Featured Speakers

Chris Anderson

CHRIS ANDERSON – Editor "Wired Magazine" and author of "The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More".

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    • As Editor-in-Chief of "Wired Magazine", Chris Anderson is one of the most knowledgeable and articulate voices at the center of the new economy. He has written an important and exciting new book that defines an entirely new economic model for business, one that is built on an economics of abundance rather than scarcity.

      "The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More" explores the tremendous business potential of the long tail—the rise of the niche as a powerful new force in our economy.

      The message: New efficiencies of distribution, manufacturing and marketing allow us to deliver to customers many more products in the "tail" — outside the usual demand curve dictated by shelf space and other limiting factors. Collectively, these niche products create a new market as big as the one we already know.

      Before taking the helm at "Wired", Chris worked at "The Economist" for seven years in various positions in London, Hong Kong and New York, ranging from Technology Editor to US Business Editor. He also served as an editor at the two premier science journals, "Science" and "Nature". Education background: physics, including research at Los Alamos.
LEV GROSSMAN

LEV GROSSMAN - Critic & Editor of "TIME Magazine" The Best Inventions of the Year

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    • Lev Grossman was born in1969, the son of two English professors, and grew up in Lexington, MA, a suburb of Boston. He graduated from Harvard with a degree in literature and went on to the Ph.D. program in comparative literature at Yale, although he left after three years without finishing a dissertation.

      After Yale, Grossman worked for a string of dot-coms while writing free-lance articles about books, technology and culture in general for numerous magazines, newspapers and websites, including "Lingua Franca", "The Village Voice", "Entertainment Weekly", "Time Out New York", "Salon" and "The New York Times". In 2002 he was hired by "Time" and became the magazine’s book critic as well as one of its lead technology writers. In 2006 he won the Deadline Club Award for Arts Reporting. "The New York Times" says Grossman is "among this country's smartest and most reliable critics."

      Grossman published his first novel, "Warp", with St. Martin’s in 1997. His second novel, "Codex", was published by Harcourt in 2004 and became an international bestseller. He currently lives in Brooklyn, NY.
PAUL KEMP-ROBERTSON

PAUL KEMP-ROBERTSON - Editorial Director & Co-Founder of "Contagious Magazine"

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    • After graduating with a master’s degree from Goldsmiths’ College in London, Paul started his career at corporate communications firm Maritz before helping to launch shots magazine in 1990. After a spell in commercials production, Paul returned to shots and became editor in 1994. Subscriptions trebled under his tenure.

      In 1998 he succeeded Donald Gunn as Leo Burnett’s worldwide director of creative resources in Chicago. Reporting to Michael Conrad, Paul was responsible for the agency’s Great Commercials intranet site and its quarterly creative councils, known as the Global Product Committee.

      Paul left Leo Burnett in 2004 to co-found Contagious – a quarterly magazine and dvd reporting on future trends and non-invasive marketing techniques. Contagious is a joint venture with Xtreme Information in London and sees Paul reunited with shots founder Gee Thomson.

      Paul has written numerous articles for publications including Business 2.0, The Guardian, Hollywood Reporter and M&M Europe, as well as co-editing D&AD’s The Commercials Book. He has appeared on BBC Radio 4’s The Today Programme and 5 Live’s Wake Up To Money and is a member of the SuperBrands Council.
GRANT McCRACKEN

GRANT McCRACKEN – Cultural Anthropologist. Researcher – Convergence Culture Consortium (C3) MIT.

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    • As a cultural anthropologist, Grant McCracken looks at the places where culture and commerce, anthropology and economics meet most often: marketing in general, branding in particular, popular culture, Hollywood, advertising, television, magazines, and new media. Through his highly-customized ethnographic and anthropological research, he provides clients with a comprehensive but incisive review of contemporary culture, its foundations, current state and future trends – and strategies for managing it.

      He is the author of several books including Culture and Consumption, Plenitude, and Transformation, and Culture and Consumption II: Markets, meaning and brand management. In his newest book, Flock and Flow: Predicting and Managing Change in a Dynamic Marketplace McCracken deploys "complex adaptive theory" to track the movement of trends and new groupings of consumers. He shows how to monitor new trends, whether and when to introduce new brands and brand extensions, how to speak to niche markets, and how to avoid costly mistakes.

      McCracken has done ethnographic and anthropological work for corporations such as Chrysler, Coca-Cola, Diageo, General Mills, HP, IKEA, Subway, Unilever, Microsoft and Kodak among others.

      Born and raised in Vancouver, BC, McCracken holds a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from the University of Chicago. He has been the director of the Institute of Contemporary Culture at the Royal Ontario Museum, has taught at the Harvard Business School and is currently a member of the branding cultures laboratory at MIT. McCracken is an adjunct professor at McGill University.