO of Surphace (fka Sphere). He was an early member of the business team, joining Sphere in November 2007 as Director of Business Development and assumed responsibility for advertising, design and products before assuming the role of COO in March 2009. He was named CEO eight months later in November of the same year. He has successively negotiated and managed numerous partnerships with publishers such as Tribune, TMZ/Telepictures, USTA, Dow Jones, Glam, Interactive One, Name Media and vendors such as The Rubicon Project and Pulse360, among others.
Guttman has worked in and around digital media since 1998. Before Surphace, he served in a business development and product management capacity at Answers Corp, helping to integrate and relaunch WikiAnswers following its acquisition. From 1998-2002, he worked in San Francisco, initially as a Financial Analyst at Robertson Stephens & Co and later as an Associate at both E*Offering and SG Cowen advising private technology companies on business strategy and venture financing. He advised more than 15 venture-backed companies, including: Sportsline, Wayport, Stamps.com, SaveSmart/Prio, Oasis, 3rd Age Media and MaMaMedia.
Twitter: @joshguttman
