DEMO: The Launchpad for Emerging Technology

Robin Baker

VP, Business Development & Markets
AMEE

Robin Baker is vice president of business development and markets for AMEE, The World’s Energy Meter.

AMEE is a neutral aggregation platform designed to measure and track all the energy data in the world. This includes aggregating every emission factor, algorithm and methodology related to CO2 and energy assessments, and all the consumption data (fuel, water, waste, quantitative and qualitative factors) of everything on Earth.

Baker has a varied background in risk management, corporate governance and compliance, and over 20 years of senior management experience at both early-stage and public companies. At these companies he has managed corporate strategy, marketing, operations and business development. He holds a BA in Economics and an MS in Management Sciences and Operational Research.

Suneet Bhatt

Co-founder
Dream Village

Suneet Bhatt co-founded Dream Village, a for-profit social enterprise that uses full-color children's books and an interactive Web portal to educate children on social, economic and environmental issues.

In 1998, when Bhatt graduated from Rutgers University, he was advised (by people he still respects and loves) against joining the Peace Corps or another public-interest organization and was encouraged to take a "real job." After spending six years developing substantive skills in corporate strategy, product development, customer research and project management with organizations like Prudential Financial and D&B (Dun & Bradstreet), Bhatt realized that he needed a career change; one that related better to his interests coming out of Rutgers but included the skills he had learned in the private sector. He entered Duke University's Fuqua School of Business to pursue an MBA in Social Entrepreneurship.

After graduating in May 2006, he spent a year with a public sector consultancy, where he worked on a business plan for a non-profit real estate organization (that eventually fell victim to the real estate meltdown) and led a corporate re-branding effort that was recognized by the Web Marketing Association as the Consulting Standard of Excellence. He learned from both experiences, but his desire to recommit to the entrepreneurial and socially responsible led him to start his own consulting practice (Social Symmetry) in October 2007, with clients such as GlobalGiving, Charity: Water, the Local Initiatives Support Corporation and a number of startup social enterprises. All of these experiences positioned Bhatt to form Dream Village in October 2007, which is currently in beta and scheduled to launch nationwide on March 20, 2009.

Bhatt graduated from Rutgers University with a BA in English and earned an MBA, with distinction, from Duke University's Fuqua School of Business with a concentration in Social Entrepreneurship.

Max Engel

Product Lead
MySpaceID

Max Engel is the product lead for the MySpaceID. He joined MySpace in June 2008 to help create an open platform that gives developers access to the MySpace social layer. The initiative embraces standards such as OpenSocial, OAuth and OpenID to provide a robust identity platform to the community. Previous to MySpace, Engel was at Yahoo!, initially with the Games team working on community tools for developers and players, and then later became a member of the Yahoo! Open Strategy initiative, where he worked on the application platform and OpenSocial implementation. He holds a BA in Psychology from Yale University.

David Hornik

General Partner
August Capital

For more than a decade, David has worked with technology startups throughout the software sector. In 2000, David joined August Capital to invest broadly in information technology companies, with a focus on enterprise application and infrastructure software, as well as consumer facing software and services.

Prior to joining August Capital, David was an intellectual property and corporate attorney at Venture Law Group and Perkins Coie. In his legal practice, David represented high tech startups in all aspects of their formation, financing, and operations, including the likes of Yahoo!, Evite (Ticketmaster) and Ofoto (Kodak). Before that, David was a litigator in New York City at Cravath, Swaine & Moore.

David has an eclectic educational background. He holds an AB in Computer Music from Stanford University, an M.Phil in Criminology from Cambridge University and a JD from Harvard Law School.

David is currently a lecturer at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, where he teaches intellectual property, and the Harvard Law School, where he teaches entrepreneurship and venture capital. He is the author of VentureBlog, the first venture capital blog, and VentureCast, the first venture capital podcast, and is the founder and executive producer of The Lobby conference, an annual gathering of the thought leaders of the digital media ecosystem.

Sam Lawrence

Chief Marketing Officer
Jive Software

Sam has 15 years of technology marketing experience ranging from start-ups to Fortune-level hardware, productivity software, communications and media companies.

Prior to Jive Software, Sam was the Senior Vice President in charge of the global Microsoft Office marketing efforts at McCann Erickson--including Microsoft Office, Microsoft Sharepoint Server, Live Meeting and Live Communication Server. Sam has been Vice President of eBusiness & IT for 3Com, Vice President of Marketing for CNET, Vice President of Business Development for EuroRSCG and was Director of Dell Computer Corporation's consumer and SMB online business.

Sam lives with his wife and two sons in Portland.

Kevin Marks

Developer Advocate
Google

Kevin Marks is a developer advocate for OpenSocial at Google, bringing external developers and Google engineers together to make a better Web. Over the last 20 years, he's alternated between working for giant companies and founding startups - BBC, The UK MultiMedia Corporation, Apple QuickTime, Technorati and now Google. The common thread has been working out how people, computers and media can complement each other, and solving the engineering and social problems where they meet. He is one of the driving forces behind microformats.org and advisor to the Open Rights Group. He wants you to remember that URLs are people too, and his URL is http://epeus.blogspot.com.

Dave Morin

Facebook Senior Platform Manager

Dave Morin is the Senior Platform Manager at Facebook, where he is responsible for the company’s platform strategy and further expanding the Facebook developer community. Dave joined Facebook from Apple, where he became the Manger of Creation & Collaboration technologies after his tenure as Manager of Student Marketing. Prior to Apple, Dave founded DM Design Studios, a design focused technology and Internet software company. Dave holds a bachelor’s degree in economics and business from the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Joseph Smarr

Chief Platform Architect
Plaxo

Joseph Smarr is chief platform architect at Plaxo. He is currently leading Plaxo’s “Open Social Web” initiative to put users back in control of who they know when using socially enabled sites by using open data-sharing standards. An active participant in the Web 2.0 community, Smarr has built Web applications for many years, including Plaxo’s online address book, Web widgets and the Plaxo 3.0 rich AJAX address book, calendar and sync tool, for which he was architect and lead developer. Smarr has a BS and MS from Stanford University in Artificial Intelligence.

Thomas Sly

Business Development Manager
Google

Tom Sly is part of Google's New Business Development team, where he is focused on supporting new products through strategic partnerships and technology licensing deals. Sly began his career as a consultant for Deloitte, where he spent several years helping Fortune 100 companies improve their customer relationship management functions. Sly received his Bachelor of Arts in Communications from Boston College and his Master of Business Administration from Harvard Business School.

Raju Vegesna

Raju is an evangelist for Zoho and is one of the foremost thought leaders in the Office 2.0 revolution. Raju is one of the key people responsible for developing the strategic direction of the Zoho Suite. He is an avid blogger (see: blogs.zoho.com), and users of Zoho are encouraged to contact him directly. Prior to joining AdventNet, Raju co-founded an Internet services company serving the educational market. He holds a Bachelors degree in Computer Science.