Games go Social

Don't miss out on the most powerful gaming revolution since the release of Pong, the iconographic videogame. After fundamentally changing the internet and the ways people communicate and interact, the entire games industry is about to be socialized. During the Picnic special 'Games go Social' on September 26 in Amsterdam this phenomena will be explored in detail. From 09.00 to 17.00 we will present you a jam-packed program of inspirational presentations and dynamic panel sessions.

Games go Social is a full day event probing the synergies between games and communities, organized in collaboration with PICNIC, the undeniably most original, pioneering and unusual get-together for creatives. The trend 'Games go social' is predicted to revolutionize the gaming industry, fusing games, communities and networks by playing against your friends, family and people you know (or don’t). Unless you’ve been stranded on a desert island without an iPhone to pass your time, you won’t have missed the phenomena of social networking. What started off as niche communities, and sub-culture, has evolved to mainstream social activities capturing all sorts of our online endeavours, from blogging, flickering and digging to instant messaging, profiling, dating and gaming. To this add the latest pass-time of the typical iSocialite, namely Community Gaming. And this is where it gets interesting. Because games fused with social communities turns traditional (console, hard-core) gaming on its head. Now reaching out to anyone out there, instantly creating critical mass, new consumers are being pulled into the game.

To explore this phenomena, from it’s roots in MMORPG’s to the latest causal games dedicated communities we have invited a selected number of creatives, visionaries and industry leaders to share their visions, ideas, case-studies and strategies. Meet luminaries from leading companies such as EA, Playfish, Spil Games, Game Entertainment Europe, Social Gaming Network (SGN), Myspace and Hyves, during a jam-packed program of inspirational presentations and dynamic panel sessions.

Check out the Program!
Games go Social will present to you speakers and panel members for a full day of intellectual stimulation and entrepreneurial inspiration.

09.00 Coffee
09.30 Opening by Chair of Games go Social Frank van Oirschot, CCO Ex Machina
09.40 Keynote “Games go Social” by Kristian Segerstråle, CEO Playfish
10.10 "Venture Capital and the Games Industry" by Maximilian Niederhofer, Associate Atlas Venture
10.40 Drinks & Social
11.00 “Social Gaming 2.0” by Shervin Pishevar, CEO Social Gaming Network
11.30 Panel "Games and Social Networks" moderated by Yme Bosma, Hyves.
Panel members: Shervin Pishevar SGN, Maximilian Niederhofer Atlas Venture, Kristian Segerstråle Playfish, Bert Van Wassenhove ONE Agency
12.10 Lunch
13.10 “Evolution of a Games Developer – Case watAgame and GoSupermodel” by Marko Orenius, VP Business Development watAgame and Joost Bazelmans, Managing Director Red Chocolate
13.40 Presentation by Yme Bosma, Business Development Manager Hyves
14.00 Case Study Hyves/Sportdreams by Sebastiaan Postma, General Manager Sportdreams
14.20 "Building social networks around games - a publishers perspective" Tobias Berlin, Director Product Analysis Bigpoint
14.50 Drinks & Social
15.10 Panel "Games as Social Communities" moderated by Martin de Ronde, OneBigGame
Panel members: Maarten Brands Virtual Fairground, Jurriaan van Rijswijk Game Entertainment Europe, Marc van der Chijs Spil Games Asia, Henrik Riis, watAgame
15.50 "Games as Social Objects - From Online Contacts to Real Friends" by Jeroen Elfferich, CEO Ex Machina
16.20 Closing and Toast! Sponsored by One Agency

Don’t miss this one off chance to find out the visions, the predictions and the future that is already here! Go to www.picnicnetwork.org/tickets to get your ticket for as little as EUR 95;-.

Hope to see you on September 26!

Ex Machina

Games go Social is sponsored by Social Gaming Network

Presenter Biographies

Kristian Segerstråle, CEO Playfish
Kristian is the CEO and co-founder of Playfish, a social games company. Prior to Playfish Kristian served as Managing Director of Europe of Glu Mobile (Nasdaq: GLUU), and was a co-founder of Glu Mobile Europe (Macrospace Ltd) in 2001. During his tenure at Glu, Kristian led the rapid growth of Glu's European business, the creation and distribution of 40+ mobile titles, as well as being a contributor to the company's successful IPO in Q1 2007. Kristian has been on the GDC Mobile advisory board since 2006 and was voted one of top-50 most influential executives in Mobile Entertainment in December 2006 in ME Magazine. He holds an MSc from London School of Economics and an MA (Cantab) in Economics from Cambridge University.

Maximilian Niederhofer, Associate Atlas Venture
Max Niederhofer is a two-time entrepreneur and seed investor in last.fm, sold to CBS for $280M in 2007. Prior to his PhD in management science at WHU in Germany, he worked at a hedge fund in New York, a strategy consulting firm in Germany and L’Oreal Strategic Marketing in Paris. Max has successfully exited one gaming investment at Atlas (Giga gaming TV sold to Premiere in 2007) and is actively looking at further opportunities. His hobbies include World of Warcraft and Python.

Shervin Pishevar, CEO Social Gaming Network
Named "Bill Gates' Worst Nightmare" by the Financial Times, Shervin is a visionary technology entrepreneur and published researcher. Shervin published critical research in JAMA at the age of 20 which helped lead to the Istanbul Protocol, banning physician involvement in state torture. He continued his high school science project at UC-Berkeley and LBL under a UC President's Fellowship, which led to his first patent on a new strategy for targeting and lysing malaria infected erythrocytes. At UC-Berkeley, Shervin was founder and Editor-in-Chief of Berkeley Scientific, the first undergraduate peer-reviewed research journal and recruited a peer review board comprised of such luminaries as Nobel Laureate Glenn Seaborg. Berkeley Scientific is still going strong after 10 years of continual publication. Shervin is a Board member of Freewebs (www.freewebs.com/) the 2nd largest web publisher in the world with over 20 million members. Shervin was President of Freewebs since January 2005 and is now the Founder, CEO and visionary behind the leading Social Gaming Company, SGN.

Marko Orenius, VP Business Development watAgame
Marko Orenius joined Watagame in the spring of 2008 to lead the business development effort of a game developer company going global with their social game product. Prior to this challenge, Marko worked at Sulake, the developer and publisher of Habbo Hotel, one of the largest online teen communities. His role was the operational management and globalization of Habbo as it grew from two sites to fifteen in three years. Before working in the online area, Marko spent several years developing the early mobile content business for Sonera Zed, pioneering billing methods for content on mobiles and packaging consumer media for the platform.

Sebastiaan Postma, General Manager Sportdreams
Sebastiaan Postma is General Manager of Sportdreams, and international fantasy sports games producer, since October 2007. Sebastiaan has a long back ground in media strategy including use of Internet. He has also led Europe´s largest online dating company Meetic for the Dutch market. Going social is one of Sebastiaan´s true believes of how to break open and professionalise the fantasy sports gaming market.

Tobias Berlin, Director Product Analysis Bigpoint
Tobias was born 1978 in Germany. After finishing High School in the US, he studied Media Management and Media Science in Hannover, Germany. After working for SAP in the CRM Roll Out 2005, Tobias was appointed Project Manager for Cooperations at Bigpoint in January 2007 – at the beginning of their significant growth internationally. Since the end of 2007 Tobias is responsible for the product management and product analysis, turning market potentials and customer demands into revenues.

Jurriaan van Rijswijk, CCO Game Entertainment Europe
Jurriaan van Rijswijk M.Sc. Started with programming Pong on his Sinclair ZX81 spectrum mounted to a black and white TV he focused during his study at the University on climatologically models and Geographic Information Systems. At his first job he let people literally play with business and process models. The first ‘real’ game he was involved developing was for the second World Water Forum organized by the UN. For more than thirteen years (serious) gaming is Jurriaan’s main professional focus. He knows what’s going on in the mass consumer on-line gaming market. He is co-founder of Game Entertainment Europe www.ge-eu.com (the first pan-European publisher of Massive Multiplayers), co-founder of the GamesFactoryOnline www.gamesfactoryonline.com (producer of serious games) and shareholder in WZZRD www.wzzrd.nl , a European chain of game café’s.

Marc van der Chijs, CEO Spil Games Asia
Marc van der Chijs (35) came to China 8 years ago while working as financial controller for an automotive multinational. In 2002 he quit his job, studied Chinese for a while in Beijing and set up his first company. Among others he co-founded China’s biggest video site Tudou.com and he invested in several Chinese internet start-ups. Marc started Spil Games Asia in early 2006. Currently the company has online gaming portals in China, India, Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines. The biggest portals are in China, where Spil Games operates game.com.cn and xiaoyouxi.com (combined 32 million uniques/month). Spil Games Asia also has a flash game studio in Shanghai, the biggest one in China with an output of 1-2 flash or shockwave games per week.

Bert Van Wassenhove, Associate ONE Agency
Bert’s goal is to build a company with an authentic vision, an innovative offering and a passionate team. Bert is a marketing and communications expert with a strategic view and a passion for new marketing. He is a highly motivated by new media such as internet, podcasting, interactive TV, mobile, etc. Bert is currently involved in multiple online communities and active blogger (www.ibert.be)

Joost Bazelmans, Managing Director Red Chocolate
After finishing his education at the Haarlem Business School Joost started his first venture distributing electrical scooters in the Haarlem area. In addition to this venture, Joost started working in the online marketing space, in collaboration with an Email marketing company. In 2006, Joost founded Red Chocolate. Red Chocolate specializes in social media and communities, developing and exploiting social media and community websites. Red Chocolate’s also instrumental in advising multinationals on how to use social media websites for marketing, sales, research and HR. They also have a high expertise in localizing international community websites (under license) and developing integrated advertising campaigns for top brands. For more info: www.redchocolate.nl

Yme Bosma, Business Development Manager Hyves
Before joining Hyves, Yme led a team of developers on the Eccky project at Media Republic. Eccky enables two people to make and raise a virtual child using the Web, MSN Messenger and their mobile phones. Eccky has been developed in close partnership with Microsoft and was introduced at the end of 2005 to the Dutch market. Before joining Media Republic, Yme worked as a strategy consultant at Lost Boys, Europe's largest Web design agency. For five years, he was advising clients in many industries on how to use the Internet in order to build a competitive advantage. Yme has have worked with prestigious brands such as Unilever, HP, ING, KPN/i-mode, MTV and KLM. Before working at Lost Boys, Yme worked in the advertising industry at Young & Rubicam's Dubai and Tel Aviv offices. He is a well-known and long-time blogger, primarily writing on technology and its impact on business, marketing and society. He’s blogs can be found on www.yme.nl/thoughts and www.yme.nl/ymerce

Martin de Ronde, General Director OneBigGame
Martin started working in the games industry over 10 years ago as a PR manager and later as development manager in publishing. After this, he wanted to see what life was like on the other side of the game industry fence and founded his own development studio in 1998, which he sold to multimedia conglomerate Lost Boys a year later. Here, Martin became managing director of Lost Boys Games, the company's games division. Lost Boys Games went independent in 2001 and was renamed Guerrilla Games when sold to cross media company Media Republic in 2003. At Guerrilla Games Martin was commercial director, witnessing the birth of PlayStation 2 hit KILLZONE for Sony Computer Entertainment and PlayStation 2, PC and Xbox hit SHELLSHOCK: NAM '67 for Eidos. He left the company in 2004, moving to Guerrilla's parent company Media Republic. Here, he was involved in a very broad range of high and low-end games projects, ranging from TV games, MMO apps to casual gaming and advergaming. Per the 1st of January 2007, Martin properly returned to the games industry through his involvement in OneBigGame (www.onebiggame.org). OneBigGame is a videogames industry charity organisation that seeks to raise money for disadvantaged children around the world by creating videogames through a collaborative industry-wide effort.

Maarten Brands Co-founder and Director Virtual Fairground
Maarten is co-founder and director of Virtual Fairground. He is a lifelong gamer and has been working in the international games and new media business for years. Maarten combines creativity with a sound commercial and strategic insight. Before setting-up Virtual Fairground, he has successfully held various director and senior positions at game organizations such as Dutch Game Garden and W!Games but also has a background in youth advertising. At international agency JuniorSenior he was responsible for setting up one of the first dedicated in-game advertising units in Europe. Maarten is also co-owner of Funky Fish, a successful community and dating site in the Benelux.

Henrik Riis, CEO watAgame
Henrik Riis is the CEO and founder of watAgame ApS. watAgame is a media company bringing the goSupermodel concept to girls around the globe. goSupermodel is a safe hang-out focused on delivering good experiences to girls. It is all about creativity, self expression and social play in a shielded environment. goSupermodel today has 6 million registered users and 2 million UV per month and is present in nine countries in localized versions. Henrik has six years of experience in the online business and is a specialist in creating compelling internet services for girls.

Jeroen Elfferich, CEO Ex Machina
Jeroen Elfferich is founder and CEO at Ex Machina, an independent, Amsterdam-based company that enables social gaming across mobile, web and broadcast. Jeroen's passion is extending the social context of technology and believes community gaming is its cutting edge. Jeroen has a background in Artificial Intelligence and Sociology and founded several successful online and technology ventures since 1996. He’s been working on online gaming technology since 1998 and mobile multiplayer since 2001. Julius, Ex Machina’s proven and robust cross-platform connected games management system, is in use at leading media companies, publishers and operators around the world. Julius games are built using the Deus multiplayer engine and SDK, which has been licensed to dozens of game developers.

Frank van Oirchot, CCO Ex Machina
Frank van Oirschot studied business administration at the Haarlem Business School and Political Science at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsteradam. Frank is responsible for strategy, marketing and business development at Ex Machina. Current programmes include the introduction of the Julius 4.0 connected games management system and the TV play along offering in the broadcast and media industry.

Frank is a business creative with experience in building companies around newest technologies and changes in society. He has been involved in building 20+ companies including the first online carlease company in the world, various marketplaces, E-Retail companies and advertising networks. Biggest company build was internet consultancy NetlinQ Group active in 4 countries with approx 150 people which was sold to Framfab