Host

Paul Walsh

Paul was elected Chair of the British Interactive Media Association (BIMA), a trade association for the digital industry, in May 2006 after serving as a member of the Executive in 2005. He was also the Chair of the BIMA Awards 2006.

Paul is the co-founder and CEO of Segala, an authority in enabling trust on the Web using Content Labels and a specialist in Web standards compliance.

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Speakers

Hugh MacLeod
Hugh MacLeod is a cartoonist and professional blogger, known for his ideas about how "Web 2.0" affects advertising and marketing. After a decade of working as an advertising copywriter, Hugh started blogging at gapingvoid.com in 2001. He first started off just publishing his cartoons, but as time wore on he started blogging about his other main interest i.e. marketing.
In 2004 he wrote "How To Be Creative" and "The Hughtrain", which both got widely read in the blogosphere. In 2005 he scored his first major blog marketing success with EnglishCut.com, a blog he started with Savile Row tailor, Thomas Mahon. It tripled Thomas' sales within six months. Since mid-2006 Hugh's main occupation has been helping a small South African winery, Stormhoek "rise above the clutter" in the wine market by using Web 2.0 tools to get the word out. Sales have gone up fivefold since then, thanks to Hugh's marketing efforts. Since 2006 Hugh has been constantly engaged as a public speaker, giving talks in both Europe and the US, talking about Web 2.0 and the ramifications it has on business.

Hugh's basic mantra about blog marketing is "Blogs are a good way to make things happen indirectly", a point lost on many corporate types. 

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Blog 

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Josephine Fraser
Josie Fraser is a UK-based social and educational technologist and blogger, currently working as an independent consultant. She has worked at local, regional and national level promoting and developing the effective and innovative use of ICT and e-learning design, delivery and policy. Working with Government, national agencies and international service providers on a variety of projects, she is primarily interested in privacy and interoperability, e-safety, media literacy, personalisation and web 2.0.  She works in online community research and development, serves on several national and international advisory boards, manages the Edublog Awards (the annual international awards programme for educational bloggers).  She works with the charity Childnet International, delivering the recently issued cyberbullying guidance for schools for the UK’s Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF – formally the DfES), and is currently leading on the production of social networking advice for schools, parents and carers. 

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Sam Sethi
Sam Sethi is a London based entrepologist and consultant. Sam has worked inthe IT industry for over 18 years for companies like Microsoft, Netscape, Gateway Computers and CMGi, in a variety of senior technical and marketingroles. He has been blogging since 2002.  When not blogging, consulting or presenting, Sam loves nothing better thanspending time with his wife & young family, running, drinking fine wine with his friends or watching his beloved Liverpool FC - YNWA.. 

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Oli Barrett (Debate Moderator)
Day to day Oli runs Connected Capital, creating business development opportunities forcompanies large and small. He is an ambassador for the UK’s Make Your Mark campaign, and brought the concept of Speed Networking to the UK, something which he continues tohost on a regular basis. This year Oli is launching ‘Make Your Mark with a Tenner’ which sees 10,000 young people across Britain challenged to see what they can achieve with just£10 in one month.  After dropping out of University, Oli became a Butlin Redcoat and worked with Hit
Entertainment on the launch of Bob the Builder. He has worked with the BBC, The Disney Corporation and Sony Wonder in New York. He founded his first company, Amazingyou at university and grew the team to 150 people in 9 cities, hosting events to connect students to young professionals for inspiration and opportunities.

Oli’s current shareholdings include FriendsAbroad.com (the world’s largest languagelearning exchange), Wis.dm (the business networking site), Stem Venture (an anti-piracy software company) and Infinite Marketing (a subscription marketing company, epresentingSockRush.com, the newly launched sock subscription web-site. He is currently helping to organise the World Entrepreneurship Summit 08 (WES 08) and
has a personal site at OliBarrett.co.uk. 

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Damien Mulley
Damien Mulley is a technical writer in an IT company in Cork. He is also the organiser of the Irish Blog Awards, writes a technology column for the Sunday Tribune, is the former chairman of broadband lobby group IrelandOffline and talks to organisations and enterprises about technology trends and social media. 

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Robert Loch
Robert is co-founder of That's Useful, an early stage startup in the social media space. Robert also runs Internet People, a London based community for the Internet sector. Previously Robert co-founded Soflow Inc, which raised $5 million in 2006 to develop social networking concepts, and MarketingVOX which he sold in 2003.

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Chad Wollen
Chad Wollen joined AOL at the end of 2005 and is responsible for Consumer Insights, Customer Relations Management, Customer Processes and Media Innovation. He reports to Rod Day, the CFO of AOL Europe.

Having worked in digital media for over ten years, Chad’s mission at AOL is to drive innovation by joining up insight and foresight with new product development and customer experience.

Before joining AOL, Chad worked at Yahoo! Mobile Europe as Head of Marketing and Strategy, specialising in the roll out of Yahoo! products and services across a European platform. Prior to that, he was Associate Director & Head of Knowledge Venturing at the Henley Centre Headlight Vision.  

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JP Rangaswami
JP Rangaswami is the Managing Director, Service Design for BT Design – BT Group’s IT design and delivery business. It has total responsibility for designing, building and implementing the IT and business processes, systems, networks (non-Openreach) and technologies. JP is responsible for group operations as well as enterprise management platforms and web technologies. He has extensive international experience and is passionate about delivering outstanding end-to-end customer experience. He has a record for innovation and collaboration that underpins his customer-focused delivery of major global programmes.

JP joined BT from Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein where he served as Global CIO demonstrating recognised market leadership in the use of innovative tools and techniques. He is a compelling advocate for community-based "opensource" development methods and practices.
He is fervent blogger (www.confusedofcalcutta.com) and a regular speaker at industry events, particularly on innovation and opensource. He was named CIO of the Year by Waters Magazine in 2003, CIO Innovator of the Year by the European Technology Forum in 2004 and is named as one of the top 10 CIOs in silicon.com’s CIO50 list for 2007.

He is an Advisory Board member of CAL-IT and a Charter Member of TiE UK, along with memberships of the IoD, the ACM and the IEEE. He is a Fellow of the British Computer Society (BCS) and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (RSA). JP is also a Freeman of the Information Technologists Company (a London City Livery Company, also known as the Worshipful Company of Information Technologists). 

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