Click on the Video Below and Sample a Session from a previous Digital Hollywood event. For Additional Video Sessions, Click Here Building Blocks 2008 Tuesday, August 5th 2:15 PM – 3:30 PM Track III: The Broadband and Social Media Platform Widgets as a Platform: Content, Advertising, Communications Now there is a new expression, familiar to almost everyone - The Widget Economy. For the uninitiated, the widget is miniature application or website that resides as a component element on a user’s desktop, social media page or mobile device. A button on a user desktop may open multiple widgets, so that in a flash, mini-apps open on the desktop to reveal up-to-the minute stocks, the weather, airline arrivals, a dictionary, your photo album – virtually anything, any data type - can be formatted into a widget and placed on your desktop. Once the user gets the hang of it, life without widgets is impossible. Widgets are as addictive as email. Widgets are your mini-obsessions managed and delivered as desired. Add in a layer of commerce and you have a fully featured platform. Watch out! Widgets are Here! Keith Rabois, Vice President, Strategy & Business Development, Slide Jennifer Cooper, co-founder and CEO, MixerCast, Inc Alex Blum, CEO, KickApps Ro Choy, Vice President of Business Development, RockYou Michael Berkley, co-founder & CEO, SplashCast John Soppe, Managing Director, King Digital, King Features Syndicate Shawn Gold, Partner, SocialApproach, former CMO, MySpace, Moderator Keith Rabois, Vice President, Strategy & Business Development, Slide: Keith is responsible for Slide's strategy and partnerships. Under his leadership, Slide has become the leading application developer on Facebook with more active users than any other developer. Before Slide, he served as Vice President of Business & Corporate Development at LinkedIn, where he was responsible for generating new revenue streams. Earlier in his career, he served as Executive Vice President at PayPal, directing the company's competitive strategy and business development initiatives. After leaving PayPal, Keith was Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Clarium Capital Management, the global hedge fund lead by PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel. Keith currently serves on the Board of Directors of Yelp, Vendio, Xoom and FanIQ. He is also an early investor in YouTube and several other high profile early stage start-ups. Keith holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in political science from Stanford University and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. Jennifer Cooper, CEO, MixerCast: Jennifer Cooper brings more than 20 years of experience in sales and business development in technology and digital media industries to Mixercast. Her work with A-list digital media executives provides her with extensive knowledge of strategic content alliances, distribution and syndication. As CEO of Mixercast, Jennifer’s creativity and technical expertise builds winning strategies that drive business growth. Prior to joining Mixercast, Jennifer served as Executive Director of Business Development for Yahoo! Inc., where she designed and launched Yahoo!’s first video subscription service and managed large media industry relationships including ABC/Disney, A&E Networks, Paramount, CBS, Time Warner/HBO and CNN. In addition, she was responsible for crafting and implementing broadband video content strategy, sourcing and acquisitions for co-branded portals such as ATT Yahoo! DSL, Verizon Yahoo! DSL, Rogers Yahoo! and BT Yahoo!. In addition to her tenure at Yahoo!, Jennifer led sales, business development and created strategic partnerships for digital media start-up companies including Generic Media and New Zing. She began her career managing sales at enterprise technology companies Oracle, Xerox and IBM before advancing into strategic business development positions at VXtreme Inc. (now the Microsoft Windows media platform) and Microsoft. As founder and executive vice president of nCommand, Inc, Jennifer served on the board of directors and was responsible for securing initial rounds of Venture financing, as well as creating initial client relationships for nCommand’s products. Jennifer holds a dual B.S. degree in computer science and marketing from San Francisco State University. Alex Blum, CEO, KickApps - Alex Blum is a seasoned senior executive who brings dee p leadership experience from roles at global and emerging technology companies. He is responsible for providing the strategic leadership that guides the company’s business, product development, marketing and sales strategy.Before joining KickApps, Alex was President and COO of JumpTV, a leading Multi-Cultural Internet Protocol Television Network. Alex has held several executive positions during his eight year tenure at AOL. Most recently he was responsible for re-launching the AOL Portal and delivering an entire suite of web-based applications including: AOL's Video Player, Video Portal, Streaming Video advertising platform, AIM and AIMpages social networking service. Prior to that, he was General Manager of AOLTV, where he established strategic relationships with DirecTV, TiVo, OpenTV and Philips Electronics. Alex has an MBA from the Albers School of Business at Seattle University and a BS in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Colorado. Ro Choy, Vice President of Business Development, RockYou: He is responsible for recruiting and managing partner relations. Before joining the RockYou executive team, Ro managed eBay's online parts business as a Director at eBay Motors and also was responsible for managing Market Development at eBay, including operation of eBay's U.S. wireless efforts. Prior to eBay, Ro co-founded Cima Systems, a leading VOIP software provider for auto dealers. Ro earned his MBA from Stanford University School of Business. Michael Berkley, co-founder & CEO, SplashCast: Michael Berkley is the CEO of SplashCast, a company that is leading an emerging field known as social advertising – strategies and solutions specifically designed to reach users of MySpace, Facebook and other social network sites. Berkley’s pioneering efforts have led to the development of the splashcast, a popular marketing technology used to create online communities of target customers. Today there are more than 300 million splashcasts being supplied with content from some of the biggest brands in the world including Sony Music, Converse, MTV, Universal Music, PBS, Warner Brothers and others. Prior to launching SplashCast, Mr. Berkley was CEO of QMIND, Inc., an e-learning company with a number of Fortune 500 companies amongst its customers. As a founder of the Kaiser Permanente national e-learning development group, Berkley provided interactive content development and management services to the corporation's 150,000 employees. Mr. Berkley also built the company's first standards-compliant Learning Management System (LMS) to manage and track e-learning courseware, currently in use across the organization. Following college, Mr. Berkley launched and operated an independent record company called Numinous Records in San Francisco. Berkley secured major label distribution for the label's numerous releases. Mr. Berkley holds a BA in Music from Middlebury College.ltiple industry and government conferences, is a member of the Open Source Software Institute's Board of Directors, SDForum?s Board of Advisors and Chair of their annual Open Source Conference, is on the Board of Advisors of SugarCRM, and has personally worked with companies such as: IBM, Sun, Intel, Nokia, HP, and others, assisting them with developing their open source strategies. John Soppe is Managing Director of King Digital, a new unit of King Features Syndicate. King Digital is an entertainment enterprise created to deliver a richer user experience for current syndicated content and will develop new products and services for the online marketplace. www.kingdigital.com Prior to joining King Features, Soppe spent three-and-a-half years as head of the supply chain services department at ACP Magazines, the largest magazine publisher in Australia. His primary responsibilities were building business-to-business and consumer Web sites and developing progressive ways of managing supply chains in the publishing world. From 1999 to 2001, he worked for www.bolero.net, an Internet startup company, to implement and market an online trade documentation system to major international trading corporations, banks, and government agencies of various countries. Prior to that, Soppe worked over six years with a boutique consulting firm and PricewaterhouseCoopers management consulting in change management and supply chain system implementations. Soppe graduated from Ohio State University in 1992 with a B.S. in engineering. Shawn Gold, Partner, SocialApproach, former CMO, MySpace: Shawn Gold is  Chairman  of newly formed Social Approach, a digital media advisory focused on Social Discovery platforms and technologies. Formerly, he was  CMO , head of marketing & content for MySpace. At MySpace Gold spearheaded the development and implementation of marketing initiatives and campaigns for MySpace’s more than 110 million users worldwide. He also oversaw the growth and expansion of popular MySpace franchises including Music, Film, Comedy and MySpace Celebrity, as well as creating MySpace’s “Impact awards” and “Our Planet” programs to recognize and reward social responsibility. Gold has over 15 years of experience in digital marketing and content strategy, including serving as publisher of WeblogsInc, the largest publisher of professional blogs on the Web (now an AOL company). In 2000 he bacame president and chief strategy officer of Intermix (formerly eUniverse), where his team brought the online entertainment network to profitability, making it the most popular on the Web. Additionally, he headed marketing and communications for WHN, an ecommerce company that provided marketing services to the 2002 Olympics, ABC, NBC, Comedy Central, MTV and Fox. Prior to WHN.com, Shawn served as head of strategic planning at Rare Medium where he created the inaugural interactive communication strategies for P&G, General Foods, Mattel and Nestle. In 1995, Shawn was GM and Founder of Icon New media’s Advertising Division, publishing Word.com and Charged.com. There he created the first interstitial ads on the web and an industry-leading advertising system based on time rotation and contextual integration. He started developing interactive content in 1992 as a partner with TouchTunes Interactive, a telecommunications music marketing service in the USA, Japan and New Zealand. He is a founding board member of the Producers Guild of America’s New Media Council and author of The Guide to Laughing at Life book series that promotes wellness through laughter.