Digital Shoreditch Festival 2011

Nick Appleyard

Dr Nick Appleyard’s first career was as a device physicist, but he gave this up to join the semiconductor manufacturing industry in early 2001, with timing that still smarts. He worked on the development of plasma etching and thin film tooling and techniques for Trikon Technologies and Surface Technology Systems, and still claims the world record for cutting a trench into silicon using a plasma, at 8 inches per hour. Nick joined the new Technology Strategy Board in July 2007 as Lead Technologist for Electronics, Photonics and Electrical Systems. This involves formulating the strategies for government to invest in the future of technology-intensive industries, and then delivering on them. Nick is now leading the Technology Strategy Board’s efforts around the Digital Britain agenda, and is a director of Westmill wind farm in Oxfordshire.

David Bott

David Bott was appointed as director of innovation platforms in the Technology Strategy Board in July 2007. He was then made director of Innovation Programmes in July 2008.

He has sat on the UK government’s Technology Foresight Panel for Materials, was president of the Industrial Affairs Division of the Royal Society of Chemistry (2002-2004) and the co-chairman of the Strategy and Implementation Board of the Crystal Faraday Partnership on Green Chemistry (2001-2007). He is chairman of Oxford Biomaterials and a director of Apaclara and Spineless Design. He is also an advisor to FirstVentures, a venture capital fund focusing on advanced materials and nanotechnology. From 2006 until 2008 he was part time CEO of Materials UK, a organisation set up to implement and develop the work of the materials innovation and growth team.

Andy Cameron

Andy Cameron is an artist, designer, curator, writer and educator. His focus is interactive media.
Andy co-founded the antirom studio – an influential art and design collective – in London in 1994. In the same year he created the Hypermedia Research Centre at the University of Westminster.
As a partner at antirom he led major interactive projects with commercial clients and arts institutions, won D&AD and BIMA awards for interaction design, and published two critical essays – ‘Dissimulations, the Illusion of Interactivity’ and ‘The Californian Ideology’ (with Richard Barbrook).

He co-founded Romandson Interactive in London 1999. In 2001 he was appointed visiting artist, and subsequently, Creative Director, in interaction design at Fabrica, the Benetton research centre in Italy. At Fabrica he has been responsible for the research programme in interactive media, organising Fabrica workshops with visiting artists like Yugo Nakamura, Golan Levin, Amy Franchesini, Casey Reas and Zach Lieberman, as well as guiding Benetton’s online and interactive communication strategy.

Robin Wong

Robin left UMIST with a degree in Management Sciences in 1999. After a highly successful career in online gaming he entered the world of digital advertising in 2003 working on a string of award-winning projects for AKQA, Carat, Imagination and Reuters. In 2005, he joined Agency Republic as a Senior Creative Technologist, moving to the role of Head of Creative Technology within 3 months. During the next 4 years, Robin led technical delivery on a series of multi-award winning websites and built up one of the best flash development teams in the world. In late 2008, Robin took on the role of Delivery Director with responsibility for operational delivery and R+D across the agency. Robin is a keen practitioner of Agile methodologies, especially Scrum. As well as founding Weir+Wong, he’s also the founder of CeeTee, a collection of leading Creative Technologists from across the London Agency Spectrum.

Jon Andrews

Jon’s been working in an agency environment for ten years now, currently Head of Creative Technology at BBH London where he specializes in physical prototyping and digital applications for web or mobile.

He codes and develops himself but more importantly drives technology from the conceptual phase, with one foot in the creative department, the other in tech. Jon works closely with Creative Directors and Creative Teams to inject innovative technologies into campaigns. Constantly looking for technology to fuse together with a brilliant creative idea, whether it’s using an awesome new piece of innovation or an algorithm that’s been sitting in a little drawer for 10 years. Maybe it’ll be both and Jon will end up hacking it together with his trusty soldering iron!

Vassilios Alexiou

Vassilios Alexiou set up Less Rain in 1997, after meeting co-founder Lars Eberle and winning the 1997 Student D&AD award for Interactive Media. Since then he has played an instrumental part in the conception & direction of Less Rain’s output, including the BAFTA award winning work ‘Eyes Only’, the online graffiti community ‘www.vandlasquad.com’, a wide variety of internet projects for Red Bull as well as ‘The Land of Me’, a collection of playful learning activities that adults and children can enjoy together.
As Creative Director at Less Rain, he is interested in engaging, rich media online environments that promote creativity & exchange.

Scott Seaborn

Scott has worked in advertising for 15 years and with mobile for the past 10. He began his career in radio then he worked with internet and digital disciplines before concentrating on mobile.

Today, Scott is Head of Mobile Technologies at Ogilvy Group UK and Co-Chairman for the UK Mobile Marketing Association.

Over the past 3 years Scott’s work with mobile technology has won more than 15 awards including a recent Cannes Lion for a mobile application. Recently, he was described in the press as “one of the few people in the world that know as much about the potential of mobile marketing; he was one of its pioneers.

Matthew Hawn

Matthew Hawn is the Vice President of Product for Last.fm, he is in charge of the execution and performance of product strategy. In his capacity as VP Product, Hawn leads innovations in business planning, concept creation, user experience, design, and product development. Hawn has also been responsible for launching the new Last.fm app and growing the audience of Last.fm on a global basis.

Matthew Hawn joined Last.fm and the CBS Interactive Music Group from Sony Music where he held the role of Vice President for Sony Music’s international direct-to-consumer group, creating the global framework that Sony Music labels use for direct marketing, customer relationship management and ecommerce. Hawn has worked in digital media for 17 years, with much of that time spent on projects and services built around music.

Mo Firouzabadian

Mo Firouzabadian is Head of Connected Devices of Buongiorno S.p.A. Prior to this role he has been responsible for Buongiorno’s Business to Operator product offering Globally, as well as opening Buongiorno’s operations in Turkey. He has worked across Strategy, Business Development, Product Development, Technology, Marketing, CRM and Organisational transformation. He has been working with the top global hardware manufacturers, wireline and wireless telecommunication companies, media companies and FMCGs. Before joining Buongiorno, Mo worked at the start-up ZedGravity focused on monetising Narrow-Band networks with richmedia communication. Mo began his career starting his own company whilst at the London School of Economics, where he gained a Bachelor’s Degree in Economics in 1998.

Sarah Wood

Sarah left the ivory towers of academia in 2006 to found Unruly Media – the leading exponent of social video advertising, with offices in London, Paris and New York. When she’s not ensuring the smooth delivery of Unruly campaigns, Sarah spends way too much time watching clips on Viral Video Chart. The first video ever shared: Introducing the Book; favourite meme evuh: Play him off keyboard cat; most embarrassing viral fail: she is taken in by video hoaxes and Internet shenanigans on a daily basis and never seems to learn: Alpine Legend – how cool is that game? Google Translate for Animals – mmm, not before time…IPhone Table? Hell yeah, I’ll have 2!

Malcolm Poynton

Malcolm joined SapientNitro in February 2010 as the agency’s first European Chief Creative Officer. In this role, Malcolm is responsible for overseeing creative for clients across the region, the creative operation across Europe and developing SapientNitro’s idea engineering brand offering.

Before joining SapientNitro Malcolm was Executive Creative Director of Ogilvy Group UK and created Dove’s now legendary ‘Campaign for Real Beauty’ campaign. As creative leader, Malcolm has led MCSaatchi, Saatchi&Saatchi and Ogilvy to win Agency of the Year titles.

Malcolm was born in New Zealand and started his career by accident when he joined a New Zealand start-up agency

Florian Schmitt

Florian is the Creative Director of Hi-ReS!, a digital agency he founded in 1999 with his partner Alexandra Jugovic, also its Creative Director. Florian also runs Nanika (http://www.nanikawa.com) with Andreas Müller, focusing on new technologies and interactive installation work beyond traditional input and output for clients such as Hyundia, Nokia and Sony.

With their original work rooted in graphic design, fine art, product design, film and music, they eventually decided to combine all these separate disciplines in one medium and started to experiment with Adobe’s Flash technology. Their first self-initiated online project, soulbath.com, garnered worldwide attention, and led to commercial work, most importantly the website for the film Requiem for a Dream by director Darren Aronofsky who they collaborate with to date.

Jon Kingsbury

Jon Kingsbury is the Director for NESTA’s Creative Economy Programmes, with a remit to encourage growth in creative organisations by developing successful models for innovation.

Before becoming interested in driving creative business growth, Jon held a number of senior editorial commissioning roles at the BBC and Channel 4, always in the space where linear TV broadcasting meets interactive content. Until recently, he was Head of External Supply, Future Media & Technology at the BBC where he acted as liaison with the digital media industry. He was also a NESTA Associate Director for the Creative Economy, before taking up a full-time post in January 2011.

Kam Star

Kam Star is a digital media entrepreneur, inventor and an award winning games developer. Creating his first computer game in 1986, he studied Architecture and is deeply passionate about innovation in play, influence, games and social media. Founder of PlayGen, Kam designs and develops playful solutions and platforms for delivering engaging experiences across the digital landscape. He has produced gaming projects for the BBC, AVIVA, Eden Project, UNESCO, McKinsey, Oxford and Cambridge Universities, NESTA, MoD, NHS, TSB, Wellcome Trust and many more.

Kam is the founder of Digital Shoreditch, with the aim of bringing the outstanding creative, technical and entrepreneurial talent closer together and to one day create the SXSW of London.