Ghosts of Location Based Social Networking Past, Present and Future

Mat Honan is a contributing editor at WIRED magazine and a journalist with more than a decade of experience covering the technology industry. A former columnist for the New York Sun, his work has also appeared in Popular Science, Macworld, Mother Jones, The National Journal Technology Daily, Salon.com, and Runner’s World. His story on location based services, “I Am Here,” appeared in the February 2009 issue of WIRED magazine.

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With over 12 years experience in innovating marketing technologies through three successful startups to date, Nihal Mehta, is a noted expert in the emerging adoption of wireless technologies for media properties and consumer brands. Named a BusinessWeek ‘M-Commerce Baron’ in 2006 and named one of AdAge’s top 20 marketers in their twenties in 2005, Nihal is currently CEO and co-founder of the location-sensitive mobile cityguide, “buzzd”. Prior to buzzd, Nihal founded ipsh!, one of the first full-service mobile marketing agencies in 2001, which he sold to Omnicom (NYSE: OMC) in 2005. Nihal started his entrepreneurial career by founding Urbangroove, an online nightlife portal, in 1999. Nihal graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a BA in Philosophy and a BSE in Computer Science.

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Dennis Crowley is the founder of dodgeball.com, a friend-finder service for mobile phones which helps people connect with the people and places around them. Dodgeball was acquired by Google in 2005.

He has been named one of the “Top 35 Innovators Under 35” by MIT’s Technology Review magazine (2005) and his work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Wired, Time Magazine, Newsweek, MTV, Slashdot and NBC. He is currently an Adjunct Professor at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program.

Dennis holds a Master’s degree from New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program and a Bachelor’s degree from the Newhouse School at Syracuse University.

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Brightkite founder. The man behind the curtain. Jack of all trades, master of none.

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Jeff Holden co-founded Pelago, Inc. in January, 2006 and has since led the company to raise capital (Series A) from Kleiner, Perkins Caufield & Byers, Bezos Expeditions and Trilogy Equity Partners and to develop and launch Whrrl, Pelago’s flagship product provides users with a next-generation local discovery experience powered by social networking and LBS and which can be accessed via the Web or mobile device.

Prior to founding Pelago, Jeff spent almost nine years (1997-2006) at Amazon.com. Most recently, Jeff was the Senior Vice President responsible for Amazon’s consumer websites, worldwide. In this role, he oversaw the end-to-end customer experience (search, navigation, personalization, social computing, ordering, merchandising, automated email) as well as Amazon’s online traffic initiatives (the Amazon Associates program, search engine optimization and search engine advertising) and the experimental platform that enabled Amazon to conduct quantitative experiments with regard to consumer behavior and measure incremental value of new initiatives.

Before moving into the website-focused role, Jeff was the Director of Supply Chain Optimization Systems at Amazon (for approximately 4 years). In this position, Jeff led the design and development of Amazon’s unique and powerful forecasting, inventory planning, order fulfillment optimization and transactional purchasing systems. Jeff championed the idea that fulfillment planning could be sufficiently real-time that the order pipeline could be connected directly to the fulfillment planning engine to generate optimal plans from which shipping promises are made to the customer during the check-out process. The system realizing this vision was launched in 2001 and continues to power the Amazon site today.

Prior to Amazon, Jeff spent five years (1992-1997) at D. E. Shaw & Co., L.P. in New York. Jeff joined the firm as a software engineer; his first assignment was to help Jeff Bezos build and launch the Third Market strategy, one of Shaw’s early sell-side strategies. After Bezos left to found Amazon.com, Jeff remained at Shaw as the Vice President responsible for the firm’s front office software infrastructure.

Prior to joining D. E. Shaw & Co., Jeff earned his BS and MS in computer science from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

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