Sasha is the founder of the Virtual Economic Forum, organisers of the Virtual Worlds Forum Europe. An entrepreneur with a strong track-record in business-to-business media, Sasha has nearly twenty years experience in the exhibitions, conference and publishing industry, working in marketing and general management with IIR and Informa, and consulting on event development, competitive and business strategy for a number of clients including the Guardian, Ithaca, the AOP, Incisive Media, CMP and the Thomson corporation.
A graduate of the London School of Economics, Siobhan has over 25 years commercial experience. Working in the financial markets for 18 years, initially as an economist and latterly in the capital markets department of a major investment bank, she was a director responsible for large scale debt issues for FTSE 100 companies. Since leaving the City in 2000, Siobhan established and was a director of a property development company in the north west of England and is currently the Chair of a prestigious yoga centre in London.
Amanda has 15 years experience in the commercial conference industry, having spent 11 years at IIR (now part of Informa Group) in Divisional Management roles in the London and New York offices, and the last 4 years as a consultant to the highly competitive conference / exhibitions industry. She has researched and developed premium priced business-to-business conferences in a wide variety of industries including telecoms, marketing, retail, pharmaceutical, media, IT, energy and transport, working on the full range of product formats from seminars and workshops up to conferences and congresses with 1000+ participants.
Petra holds a MBA from Lund University in Sweden and has over ten years experience in the B2B events industry, working with Informa, Incisive Media and Financial News on events in the finance, pharmaceutical, telecommunications, and technology sectors.
Liz has over 15 years experience in the B2B marketing arena, working with a variety of organisations such as CMP, DMG, IMP Events, and many more, across a number of different vertical markets from IT to Fashion.
Rebecca has been organising events for over 15 years and there’s not much that can faze her now! With a breadth of experience covering large congresses, bespoke seminars, social programmes and networking events, Rebecca is responsible for delegate and speaker care. Rebecca has worked for Euromoney, IBC / Informa, Societe Generale and The Industry Standard.
Rassami has over ten years experience of in-house corporate communications and PR strategy and tactics in a wide variety of professional services (B2B) industries such as digital, branded content, advertising and marketing services. Rassami has a range of international experience and is well-versed in communicating to diverse audiences from different cultures. Her strong cross-cultural communication skills are the result of having worked in international groups (Swedish, Swiss/French, American, Indian and British) and across a wide range of markets (Europe, Asia, India and Scandinavia).
Stevie has over 20 years experience within the B2B events industry, having previously worked for CMPi as Operations Director, managing the operations and logistics across the company’s events portfolio. Stevie has successfully delivered events with a consistent record of professionalism from 500 to 65,000sqm within the IT, Games and Security industries.
Miki is a digital artist and graphic designer with a background in programming, research and computer games development. At Sony Computer Entertainment Europe she was one of the creators of the award-winning SingStar series.
Huw has been covering the changing media landscape for three years, first as editor of Gizbuzz and subsequently as UK editor of Blognation. He became VWF's blogger in July 2008.
Twinity has announced that it has been awarded funding by the government of Singapore for its development of a virtual equivalent of the city. Twinity is a virtual world which aims to create virtual replicas of the leading cities of the world. They have already built Berlin, with Singapore and London next in the pipeline. For more background, check out my interview with Twinity's Chief Marketing Officer from our Unplugged gathering earlier this month. As part of the deal, Twinity will also be launching geo-tagging capabilities in the virtual world. Presumably this will involve media assets, such as pictures or videos, of real world places being connected to the virtual equivalent in Twinity.
The aspect of the announcement which most interests me is the fact that that they have attracted government funding for this. Metaversum are quite open about the fact that developing mirror worlds is an expensive operation – a potential disadvantage against competitors such as Second Life which can mostly rely upon users for content generation. If Metaversum could attract local government funding for development of more cities, that could go a long way to alleviate the problem. Whilst I'm sure many governments would not be easily persuaded to put money into a virtual world, some could embrace it, perhaps as a tourism marketing exercise or to help in a real world regeneration effort by improving the virtual environment first to create a buzz around an area.
"We're very excited about being awarded funding for launching virtual Singapore, geo-tagging and our other Co-space™ projects. We see it as recognition of the strategic importance of a real context for virtual cities for city authorities and local business alike," commented Jeremy Snyder, Managing Director of Metaversum Asia Pte Ltd. He continued, "We look forward to helping Singapore transform itself into the virtual information and communication hub for Asia."