Liz Gannes

Recent Posts by Liz Gannes

Dive Into Mobile Adds Google’s Schmidt, Waze’s Bardin and Twitter’s Sippey

We’ve added some exciting speakers for our D: Dive Into Mobile conference on April 15 and 16 in New York.

While much of our lineup remains intact from October’s hurricaned-out event, there are a few notable changes.

First, Google Chairman Eric Schmidt is joining the roster. Schmidt, of course, is fluent and well-versed on many topics, including competing platforms, the big picture of artificial intelligence, privacy, tech diplomacy and more.

Schmidt is replacing Android head Andy Rubin, who had an unmissable conflict halfway around the world. (Rubin will be appearing at our next conference, D11, instead, and Schmidt will likely have plenty to say about Android and Google’s many other mobile efforts.)

Schmidt has given us many a memorable interview, including a prescient declaration at our D9 conference in 2011 that the next stage for technology was a platform battle between a “gang of four” companies — Google, Apple, Amazon and Facebook.

Plus, it’s a particularly exciting time to have Schmidt onstage, as his book, “The New Digital Age,” written with Jared Cohen about the global impact of technology, is set for release on April 23.

With lots of interest around mapping these days, we’ve also added Waze CEO Noam Bardin, who leads the fast-growing and remarkably effective crowdsourced mapping and navigation startup.

Bardin’s Waze got a big boost this past year when Apple CEO Tim Cook went so far as to prominently recommend it as an alternative to Apple’s homegrown and half-baked iOS Maps app.

But the Waze story is bigger than that. This is a company that started from an open-source mapping project in Israel that is now vibrant with users’ driving data from all over the world. Is it a real business yet? No. But that hasn’t kept investors — including Kleiner Perkins, Horizon Ventures and Blue Run Ventures — from pouring money into one of the most useful examples of a social application.

Bardin, who was previously CEO of Intercast Networks and cofounder of Deltathree, doesn’t speak at events very often, so we’re looking forward to picking his brain on a range of topics.

And last but not least, another scheduling switcheroo: Twitter’s international head Katie Jacobs Stanton can’t make it this time around, so she will be replaced by the company’s VP of product, Michael Sippey.

Sippey has brought stability and a mobile focus to Twitter’s product team since joining last year. And he’s responsible for increased efforts at consistency and faster development cycles for Twitter’s apps.

Prior to Twitter, Sippey was at Say Media and Six Apart.

We’re keen to talk to Sippey about how Twitter thinks about mobile, especially monetization, for which Twitter claims it has a particular knack.

It will also be interesting to hear Sippey in juxtaposition with Facebook engineering head Mike Schroepfer, as the social media giant has more publicly struggled with shifting its product organization to think mobile.

In addition to these folks, we have a great array of speakers sharing mobile perspectives from around the world. Juliana Rotich will share her views from the mobile disaster coordination startup Ushahidi, while Movile CEO Fabricio Bloisi Rocha will talk about the quick-changing Brazilian market and Xiaomi President Bin Lin will update us on his startup’s latest high jinks in the Chinese device market.

Lady Gaga’s manager Troy Carter will talk about reaching fans in a mobile age, and DoSomething.org’s Nancy Lublin will talk about activating teens. Plus, Mozilla, Microsoft, Snapchat, WhatsApp and more.

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