This year's Speaker Faculty

This is the current list of confirmed contributors
at Mobile Web in Africa 2010
 (we don't think that it looks too shabby so far...)

As more and more of the leading lights from the mobile industry are confirmed
their details will be included here:

• Antonie Roux, CEO Internet Global Operations, Naspers Group
• Dr Marc Smith, Chief Social Scientist, Connected Action Consulting Group
• Russell Buckley, VP Global Alliances, AdMob
• Arthur Goldstuck, MD, World Wide Worx 

Photos and Biographies:

Antonie Roux, CEO Internet Global Operations, Naspers Group
In December 1979 he joined Nasionale Pers (a printing/media company) as a Junior Technician. In 1982 he was promoted to Head of Information – Technology Department at Naspers. Antonie was at Naspers from 1982 to 1985.
In April 1985, Antonie joined M-Net (Pay TV) as Head of Information Technology (Director and one of the founder members). He stayed at M-Net until December 1989. In January 1990, he moved to Milan, Italy where he was appointed Head of Projects at Telepiu (Pay TV).
From October 1991 to December 1996, Antonie worked as Technical Director at MIH Nethold, Hoofddorp, The Netherlands.
In January 1997, Antonie was appointed Chief Executive Officer MWEB. After MWEB’s success – was time for Antonie to forward to the next challenge!
In August 2002, Antonie was appointed CEO MIH Internet Division and relocated to Bangkok, Thailand.
Under his guidance the Group’s internet businesses has grown from strength to strength. As example Tencent (QQ), & their successful listing on HongKong stock exchange.
December 2006 under Antonie’s guidance the group bought 30% of Internet Group Mail.ru in Moscow. The first investment for the Group in Russia.
Antonie is dynamic, energetic, innovator a true leader, only to name but a few of his qualities.
August 2008 Antonie was awarded with the highest accolade within the Naspers Group, namely the Phil Weber Award.
Antonie is very much a family man, he is 52 years old and is married with three children.
Wife Sonja, son Andre & daughters Petronel & Marte.

 

Dr Marc Smith, Chief Social Scientist, Connected Action Consulting Group
Marc Smith is a sociologist specializing in the social organization of online communities and computer mediated interaction. He founded and managed the Community Technologies Group at Microsoft Research in Redmond, Washington and led the development of social media reporting and analysis tools for Telligent Systems.  Smith leads the Connected Action consulting group and lives and works in Silicon Valley, California.  Smith is a co-founder of the
Social Media Research Foundation (http://www.smrfoundation.org/), a non-profit devoted to open tools, data, and scholarship related to social media research.
Smith is the co-editor with Peter Kollock of Communities in Cyberspace (Routledge), a collection of essays exploring the ways identity; interaction and social order develop in online groups. Along with Derek Hansen and Ben Shneiderman, he is the co-author and editor of a
book Analyzing Social Media Networks with NodeXL: Insights from a connected world, forthcoming from Morgan-Kaufmann in July 2010 which is
a guide to mapping connections created through computer-mediated interactions.
Smith's research focuses on computer-mediated collective action: the ways group dynamics change when they take place in and through social cyberspaces. Many "groups" in cyberspace produce public goods and organize themselves in the form of a commons (for related papers see: http://www.connectedaction.net/marc-smith/). Smith's goal is to visualize these social cyberspaces, mapping and measuring their structure, dynamics and life cycles. At Microsoft, he developed the "Netscan" web application and data mining engine that allows researchers studying Usenet newsgroups and related repositories of threaded conversations to get reports on the rates of posting, posters, crossposting, thread length and frequency distributions of activity.  Smith applied  this work to the development of a generalized community analysis platform for Telligent, providing a web based system for groups of all sizes to discuss and publish their material to the web and analyze the emergent trends that result.  He contributes to the open and free NodeXL project (http://www.codeplex.com/nodexl) that adds social network analysis features to the familiar Excel spreadsheet.  A tutorial on social network analysis is evolving into a book and is freely available (http://casci.umd.edu/NodeXL_Teaching).  NodeXL enables social network analysis of email, twitter, flickr, www, facebook and other network data sets.
The Connected Action consulting group (http://www.connectedaction.net) applies social science methods in general and social network analysis techniques in particular to enterprise and internet social media usage.  SNA analysis of data from message boards, blogs, wikis, friend networks, and shared file systems can reveal insights into organizations and processes.  Community managers can gain actionable insights into the volumes of community content created in their social media repositories.  Mobile social software applications can visualize patterns of association that are otherwise invisible.
Smith received a B.S. in International Area Studies from Drexel University in Philadelphia in 1988, an M.Phil. in social theory from Cambridge University in 1990, and a Ph.D. in Sociology from UCLA in 2001. He is an affiliate faculty at the Department of Sociology at the University of Washington and the College of Information Studies at the University of Maryland.  Smith is also a Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the Media-X Program at Stanford University.

Russell Buckley, VP Global Alliances, AdMob
Russell is a leading expert on mobile marketing, having overseen thousands of campaigns since 2000. MobHappy, his blog about mobile technology and mobile marketing, is one of the most popular focusing on this area. Before specializing in mobile, he spent over 15 years working in marketing, including advising leading brands such as Coca-Cola, Diageo, Texaco and Mars. In 2000, he was recruited to be Director of Marketing of mobile marketing start up, ZagMe, one of the leading pioneers in mobile advertising and location based marketing. Russell learned about AdMob soon after the launch and joined as its first employee, with the remit of launching AdMob into the EMEA market.
Russell is currently Global Chairman Emeritus of the Board of The Mobile Marketing Association, a founder of Mobile Monday in Germany and has published many articles, as well as a white paper on location based marketing.

Arthur Goldstuck, MD, World Wide Worx 
Arthur is an award-winning writer, analyst and commentator on Internet, mobile and business and consumer technologies. He heads the World Wide Worx research organisation, leading groundbreaking research into how change is affecting businesses large and small. Clients of the research include South Africa’s major financial institutions and corporations, Government departments and agencies, and international organisations.
Arthur is author of 17 books, including South Africa’s best-selling IT book yet, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Internet", and the current guide to mobilising the workplace, “The Mobile Office”. Through Penguin Books, he has also published five books on urban legends.
For his work in uncovering technology trends, Arthur was a finalist in the science and technology category of the Men’s Health Man of the Year awards in 2009.
He is a regular speaker at conferences, universities and corporate events and has presented his insights to audiences across the world.