9:45 - 11:00 am

Panel: Mobile eCommerce

Bess Ho, Moderator

    Mobile Architect at Archimedes Ventures

Zvika Ashkenazi, CEO, MobileAppLoader.com

Praveen Alavilli, Developer Evangelist, eBay/PayPal

James Smith, CTO, Heyzap

Henry Oh, Dir. Biz Dev, Outblaze Venture / Animoca

Joseph Wei, VP BizDev

Bess Ho (Moderator), Mobile Architect at Archimedes Ventures & Book Author

Bess Ho is the Mobile Architect (EIR) at Archimedes Ventures. She guest lectures at well-established universities and teaches mobile design and development privately and online at Udemy.com. She is also an active mobile publisher and hacker. The multiple teams she led won "Best Healthcare" category at iPhone Dev Camp in 2009 and in 2011 and received "Honorable Mention" at iPad Dev Camp 2010. She was featured on the cover story of USA Today newspaper when iPad was released by Apple during WWDC. She won top prizes in iOS app at Muther! Hackathon in 2011. She is also a winner recipient of Nokia & Adobe Open Screen Project Fund in 2010.

Bess has presented at major tech conferences and events in Web20 Expo SF, Where20 Conference, Plug and Play Mobile Play conference, Silicon Valley Code Camp (SVCC), Techcrunch Disrupt Hackathon, Silicon Valley China Wireless Conference (SVCW) and local user groups. She served as the Technical Editor of the first Open Social developer book “Building OpenSocial Apps: A Field Guide to Working with MySpace Platform”, written by MySpace Chief Software Architect. She is also the book author of "Sam Teach Yourself the Twitter API in 24 Hours".

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Zvika Ashkenazi,  MobileAppLoader.com

Zvika has been in the forefront of the mobile industry for the last decade. From launching mobile games in Europe as early as 2001 to bringing mobile e-mail to millions of users at Yahoo!, Zvika's life mission is to innovate and create.  Having generated several patents in the mobile space, he has embarked on a new mission to change how mobile applications are built, traded, and deployed. His professional achievements in the fields of marketing and product management span three continents and involve planning, positioning, and writing specifications for the next generation of products and solutions, based on direct contact with customers and a strong understanding of market trends. 

Zvika has a M.Sc. degree from Tel-Aviv University in Biomedical Engineering.  His Masters thesis was implemented to save lives during car crashes.

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Praveen Alavilli, Developer Evangelist, eBay/PayPal 

Praveen is the developer evangelist for the PayPal X Developer Network (x.com) to help developers convert their cool new ideas into successful applications and services using the PayPal's Global Payments Platform.Praveen usually plays with a lot of technologies and tries to connect dots across them relating to Online Identity, Mobile Technologies and Payments.

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Joseph Wei, VP of BizDev

Joseph Wei is presently advising a number of start-ups related to mobile and the NFC eco-system.

Joseph has a successful track record in bringing new mobile, wireless and cloud computing solutions to market. Prior to Wong's, Joseph was an executive with Inventec, a $15B mobile, notebook and server ODM with customers such as Acer, Fujitsu-Siemens, HP, and Toshiba. Previously, Joseph was the Marketing VP for Amphus, a blade server startup that developed industry's first highly efficient blade server and virtualization software for the data centers. Earlier, Joseph headed up SGI’s Linux High Performance Computing (HPC) group that partnered with Oracle and IBM DB2 in accelerating enterprise adoption of Open Source Linux applications. Previously, Joseph also held product management positions at NEC and at DEC where he was part of the Alpha Cluster launch team.

He holds a BSEE from Tufts University and is the Vice Chair for the IEEE Consumer Electronics Society Santa Clara Valley.

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James Smith, CTO, Heyzap

James Smith is CTO of Heyzap the largest online distribution network for mobile and social games, partnering with 40,000 of the top game titles and more than 370,000 publishers. Heyzap's mobile app for Android is the world's fastest growing mobile gaming social network. James has a long track record in building successful social applications and sites.

After graduating with an honors degree in mathematics and computer science, he went on to co-found and build Sponsor-Me, the first social donation application for Facebook, as well as co-founding charity gaming site (Helpthirst.com) in contract with Worldvision. In 2008 James created the social TV discovery site WeGot.tv which was acquired last year.

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Henry Oh, Dir. Biz Dev, Outblaze Venture / Animoca

Henry Oh is the Director of Business Development for Outblaze Ventures and its mobile apps division (Animoca).  Henry has studied the Internet since 1993, with a focus on privacy, free speech and open source technologies.
Henry is the co-founder of the Hong Kong Startup Association (HKSUA) and prior to joining Outblaze Ventures / Animoca, he has been the principal or co-founder for several startup ventures running the range from biofuels, wireless mesh networking systems, an investment matching online platform, social e-commerce, and a digital content licensing and distribution platform utilizing Creative Commons.  He has also worked as an associate at a Wall Street law firm, where his work focused on Brazilian capital markets and M&A.  He also has screenwriting and movie production experience and has songwriting credit on a Brazilian music album.
Mr. Oh received a Fulbright grant to study and teach in South Korea.  He was also a Judicial Administration Fellow for the State of California in 1998 and worked with the Judicial Council's Court Technology Committee and the Technology Policy and Planning Division of California's Administrative Office of the Courts.
He holds a J.D. from Stanford Law School and an M.Sc. in Media and Communications Regulation and Policy from the London School of Economics.  His dissertation at LSE in 2004 focused on content regulation on 3G/4G mobile networks.  His B.A. is from UCLA.  
He has just relocated to the Bay Area after spending 4 years in Hong Kong and 1 year in Singapore.

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