Coles, Peter   Professor, Harvard Business School

The Commoditization of Search | 11:00 – 12:00pm | Aldrich 111

Peter Coles is a member of the Negotiation, Organizations, and Markets Unit at Harvard Business School. He received his A.B. in mathematics from Princeton University and his PhD in economics in 2006 from Stanford University.

Peter’s research focuses on entrepreneurial market design - the study of creating for-profit marketplaces.  Such marketplaces often require innovations (market rules, information flows, timing adjustments, reputation mechanisms) to resolve longstanding inefficiencies (lack of market thickness, adverse selection, high transaction costs, etc).  These innovations can create significant value for market participants, and at the same time offer a promising business model for the entrepreneur.

Peter has recently written cases on prediction markets at Google, strategy at Microsoft’s adCenter, pricing and the “market ecosystem” at TheLadders.com, and on several other topics.  Current projects include the design of a prediction market for drug clinical trials, as well as implementation and analysis of the American Economics Association signaling mechanism, a service intended to streamline the job market for new economists.

Along with Professor Ben Edelman, Peter teaches “Managing Networked Businesses,” a second year course at Harvard Business School.  With Professor Al Roth he co-teaches a doctoral course in market design in the Harvard Economics Department.

Dodge, Don   Google

From Powerpoint to Product – Perspectives on the Day-Zero Experience | 9:40 – 10:40am | Aldrich 109

Scaling to Success – Perspectives on Growing Pains and Levers for Growth | 11:00 – 12:00pm | Aldrich 109

Don Dodge has been in the software business for more than 25 years.  He is a veteran of five start-ups including Forte Software, AltaVista, Napster, Bowstreet, and Groove Networks. Don formerly served as Director of Business Development for Microsoft’s Emerging Business Team, whose goal is to help VC’s and start-ups be successful with Microsoft. He writes a daily blog, “Don Dodge on the Next Big Thing” which can be found http://dondodge.typepad.com.

Edelman, Ben   Assistant Professor of Business Administration - Negotiation, Organizations & Markets Unit, Havard Business School 

Future Trends in Online Advertising | 3:30–4:30pm | Aldrich 111

Ben is a member of the Negotiation, Organizations & Markets Unit at the Harvard Business School. His research focuses on market design, particularly as to electronic markets. Much of Ben’s recent work considers Internet advertising. He compared the revenue of alternative structures of pay-per-click advertising auctions, quantifying the losses from early inefficient auction systems. He has also analyzed the stability and truth-telling properties of certain online advertising mechanisms, and he designed a simulated bidding environment to evaluate bidding strategies empirically.

Ben’s consulting practice focuses on preventing and detecting online fraud (especially advertising fraud). Representative clients include the ACLU, AOL, the City of Los Angeles, Microsoft, the National Association of Broadcasters, the National Football League, the New York Times, Universal Music Group, the Washington Post, and Wells Fargo.

Ben holds a Ph.D. from the Department of Economics at Harvard University, a J.D. from the Harvard Law School, an A.M. in Statistics from the Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and an A.B. in Economics from Harvard College (summa cum laude). He is a member of the Massachusetts Bar.

Garriga, Camille   Sales Manager, Entertainment, Google 

Trends in Digital Media and Online Entertainment | 9:40–10:40am | Aldrich 112

Camille Garriga is a Sales Manager at Google, Inc. where she works on advertising and marketing programs for the entertainment industry. She began her career at MTV Networks where she spent five years in strategic planning. Camille holds a BA from Cornell University, an MS from Columbia University and an MBA from the University of Pennsylvania.

Ghosh, Shikhar   Senior Lecturer, Harvard Business School

Venture Capital | 3:30–4:30pm | Aldrich 112

Shikhar Ghosh has been a successful entrepreneur for the last 20 years. He has been the founder and CEO or Chairman of eight technology-based entrepreneurial companies.  He was selected by Business Week as one of the best Entrepreneurs in the US, Forbes as one of the ‘Masters of the Internet Universe’ and Fortune as the CEO of one of the 10 most innovative companies in the US.

Shikhar joined the Boston Consulting Group after getting his MBA from HBS in 1980. At BCG he focused on organization and innovation in large organization. He was elected a worldwide partner of the firm in 1987. Shikhar left BCG in 1988 to become CEO  of Appex , an early-stage venture backed company that  built the inter-carrier infrastructure for the US mobile phone industry. Appex was bought by EDS in 1990.

Shikhar founded Open Market in 1993. Open Market built the first commercial infrastructure for enabling secure commerce on the Internet, and was one of the first internet companies to go public. After leaving Open Market, Shikhar has founded several companies in the wireless, payment, Internet marketing, and on-line retailing industries. He is currently a Senior Lecturer at Harvard Business School.

Hagiu, Andrei   Assistant Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School

The Mobile Consumer  | 3:30–4:30pm | Aldrich 109

Andrei is an Assistant Professor in the Strategy group at Harvard Business School. Andrei’s research focuses on multi-sided markets, which feature platforms serving two or more distinct groups of customers, who value each other’s participation. He is studying the business strategies used by such platforms and the structure of the industries in which they operate: payment systems, advertising supported media, personal computers, videogames, mobile devices, shopping malls, etc. Andrei is using the insights derived from this research to advise a wide range of companies in all of these industries.

In addition, he is also involved in competition and industrial policy research and advisory projects, in Japan, China and in the United States. Andrei graduated from the Ecole Polytechnique and the Ecole Nationale de la Statistique et Adminstration Economique in France with an MS in economics and statistics, before obtaining a PhD in economics from Princeton University in 2004. Prior to joining HBS, he spent 18 months in Tokyo as a fellow at the Research Institute of Economy Trade and Industry, an economic policy think-tank affiliated with the Japanese Ministry of Economy Trade and Industry.

Higgins, Robert F.   Senior Lecturer of Business Administration, Harvard Business School 

Technology and Healthcare | 9:40–10:40am | Aldrich 110

Bob Higgins is a Senior Lecturer at Harvard Business School and a General Partner and Founder of Highland Capital Partners in Boston. Bob co-created and currently teaches a course in the EC called Entrepreneurship and Venture Capital in Health Care. For several years, he taught the first year course The Entrepreneurial Manager. He is a member of the Health Care Initiative, the Social Enterprise Initiative, and the Harvard Faculty Committee for the MD/MBA program. 

Holtzman, Henry   Research Scientist, Chief Knowledge Officer, Co-Director, Digital Life, MIT Media Labs 

Converging Devices | 11:00–12:00pm | Aldrich 112

Henry Holtzman joined the Media Lab as a researcher when it opened in 1985. Currently, he is the Lab’s Chief Knowledge Officer, executive director of the DigitalLife consortium, and director of the Information Ecology research group. In addition, Holtzman directs the Lab’s CE 2.0 initiative, a collaboration with 14 Media Lab sponsor companies to formulate the principles for a new generation of consumer electronics that are highly connected, seamlessly interoperable, situation-aware, and radically simple.

Holtzman has led research projects in the areas of tangible networking and image compression, resulting in desktop applications for RFID such as the Smart Mousepad, multicast network architectures for multimedia, IP television, scale-free image representation, and knowledge-based video representation. As a member of the MPEG standardization committee, he helped to define MPEG-2 video technology, used in DirecTV, DVD, digital cable, and digital TV broadcasting.

Holtzman has extensive experience with RFID, computer programming, hardware design, operating systems, and network architecture. He has worked with Codex, a subsidiary of Motorola Inc.; Apple Computer; Hearst New Media; and Art Technology Group. He was founder, CEO, and CTO of Presto Technologies, Inc., which introduced many novel uses for RFID to the market. He received his MS in media arts and sciences, and his BS in computer science, both from MIT.

Lassiter, Joe   Professor of Management Practice, Harvard Business School 

Cleantech/Greentech | 2:10–3:10pm | Aldrich 109

Joe Lassiter teaches Entrepreneurial Finance and Building Green Businesses in the MBA Program as well as in the Executive Education Program. His academic research and professional work focus on high-potential ventures, including both those formed as new companies and those formed within existing organizations. His most recent work is concentrated on the emerging “green businesses.”

From 1994 to 1996, Joe was President of Wildfire Communications, a telecommunications software venture backed by Matrix Partners and Greylock Management. From 1977 to 1994, Joe was a Vice President of Teradyne (NYSE/ automatic test equipment) and a member of its Management Committee. Joe joined Teradyne in 1974 as a Product Manager while on sabbatical from MIT.

Joe began his career at MIT’s Department of Ocean Engineering as an Instructor in 1970 and was promoted to Assistant Professor in 1972. Joe received his BS, MS, and PhD from MIT and was awarded National Science, Adams and McDermott Fellowships. He was elected to Sigma Xi.

Leong, Lydia   Research Director, Gartner  

Cloud Providers | 9:40–10:40am | Aldrich 111

Lydia Leong is a research director in the Communications group at Gartner. She is responsible for covering Internet infrastructure services, such as Web hosting, content delivery networks (CDNs), cloud computing and other emerging managed services. She is also responsible for Dataquest Market Insights research in these areas.

Prior to joining Gartner, Ms. Leong held various technical and management positions in the Internet industry, including director of server engineering at Excite@Home, and director of product engineering and operations at DIGEX/Intermedia Communications. Her prior roles have included product management, systems architecture, operations, deployment and product development.

Piskorski, Misiek   Associate Professor of Business Administration and Marvin Bower Fellow, Strategy Unit, Harvard Business School 

Reinventing eCommerce | 2:10–3:10pm | Aldrich 112

Lifestreaming and Social Media Marketing | 3:30–4:30pm | Aldrich 110

Mikołaj Jan Piskorski, who often goes by Misiek, is an Associate Professor of Business Administration and Marvin Bower Fellow in the Strategy Unit at the Harvard Business School. Professor Piskorski received his B.A and M.A. (Cantab) from University of Cambridge where he read Economics and Politics at Christ’s College. Subsequently, he received A.M. in Sociology and Ph.D. in Organizational Behavior from Harvard University. After completing his Ph.D. Professor Piskorski became a faculty member in the Organizational Behavior area at the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University. In 2004, he returned to Harvard to teach the Required Curriculum Strategy course in the MBA Program. He is now teaching his own Elective Curriculum class: Competing With Social Networks. In addition, Professor Piskorski teaches in Building and Sustaining Competitive Advantage, Strategic Agility and Media Strategies Executive Education programs as well as in a number of external programs. Professor Piskorski is also Managing Director at Market Platform Dynamics where he consults extensively to large corporations in the financial services industry.

Professor Piskorski’s current research examines how firms can harness the power of social networks together with innovative organizational designs to build and implement sustainable strategies. He is also an expert on why and how people use on-line social networks, both in the US and abroad, and how firms can use them to increase viral product adoption. He has also applied many of these insights to large organizations as they seek to become more agile and use social networks to execute their strategies. Misiek’s previous research examined the role of social networks in the venture capital industry.

His research has been published in Administrative Science Quarterly and Social Forces and cited in the New YorkTimes,Business2.0,and Investors Business Daily. He serves or has served on the editorial boards of several academic journals including Administrative Science Quarterly, American Journal of Sociology, Management Science and Organization Science.

Reidy, Richard   President & CEO, Progress Software Corporation

Big Data Processing | 2:10–3:10pm | Aldrich 111

Richard (Rick) Reidy is the president and chief executive officer (CEO) of Progress Software Corporation (NASDAQ: PRGS) a $500M global provider of  SOA infrastructure, data management,  data integration,  and event-processing software.   Reidy joined Progress Software as one of the original developers of the Progress® relational database. He has held numerous technical and management positions and served for several years as vice president of product development for the company’s existing and new, high growth product lines. Reidy also served two years in Europe where he helped build Progress Software’s network of distributors in Europe and the Middle East.

Prior to joining Progress Software, Reidy held database systems software developer and architect positions at Computervision Corporation and Telesis Systems. Reidy hold a BS from Boston University and is a Member of BU’s Board of Trustees and past-Chairman of the Board of Overseers.  He also Chair’s the Leadership Advisory board of Boston University’s College of Engineering.

Scherlis, Dan   Principal, Scherlis.com 

Gaming - Where Gaming and Social Identity Collide | 2:10 – 3:10pm | Aldrich 110

Dan Scherlis has 15-years experience producing electronic entertainment. He was recently co founder of Etherplay Inc., a startup developer of community-based online entertainment. Dan was CEO of massively-multiplayer developer Turbine during its initial five years, serving as producer of Turbine’s Asheron’s Call. He was then founding Content Director of a new mobile-games venture within telecom giant Comverse.

Before joining Turbine, Dan was New Content Director for Ziff’s Interchange Online Network, acquired by ATT. He proposed and led a new game-publishing initiative for Papyrus Design Group, where he produced IndyCar Racing. At HBO, Dan led a marketing-information group, and was Market Analysis Manager.

Dan is an advisor to Floodgate Entertainment and ThwartPoker Inc., and has supported other online-content and online-community ventures as advisor or consultant. Dan holds AB, AM (Linguistics), and MBA degrees from Harvard. He was a Teaching Fellow in Computer Science at Harvard College, and an Associates Fellow at Harvard Business School.

Weaver, Ray   Assistant Professor, Marketing, Harvard Business School 

Killer SaaS Apps | 11:00–12:00pm | Aldrich 110

Ray Weaver is an Assistant Professor in the Marketing Unit at Harvard Business School. His research focuses on socialinfluences on consumers and firms, particularly their effect on the adoption of new products and new technologies.  He also studies the role of fairness on price perceptions.

In addition to his academic career, Ray has held several positions at information technology and consulting companies. As the first marketing employee at Akamai, he helped develop the company’s brand and marketing strategy. Ray was the product manager for Akamai’s first service offering, and later director of product marketing, overseeing their streaming media product. Prior to Akamai, Ray was a member of Intel’s mobile products group, where he helped launch Bluetooth and other wireless communications technologies. He also worked at Deloitte Consulting, designing information systems for clients in the health care and transportation industries.

Ray received his Ph.D. in management science from MIT. He also holds an MBA from the Wharton School, and B.S. degrees in computer science and electrical engineering from Washington University in St. Louis.