Mobile Device and the User Experience '08

Adrien Pitrat has a MA in cognitive and experimental psychology from Canada as well as an MA in usability from France. Has taught psychology 2 years in the UK before working at Bouygues Telecom as a usability specialist. He works on a wide variety of topics such as WAP services, web sites, set top boxes UIs, vocal services and so on...

Alejandro has over 12 years of experience in the telecoms industry. Alejandro has recently joined Yahoo! Connected Life team headquartered in London from Vodafone where he occupied various roles in Vodafone Spain, most recently as Head of Mobile Internet. He has also worked for Vodafone Group in the UK and Germany as part of the Vodafone Global organisation where he played a major role in driving Vodafone's global content roadmap and strategy across Europe and Asia. Prior to this, Alejandro worked as a senior consultant for Alcatel Telecom Software & Services in Spain & South America. Alejandro Romero has an MSc in Industrial Engineering from the UMA University in Spain. He also has an MBA, with an Economics major from Henley Management College (UK)“

Andrew Swartz is a Managing Consultant at Serco Usability Services, designing and leading commercial research projects, with a special focus on mobile hardware and software. He also has a particular interest in the effects of high technology on society and democracy. Before coming to Serco, Andrew spent eight years working at Apple Computer on instructional design and usability issues for projects ranging from HyperCard, the first commercial hypertext product, to Newton, the first commercial PDA (personal digital assistant). He also worked for three years at a company that developed police intelligence software.

Andrew studied Psychology at Yale University where he graduated summa cum laude (highest honours) as a Scholar of the House. In addition to his usability work, Andrew has worked and volunteered as a butcher, a blood bank worker, a medical researcher measuring the size of pancreatic nuclei, and escorting elderly ladies to church sherry socials.

Asokan Thiyagarajan serves as a technology evangelist at the Ecosystem & Market Development team of Motorola. As an evangelist, he is responsible for recommending strategies to address market and technology trends as well as strategic alliances with key developers. He is a respected speaker at international conferences on technology. He authors technology and visionary articles for leading magazines around the world.

Asokan has over 19 years of international experience in high technology sectors, developing software and communication systems. Asokan has skills blended in technology, business, engineering and management, and is very effective in Technology Management.

Prior to Motorola, Asokan held a variety of senior development, operations and strategic management positions at companies such as Nokia, Ericsson and Compaq (HP). He also has entrepreneurial experience, having co-founded a technology company.

Asokan holds a Bachelors Degree in Computer Science, from Madurai University, India.

Barbara Ballard is founder and President of Little Springs Design, a full service design agency providing the heads of marketing, product, and user experience the help to optimally engage with their clients over mobile phones. She has been working on mobile services, devices, web sites, and applications since 1998.

Barbara contends that mobile user experience goes beyond simply designing for the small screen, as the mobile is both more and less than the PC. She has recently published "Designing the Mobile User Experience" to help user experience professionals make the transition to mobile.

Bernd Hoogkamp joined Teliasonera International Carrier in 2005. Bernd has close to 10 years experience in the Telecommunications industry in various roles within wholesale, interconnection and the regulatory field. Prior to joining TeliaSonera International Carrier Bernd worked as Interconnect Manager at Orange Netherlands. Prior to Orange Netherlands, Bernd held several wholesale related positions in various companies in the Netherlands. Bernd holds a Bachelors degree in International Business and languages from the Hogeschool Arnhem en Nijmegen in The Netherlands

Brett Simpson:
Brett focuses on mobile phones, GPS, and the wireless semiconductor sector at Arete. Before co-founding Arete, Brett spent two years specialising in telecommunications equipment and semiconductors at Goldman Sachs International. Prior to his time at Goldman, Brett had three years with Ericsson, working in a business development role covering all aspects of wireline and wireless telecom infrastructure. He holds a first-class honours degree in Technology from Robert Gordon University.

Carl Taylor has worked for Hutchison Group since 2000 developing new applications and services for its 3G networks, and in the creation of Hutchison's mobile technology strategy including the X-series products. Carl is Hutchison's representative to the GSMA Executive Management Committee, the Services Review Group and the Mobile Advertising Programme. He is also the principal Hutchison representative to the dotMobi Product Steering Group, and W3C. He has a history in mobile technologies dating back to 1987 with the first CT2 cellphone systems.

Dave Marshall joined Plantronics in June 2005 as a Senior EMEA expert with responsibility for the management and development of the headset and wireless office portfolio relevant to the business markets, as well as developing relationships with key industry partners. He is now focussed on the Telecommunications market, taking advantage of his fixed and mobile background.

Before joining Plantronics Marshall was head of product management for mobile operator Orange UK, serving innovative products and services for the business market, basing them on customer insight.

Prior to joining Orange, Marshall was EMEA head of notebooks at Dell where he defined the EMEA Latitude brand strategy, spearheaded the launch into the PDA market and drove the consumer notebook business across EMEA. Previously Marshall held a number of positions at blue chip technology companies including Panasonic UK, AEG Olympia, Epson and British Telecom.

Jonas Kronlund is a technology manager at Elisa Corporation, a leading telecommunications provider in Finland. He has for several years been involved in the research and development of innovative and interactive mobile media services, for example by leading the Finnish Mobile TV project.

Leland Rechis is a Mobile UX designer at Google. He works on a wide range of Google's mobile efforts, his key projects include Mobile Search and the Android platform. Other Google products for which Leland has done design work include the relaunch of Blogger and launch of Google Transit.

Prior to Google, Leland has designed experiences for Yahoo! HotJobs, BarnesandNoble.com, Razorfish and Organic.

A born and bred New Yorker, Leland spends time in Google's New York and Mountain View locations, allowing him to enjoy both good bagels and long bike rides in the fog.

Francis MacDougall co-founded GestureTek in 1986 and drives the technology strategy of the company, leading the R&D and production teams as well as all patenting and licensing activities. Francis developed and patented the company’s core single camera gesture control technologies and led the creation of the application development engine, tracking engines, and numerous other capabilities that form the base of GestureTek’s product offerings. Francis is a specialist in real-time system design and has experience spanning low level embedded architectures incorporating ASIC and DSP solutions, communication systems design, network audio/video transport, image processing and computer vision, as well as high level implementations under consumer and commercial architectures. Francis is a creative force in technology and product development and excels at finding the rapid path to creating marketable solutions for next generation user requirements.

Fredrik Ademar is working with new products and technology strategies as CTO of TAT (The Astonishing Tribe). TAT is a mobile user interface company pushing the visual limits of mobile experiences in a rapidly increasing set of devices world-wide. Fredrik has been working in the mobile industry for the last decade, and before joining TAT, he was heavily involved in the evolution of embedded browser technologies, at Teleca/Obigo and industry forums like WAPForum/OMA. Prior work also includes establishment of a small Bluetooth start-up, and product development at Telia R&D (now TeliaSonera) extending mobile internet services with multimodal interaction schemes e.g. for unified messaging. Fredrik's formal background is a Master of Science in Computer Science and Engineering.

Gus is chairman of Alloy, a product design consultancy offering a full scope of innovation services from consumer research to engineering specifications.

A RCA trained car designer with degrees in Mechanical Engineering and Systems Engineering, Gus has rare multi-disciplinary scope.

Over a 25 year career he has created or directed many hundreds of designs leading to many tens of millions mass-produced products, and recognised commercial and critical success. The common denominator is his strong focus on bringing better user experiences and professional brand marketing into high-tech industries, across many sectors from IT and communications to transport.

Haim Cohen Mintz, VP, Europe at Vringo.
Prior to Vringo, Haim was with Followap (2001-2007) which was acquired by Neustar (NASDAQ:NSR) in 2006 for $139 million where he was Head of Project Management, VP Strategic Accounts and VP Service Marketing.

Prior to Followap, Haim was a Managing Director and co-Founder of PCIT (1998-2001) an IT consulting firm with focus on ebusiness (ERP/CRM) and financial systems to the banking industry Customers included Haim graduated the Tel Aviv University Law School in 1997.

Ian joined Vodafone in 2004 to lead the global user experience work with handset manufacturers. He has recently moved to a more general role, looking across all UE team work to help harmonise its practices and transition to a more development-centric and internet-oriented approach. Ian has 15 years experience as a usability and user-centred design specialist and has consulted across many organisations and industries.

Mirjana Spasojevic is the Senior Principal Scientist at the Nokia Research Center in Palo Alto, California where she leads the mobile user interface innovation team called IDEA (Innovate, Design, Experience, Annimate). In her role as a user research evangelist and a passionate advocate for very human mobile experiences, she focuses on ethnographic and lab-based studies of mobile technologies. In the last several years she has been investigating how and why people use camera phones and has been conducting international studies of mobile web services. Prior to Nokia, Mirjana has worked as a senior design researcher at Yahoo! Mobile business unit, and a senior research scientist and project manager at HP Labs where she was a member of the Cooltown program. She holds a Ph.D. in computer science from Penn State University.

Markus Hohl is Head of Design at O2’s Own Branded Solutions (OBS) team in the UK delivering own branded handsets such as the XDA range and O2’s music phone Cocoon.

Markus has a degree in mechanical engineering in Germany and MDes from the Royal College of Art (RCA) in London. After a stint at VW concept cars he joined multidisciplinary design agency Pentagram, designing products for companies like Motorola, Samsung, Swatch, Unilever and Tesco. He set up his own industrial design agency Berlinlondon in 1999 with Geman business partner Susanne Ewert in Berlin and London designing numerous award winning products, of which the MP3 headphone ranges for Sennheiser achieved the biggest success so far.

In 2006 Markus joined O2 in order to fuse industrial design and UI design to create unique mobile devices, giving O2 differentiation in the market. Markus has also been teaching at the RCA since 2004.

Mark Rolston, Senior Vice President, Creative As the Senior Vice President for Creative at frog design, Mark Rolston is responsible for the creative direction of the company’s work for clients. He orchestrates teams of strategists, technologists, designers, information architects, analysts, and others to produce groundbreaking work for Fortune 500 clients.

As the founder of frog design’s digital media group in 1997, Mark was an early pioneer of digital media and the Internet. Called “the most talented web designer in Austin” by the Austin American Statesman, Mark has been personally responsible for extensive new media design work and user interfaces, including all of the Compaq Presario utility applications (audio playback, telephone, fax, etc) in the early 1990s. He managed the design of dell.com which launched in 1999, marking the birth of the most profitable website on the Internet. Recent user interface and eCommerce projects managed by Mark include work for clients such as i2, Microsoft, SAP, and Sun Microsystems.

Mark’s client roster has featured many of the world’s largest brands, including Acura, Dell, Disney, and Ford. He is an internationally recognized expert on the web, digital media, user interface, eCommerce, and mobile applications and has been widely quoted in the press, including Business Week, CIO, Design, HOW, Information Week, MacWeek, MacWorld, New Architect, PC Magazine, PC World, PC Week, and others.

Matthew Menz - Director, Consumer Experience Design, Motorola.
As Design Director for Motorola's European Design Studio, Matthew Menz is responsible for the user experience delivered across the product portfolio. Trained as a graphic designer, Matthew brings together visual, conceptual & thoughtful design responses to the often complex mobile industry. “The most interesting designs spring from a simple concept thoughtfully applied. Amazing solutions emerge as you uncover the underlying principles.” His approach to design reflects this philosophy. Prior to joining Motorola, Matthew lead design teams to create global solutions for companies such as IBM, Lotus, Nickelodeon, CIBC, Mass Mutual Financial Group, Dow Agro-sciences and Fila.

Michael joined Vodafone in 2003 to lead the global user experience function, having worked as a consultant helping Vodafone to create a centralised global UE capability serving the global footprint of Vodafone for all products and services across all digital touchpoints. Michael was part of the initial Vodafone live! launch team, responsible for the overall experience including the first camera handset in Europe. Michael ran the Japanese UE operations between 2004 and 2006. Earlier in his career he worked with Accenture in their communications practice serving key players in the fixed and mobile communications industry both in strategy and technology roles.

Richard Kramer:
After four years as the #1 rated technology analyst in Europe, Richard left his role as head of technology research at Goldman Sachs in January 2000 to form the first - and still only - independent technology research group in Europe. Unlike other analysts, Arete has no conflicts of interest preventing their telling the truth about technology. After the scandals surrounding deceptive and poor quality analysis, Arete found an increasing demand for its independent views on telecoms, software, semis and services. Richard has an industry background, having worked for Nortel and at a prestigious Columbia University economics think tank before six years in the City of London.

Rob Bamforth

Dr. Roberto Lattuada holds a PhD in GIS and 3D modelling from the University of London and a Master in Computer Science from the University of Milan. He has more than 15 years experience in the IT and Mobile industry having worked with companies such as Oracle(US), Vodafone(Italy) and TTPCom-Motorola(UK). He is currently based in the UK working for T-Mobile International in the Strategy and Innovation Group; he is responsible for the mobile devices OS/Platforms strategy for the company and for the Mobile Devices Selection.

Saverio Romeo is a Research Analyst with the Frost & Sullivan Europe Information & Communication Technologies Practice. He focuses on monitoring and analyzing emerging trends, technologies and market behavior in the mobile and wireless communications in Western and Eastern Europe. He also studies the impact of EU regulation and government technology policies on the mobile industry, and applications of mobile technologies in vertical markets.

Since joining Frost & Sullivan in March 2007, Saverio has completed the following studies: European Mobile Communication Outlook, Mobile Virtual Network Operators: Emerging Players in the European Mobile Market, Exploring The European Market of Mobile Smart Devices, Exploring the EU Research Policy in Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing and European Mobile Premium Content Market. Saverio has also been involved in consultancy projects with diverse clients such as IDA Ireland, GN, Capricode and Goldman Sachs. He also comments on mobile communication market in Europe for magazines and television channels such as IT Europa, BBC, CNBC and ANSA. He contributes to Convergence Conversation, the blog of Intellect, the ICT industry association.

Terrence Barr is a Senior Technologist at Sun Microsystems and Ambassador of the Java Mobile & Embedded Community. He has 15+ years of industry experience with more than 10 of those years at Sun. He has been working on various technical aspects of embedded systems and Java ME for a number of years including implementation and optimization of virtual machines, byte code hardware acceleration, and multiprocessor platforms. Terrence also participates or has participated in organizations such as JCP, OMA, EEMBC, and VITA, is author and co-author of a number of U.S. and European patents, and speaks frequently at various conferences around the world including JavaOne. Terrence is also the project owner of the ME Application Developers project.