Reuben Steiger has been dreaming of the Metaverse since 1971. He is the Founder of and Equal Partner in PATTERN5, LLC. where he delights in collecting odd and extraordinary people with unnatural talents and kind souls. For 25 years he has built global scale businesses for companies for clients including Nike, SONY Playstation and Stanford University and has founded / exited from 2 startups. Steiger's work has been generally focused on the intersection of the physical and virtual world with a focus on complex systems and large scale simulations. His work in XR has included contributing to creating a web-based model of the known physical universe called ONECOSMOS (2000), leading interactive design of the world's largest casino Wynn Las Vegas, serving at the Evangelist for and contributing to the early design of SECOND LIFE (2004 - 2005) and founding virtual world design studio MILLIONS OF US (2006 - 2010). In 2008 with financing from OMNICOM he co-founded VIRTUAL GREATS, creating the legal framework for licensing IP associated with iconic real world personalities for sales in virtual environments. The company was acquired in 2013 by German media company ICONIC FUTURES, GmbH. He has also lead the advanced research division of of INTERPUBLIC GROUP served as Principal for global product design firm METHOD and built an education company teaching creative entrepreneurship to children called 8ANDUP based on the concept that an Entrepreneur creates the future by asking, “What If?”. In March 2020, in response to the onset of the COVID-19 Global Pandemic he assembled a team to build a place for virtual work and culture in the Metaverse called BILLIONS OF US. He is a graduate of Brown University, husband to Hilary, proud father of Phoebe and Theo and protected by a miniature Australian Shepherd named Bodhi.
Lawrence Wilkinson is Chairman of Heminge & Condell, an investment and strategic advisory firm, and Co-Founder of scenario planning pioneer Global Business Network (GBN), both based in San Francisco. Through H&C, Lawrence is involved in venture formation work, and as a director and counselor to a number of companies that he helped create, including: Colossal Pictures, Wired, Oxygen Media, Design Within Reach, Ealing Studios, Mindswarms, and Public Bikes. At the same time, Lawrence continues to offer strategic counsel to a number of corporate clients and governments around the world with which he has worked for years, among them Capital Group, Wiley, The Walt Disney Company, Ford, BBC, CPB, PBS, NPR, IBM, Apple, Proctor & Gamble, the World Economic Forum, and the governments of the United States, the United Kingdom, and Singapore. Named a “Jedi Knight of Innovation” by Fast Company, Lawrence is a widely consulted/cited source and frequent speaker on strategic issues; he serves as a director of not-for-profits Landesa, Institute of the Future, Common Sense Media, Public Radio International, New America Media, Public Architecture, and Global Lives; he is an advisor to the Libraries at Oxford and Harvard Universities; he authors two blogs, (Roughly) Daily and Scenarios and Strategy, and can be found on Twitter at @roughlydaily.
Marc Shillum is a multi-disciplinary designer with a proven track-record for creating valuable brands and products. His 2012 paper 'Brands as Patterns' has become a foundational theory for global brand building in the digital age. The paper has been republished by FastCompany, Contagious Magazine and PSFK, and became two wildly successful panels at SXSW and is soon to be published as a book. Marc helped conceive, design and launch some of the worlds most successful products and brands including HBOGO, Nike Fuel, B&N nook, Discovery Digital Networks, RH, Nokia viNe and The Aston Martin Rapide. He also advises and invests in category redefining startups like Basis, SoftKinetic, Onlive and Canary. In his private practice he has helped the senior management of eBay, GoPro, Adobe, Discovery and Lego to reimagine creative leadership.
Michael Felber is founder of PASTPRESENTFUTURE , a New York based Brand Distillery & Interaction Design Company focused on sustainable cultural progress. After graduating from the Swiss School of Visual Arts, Michael emigrated to New York where he joined the studio of Italian architect Aldo Rossi, helping design Levi's Strauss and Co's SilverTab Soho store. In the years that have followed, Michael has become known for adapting Swiss Modernist thinking to create interfaces to complex data.Examples include designing an interface to the known physical universe to the website and brand for the City of New York, still used today. Prior, Michael was the Creative Director at OVEN, where his global team helped clients included Tiffany & Co. MoMA, Intel and City of New York to develop their original web presences. He received three One Show Interactive gold awards and the New York Art Director's Club Young Gun award for his work. More recent work includes creating a global peace agreement database and interface modalities for the United Nations.
Michael Tiffany is the CEO and Co-Founder of White Ops, a security company founded in 2013 to break the profit models of cybercriminals. By making botnet schemes like ad fraud unprofitable, White Ops disrupts the criminal incentive to break into millions of computers. Michael founded his first cyber business (a bbs) in 1992. Michael has designed and developed cyber security and connectivity solutions in high-speed fiber, U.S. Government, and banking industries. Michael is a founding member of the California-based hacker crew Ninjas.org.
Dave Edwards is the founder of Intelligentsia.ai, the leading AI research firm. His career has followed the course of predicting big technology trends starting with the Internet in the mid 1990s to cleantech in the mid 2000s and now artificial intelligence in the mid 2010s. He has been a research analyst at Morgan Stanley, a marketing lead at Apple, and an advisor to startups and major corporates.
His current work is on artificial intelligence and the human machine community, with a specialty in human machine interfaces. He writes on all fields of AI as well as offers consulting services in AI strategy. He is passionate about understanding this next great technology trend by combining big visions with detailed analysis to help investors and executives understand the magnitude of change as well as understand what to do about it.
Tony Parisi is a Virtual Reality pioneer, serial entrepreneur, author and angel investor currently heading WebVR for Unity Technologies. He has developed many of the critical international standards and protocols in the field and started and sold technology companies. I am currently a founder at a stealth virtual reality startup, and an angel investor specializing in immersive technologies (VR, AR, MR). Tony is the co-creator of the VRML and X3D ISO standards for networked 3D graphics, and the specification editor for glTF, the new 3D file format standard for WebGL and OpenGL applications for desktop and mobile, VR, AR and more. Tony has authored O’Reilly Media’s books on Virtual Reality and WebGL: Learning Virtual Reality (2015), Programming 3D Applications in HTML5 and WebGL (2014), and WebGL Up and Running (2012). Tony co-hosts the San Francisco WebGL and WebVR Meetups, plays a mean guitar and sings with the voice of an angel.
Mustafa Osman Turan is a career diplomat since 1992. He was assigned to a number of challenging posts including the Balkans (Albania, Macedonia and Kosovo) and Afghanistan. He also served in Turkish Embassy in Rome and Turkish OSCE Mission in Vienna. From 2011 to 2014, Mr Turan was Deputy Permanent Delegate of Turkey to the European Union in Brussels. Currently he is heading the Department on G20 outreach activities and engagement groups as a senior member of Turkey’s G20 Presidency Team.
Mr Turan studied international relations and graduated from Middle East Technical University in 1991. He holds a Masters degree on European politics from College of Europe in Bruges. He is a Ph. D. candidate on political science at Bilkent University in Ankara. As a volunteer, Mr Turan engages with non-profit sector and takes an active role in a project called InnoCampus which aims to serve as a mobile pre-incubation programme and a FabLab for young innovative entrepreneurs.
Todd Porter makes impossible possible by connecting important ideas with the people and networks they need to thrive. An expert in the fields of open innovation, ecosystem development, design thinking and entrepreneurship, Todd was the Founding Ambassador of TEDx Tokyo and co-founder of the IMPACT Foundation Japan, Prosperity Exchange, FabCafe, Galvani Studios (stealth) and the PAN Asia Network. In earlier parts of his career he worked with Imagine Media, Public Allies, Ashoka: Innovators for the Public, Bain & Co. He also advises the Open University of West Africa. He earned his MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business.
Dan Girshowitz is a computer scientist working to build the world's most powerful computer at Rigetti Computing. A gentle polymath with the soul of a musician, he calls the poor, overcomplicated explanation of the wonders of physics "the greatest crime in the history of communication".
Alexander Rose is the Executive Director of the LongNOW Foundation, a position he has held since 001996. In addition to helping engineer a clock that runs for 10,000 years he was also (allegedly) a driving force behind the infamous Survival Research Labs and the long-forgotten Power Tool Drag Races.
Peter Leyden is CEO of Reinvent, a network of thought-leaders and innovators who produce regular invite only discussions with world experts in fields ranging from BioFusion to Politics to Virtual Reality. A former Editor of WIRED and member of the renowned GBN think-tank, Peter is always abreast of the latest topics informing national and international debate-- he is also a master curator of networks of innovators as part of Reinvent's rapidly growing offering.
Peter Martin is an Academy Award Nominated Producer, Creative Futurist and recognized thought leader in next generation entertainment, having pushed the barriers of visual effects in storytelling for the past 20 year. In 2000 Peter was hired by Lord David Puttname as the Creative Director of CREATEC where he pioneered new virtual technologies, making a photo-real CGI animated film starring a virtual Nick Cave and PJ Harvey and a virtual fashion show with Nick Knight, Peter Saville and Alexander McQueen for ShowStudio.
Peter became Creative Director at Ealing Film Studios in 2001 where he formed the cross-platform content company Zeppotron ("Black Mirror") which was sold to Endemol. Following this he setup the film division of Done & Dusted and Produced the Victoria's Secret Fashion Show and co-created and wrote the TV show "Phoo Action" with Jamie Hewlett (Tank Girl/ Gorillaz). for the BBC, winning a BAFTA for best drama in 2009. In 2010 Peter created and produced "WasteLand", the feature length documentary which won over 35 Festival awards including Sundance, Berlin and a nomination for Best Documnetary at the 2011 Academy Awards. In 2014 he creatively directed the world's first holographic duet between M.I.A. and Janelle Monae for the launch of the new Audi A3, where both artists simultaneously performed duets in New York and Los Angeles in specially constructed immersive environments. In 2014 Peter joined SFX entertainment ("Tomorrowland", Beatport) as Head of SFX Studious where he created Virtual, Experiential and Immersive content. Since 2015 Peter has specialized in VR, directing a number of high-profile projects including Run the Jewels "Crown" music video, released on NYTVR and the 2016 Sports Illustrated Swimsuit VR. In 2017 Peter created a room scale VR project for the Smithsonian with Intel, Framestore, XRez and 8i) and Produced the 4-part VR series "Capturing Everest" for Life VR which was recently featured on the cover of Sports Illustrated.
Douglas Gayeton is best understood through his Wikipedia entry. A ground-breaking digital filmmaker, Gayeton was the youngest member of the famed Propaganda Films team that included Spike Jonze, Christopher Nolan and David Fincher. Over the years he has worked with William Gibson, sold the first documentary make in a virtual world to HBO and run a successful goats' milk ice-cream business. More recently, he has devoted his life to The Lexicon of Sustainability -- a global movement that uses film and art to describe food to educate us about the way we live and can improve and preserve the planet through words. In 2007, having recently completed a 10-part machinima documentary entitled “My Second Life: Molotov Alva and his Search for the Creator” (acquired by HBO), he met Reuben Steiger at MILLIONS OF US, showed him Episode 1, and spent the following year serving as the Chief Creative Officer for the company. This single piece of film-making, uniquely captured the entire essence of the Metaverse and it’s potential and reason for being. Douglas’ contribution the field is largely misunderstood or unknown except by ture insiders and cognoscenti. The film’s vision of the future is captured in the growing global initiative called The Metaverse Commons.
Matt Connors is an American entrepreneur based in Sweden. He is a polymath - one of those rare people able to see the big picture while perfecting the smallest details. Over the past 25 years he has used these skills to launch some of the world's leading software tools at places like Macromedia (Freehand, Flash) and Apple. Most recently he served as CEO of Swedish 3D optimization software company Simplygon, leading to the company's sale to Microsoft in December 2016. In his current role he serves as CEO of RapidCompact.