Casting Off the Shackles
The Future of Wireless Mobility

Co-hosted by:

Chris Jones, Vice President & Principal Analyst, Canalys

Chris Jones was one of the three founders of Canalys in 1999, and is based in the Canalys Americas office in Palo Alto, California. Chris covers mobile devices (from mobile phones to notebook computers) and mobile applications. In 2000, Chris led Canalys into its first market-specific analysis area, smart phones and handhelds. With Chris as the lead mobile analyst, Canalys quickly became the leading provider and standard source of market data and analysis for smart phones and handhelds globally. The Smart Phone Analysis service is renowned for its quality, consistency, clear device segmentation, timeliness and respected team of responsive analysts. Chris and the team continue to add value for service clients by increasing the depth and breadth of this research. In 2003, Chris initiated Canalys’ research into location-based services (LBS) with the successful Mobile Navigation Analysis service. Canalys produced the industry’s first quarterly shipment tracking and analysis service which, like Smart Phone Analysis, became the recognised source of market intelligence in the LBS industry. Prior to joining Canalys, Chris spent five years with Gartner, mainly within Dataquest’s European PC group. His principal activities were to manage Dataquest’s quarterly PC market programme in Europe, to lead its research into handheld computing and to represent Europe within Dataquest’s worldwide PC analysis efforts. Before joining the PC group, Chris worked on projects for several research units, covering the networking, document management, storage and software markets.

Ben Jones, Vice President, Zynga

Ben Jones is Vice President of the mobile division at Zynga.  He recently served as President & Co-Founder of Six Degrees Games, a venture backed publisher of sports based virtual worlds that had partnerships with the NBA and Major League Baseball.  Prior to Six Degrees, he was a key executive that helped lead JAMDAT from a start-up in 2001 through a successful IPO in September 2005. JAMDAT was sold to Electronic Arts in February 2006.

Dev Khare, Vice President, Venrock

Dev Khare is Vice President at Venrock, a premier venture capital firm with offices in Palo Alto, New York, Cambridge, MA, and Israel. Dev focuses on software, Internet and mobile investments. He sits on the boards of Aha Mobile, Lavante and SlideShare and supports Venrock’s investments in Aria Systems, BillFloat and Redbeacon. Dev previously co-founded Covigo, a mobile application server company, acquired by Symbol Technologies. He blogs at http://www.nextwala.com and is on Twitter @dkhare.

Kent Lindstrom, CEO, PlacePop

Kent Lindstrom is the founder and CEO of PlacePop, which provides a mobile loyalty card platform for local businesses. Previously, he was CEO of the pioneering social network Friendster, backed by Kleiner Perkins and Benchmark capital. During the tenure, the business grew to be the 7th largest web property in the world, and the #1 social network in Asia. Previously he was co-founder of NetRead, and lead a consulting practice at Deloitte & Touche . He holds an MBA from Kellogg at Northwestern University.

Curtis Sasaki, Vice President, Platform Product Management, Research in Motion (RIM)

Curtis Sasaki is Vice President, Platform Product Management at Research in Motion.  He is responsible for the product management of several new initiatives, developer platform programs, and AppWorld.  Prior to RIM, Curtis was Vice President at Sun Microsystems managing development for Sun’s global web sites, desktop software products, and Java for consumer products.  Prior to Sun, he held executive positions at Apple, NeXT, and General Magic.