2009 Speakers

Jean Varaldi is head of Marketing and Business development at Qualcomm CDMA Technologies (QCT) France. At QCT, Jean's main objective is to develop collaboration with telecom operators, as well as with other key players in the telecom value chain.

With an ample background in the telecom industry, Jean has spearheaded QCT business activity in France for over 5 years, and is today the go-to person for decision makers looking for a partnership with the company in this market.

As Senior Director of marketing, Jean is also the key spokesperson for QCT in France, representing the company at tradeshows, with the press and in product launches. Implementing Qualcomm's global goals within the French market, Jean is regularly promoting marketing operation aimed at stimulating the entire mobile value chain, and plays a key role in anticipating the customer demand in this market.

Jean's knowledge of the global and French telecommunication market also comes from his seven years of experience at Alcatel; first within the handset division as project manager and then within the network division as head of handset partnerships.

Bringing to the table his lifelong interest in electronics and digital innovation, Jean holds a degree in electronic engineering from the University of Nice-Sophia Antipolis.

Ash joined Google in 2007 as Head of the EMEA distribution business. Ash and his team drive business development and marketing efforts with hardware manufacturers, retailers and software companies to increase the penetration and adoption of Google’s desktop offerings including Google Toolbar, iGoogle, Google Chrome and Google Chrome OS.

Prior to joining Google, Ash drove business development for Windows at Microsoft, where he worked on new products and business models for emerging markets including Brazil, India, China and Russia to fight piracy and deliver incremental revenue to the Windows business. He started his career at MicroStrategy, an enterprise business intelligence software company where, as a Group Program Manager, he led development efforts on new products.

Based in London, Ash holds a BS in Mechanical Engineering from Cornell University and an MBA from the Harvard Business School.

Miss Eszter Morvay works as a senior research analyst at IDC, the premier global provider of market intelligence, advisory services, and events for the information technology, telecommunications, and consumer technology markets.

As a member of the European Personal Computing Group, Miss Morvay is responsible for managing the EMEA Quarterly PC Tracker program, which provides quarterly market analysis and forecast into the European PC market. In this role, Misss Morvay also outlines key PC market dynamics and technology developments, including in-depth expertise in netbook market trends.

Miss Morvay graduated in 2002 from Oxford Brookes University – International Business School in Budapest, Hungary, and holds a Bachelor of Arts in Business Studies degree in Marketing. She also acquired a certificate in Marketing Communications from the International Advertising Association.

Scott Apeland currently manages the worldwide Developer Network organization which is responsible for defining and delivering programs and services for software developers. His responsibilities include the Intel Software Network and Intel Academic Community.

The Intel Software Network is a community oriented portal where developers can share knowledge and interact with Intel engineers as well as with other developers around the globe on how to best enable their applications for the latest Intel platforms and technologies. The Intel Atom Developer Program is a recent addition to the Software Network and provides developers an opportunity to sell their applications via netbook app stores.

Scott joined Intel in 1991 and prior to his current role was responsible for managing new product development, roadmap strategies and partner initiatives in the Video Conferencing Division, Internet Media Streaming Division and Embedded Controller Division.

Scott holds a Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering and a Masters of Business Administration from Brigham Young University.

Aaron Seigo is a Free/Open Source software architect and community leader.

Aaron works primarily with KDE, which creates the leading Free software desktop, as a team leader and software developer as well as with several other projects and organizations with a Free software focus.

Named one of the 50 most influential people in IT by silicon.com in 2008, Aaron has served as President of the global non-profit foundation KDE e.V. and travels the world speaking in front of and writing for audiences on the topics of technology, freedom and their intersection.

He started his career at the Institut of Data Processing of the Technical University of Darmstadt. He then joined worked the TeleDiffusion de France Research Center as of head of digital electronics laboratory) and Thomson Multimedia R&D France as the leader of the Advanced Television and Multimedia Group. He holds various patents related to digital electronics and video processing.

Arnaud created Free & ALter Soft in 1996, which became Linbox FAS in 2001 when it acquired the assets of the Linbox startup. The Linbox Rescue Server software was created in this environment and is now used massively in industry and administrations in France. Linbox FAS was bought by Mandriva in 2007.

Arnaud has engineering degrees from “Ecole Nationale Supérieure de Mécanique et des Microtechniques de Besançon” and from “Ecole Nationale Supérieure d'Electronique et de Radio-électricité de Grenoble” and a masters of accousto-opto-electronics and vibration from the Franche-Comté University. He joined Mandriva in 2007, when Linbox was acquired by Mandriva.

Bastien has graduated in cognitive science. He worked for the One Laptop Per Child foundation, helping with the deployment of the "100$" laptops in Haïti back in 2008.

He co-founded OLPC France, a french NGO dedicated to help France and french-speaking countries use these ICT resources the best way possible. He is also active in Sugar Labs, the foundation developing the free software Sugar, a learning platform for primary school.

Mr. Arora joined Phoenix Thechnologies as Vice President of Business Development in July 2007.

He has extensive experience in market and business development both for consumer and enterprise technologies. Most recently, Mr. Arora was Director of Enterprise Solution Sales and World Ahead Program for Intel in South Asia. This sales group influenced over $300 million in revenue and forged alliances with ISVs, SIs, OEMs, and service providers.

Prior to the Intel South Asia position, Mr. Arora led the world-wide market development team in Intel, evangelizing Centrino mobile technology in the telecom channel. His team successfully negotiated WiFi and WWAN service bundles with telecom operators worldwide.

Mr. Arora holds a BS in Computer Engineering from Rensselaer and an MBA from UC Berkeley/London Business School.

Satheesh is the WW Director of business development for Phoenix technologies. In this role his key responsibilities are planning, strategic marketing and business development of Phoenix businesses across the Silicon partner ecosystem and Netbook and embedded channels. In his last role, Satheesh was responsible for ecosystem enabling for Intel’s Mobile Internet Devices Business.

Previously, he was the founding director of Ultra-mobile business for Intel and helped build it from a start-up to annualized revenue of $150+ mil. In this role, he managed product planning, systems engineering and ecosystem enabling to drive design wins and market expansion into key OEMs, ODMs. Prior to that, Satheesh served in a variety of leadership roles in engineering, architecture and marketing for Intel server platforms and mobile platforms group.

Satheesh serves as the marketing chair for emerging technology for the Stanford/MIT venture forum. Previously, he has served as the IEEE Circuits and Systems Chair for Silicon Valley and on Silicon Valley Engineering Council and as an Advisory member on the WESCON committee.

Satheesh hold an Executive MBA from Columbia Business school and University of Berkeley and a Masters in Electrical Engineering from Purdue University.

Jaewoo Seo has been working for Samsung Electronics since 2006. He is now Notebook Channel Marketing Manager, before that he was Notebook Product Manager.

He graduated from the Grenoble Graduate School of Business.

Walter Bender is executive director of Sugar Labs, a non-profit foundation he founded in 2008, in order to support the further development of the Sugar learning platform.

Bender is coordinating the efforts of volunteers from around the world, a melting-pot of software developers and educators, who are working together to provide powerful tools for learning to every child.

In 2006, Bender co-founded the One Laptop per Child, a non-profit association with Nicholas Negroponte and Seymour Papert. The team designed and built the OLPC-XO-1 computer, the world's first netbook computer, and put it into the hands of over one-million children, worldwide.

As director of the MIT Media Laboratory, Bender led a team of researchers in fields as varied as tangible media to affective computing to lifelong kindergarten. In 1992, Bender founded the News in the Future consortium, which launched the era of digital news.

In addition to pioneering many of the news services that we now take for granted on the Internet, we also pioneered a new model for university-industry collaboration.

In 1980 at MIT, Bender founded the Electronic Publishing research group that has been responsible for much of the foundational work in electronic publishing, including style sheets for the web, personalization media, data hiding, media remixing, electronic program guides, digital video encoding, personal video recording, interactive video, et al.

Bender has degrees from MIT and Harvard University.

Sascha Pallenberg has been a leading proponent of the small form factor and mobile computing market for several years, first co-founding Techcase in 2002, a company developing complete hardware and software solutions exclusively for the Mini-ITX platform, then going on to start Epiacenter.de and Epiacenter.com, respected community websites centered around the Mini-ITX form factor and VIA EPIA mainboards, of which he is still Editor-in-Chief.

In 2005, he started epiOS GmbH & Co. KG, a software development house providing integrated operating systems targeted at VIA EPIA-based applications.

With the rise of the netbooks he started his first mobile computing blog Eeepcnews.de back in December 2007, while he was still living in the US. After just 2 months he quit his job at his US startup and relocated to Taipei/Taiwan to cover the recent netbook news directly from its’ source. Netbooknews.de became a leading source for all the netbook related news, even though he is still blogging in German.

With the help of Nicole Scott (former BnetTV.com), Joanna Stern (Laptopmag.com) and Lars Nilsson (former Fudzilla.com) he launched Netbooknews.com in June 2009 a website based on video content about all the latest mobile computing news from the Asian hotspots.