** virtual worlds conference ** - Virtual Worlds Forum Europe

Our speakers include

Alice Taylor
Alice Taylor is Commissioning Editor, Education, Channge 4 TV.

Alice Taylor has over a decade of experience working in new media, from developing Channel 4’s first website (www.channel4.com) in early ‘96 to more recently, Vice President of Digital Media for BBC Worldwide in Hollywood. Alice specializes in cross-media entertainment, videogames and interactive entertainment and was recently a judge for the 2006 Machinima awards, the 2007 Independent Games Festival and Edge Magazine Awards. Alice founded the gamecentric blog Wonderland (www.wonderlandblog.com) and has written about gaming for sites and magazines, including BBC News, The Guardian, Paste magazine, the New Statesman, and Kotaku. Wonderland was recently nominated for Best Non-Commercial Website or Blog in the MCV Games Media Awards.

Susan Wu
Susan joins CRV with 12 years of operating experience working with early stage technology ventures. Susan is a member and the former CMO of the Apache Software Foundation, one of the world's most influential open source software organizations. Susan's roots in the open source community stems from her long-abiding interest in how technology catalyzes social and economic change. She began her career as the chief architect of an early massively multiplayer online game and has remained active in online gaming. She was the Executive Producer of GXMod, a widely popular, award winning Quake 2 enhancement. Susan also contributed to components of the open source Nebula 3D graphics and game engine. Prior to her work at Apache, Susan was the VP of Strategic Alliances for Predictive Systems, a NASDAQ-listed security services firm that was acquired by International Network Services (INS) in 2003. Susan also served as the VP of Strategic Development for Opus360, a provider of on demand human resources and project management solutions. Susan co-authored Opus360's business plan, led business development activities, and helped steer the company to a public offering in 2000. Prior to Opus360, Susan was the Director of Development at USWeb/CKS, where she led the development and design of some of the world's first community-centric consumer Internet businesses. Susan received her BA from Tufts University and an MBA with distinction from Cornell University, where she was a Park Fellow and a Bristol Myers Squibb Fellow. She maintains a popular blog at www.reality.org.

David Triesman
David Triesman, Lord Triesman of Tottenham
has been appointed Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State (PUSS) in the newly created Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills with responsibility for the UK’s Intellectual Property Office among many others. Prior to this post, Lord Triesman was PUSS at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office with responsibility for relations with Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, Overseas Territories and the Commonwealth.

David’s background is in epidemiology at the Institute of Psychiatry, London University, and had a visiting professorship in the United States in Econometrics and become a Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society. He is currently Visiting Fellow in Economics at the University of Cambridge and Visiting Fellow of Wolfson College.