TOC 2010 Keynotes

Anthony Antolino is Senior Vice-President and Co-Creator of COPIA, leading strategy and marketing functions. Anthony has more than 15 years of business strategy and strategic marketing leadership experience across diverse market segments. COPIA is part of the DMC Worldwide family of companies. DMC Worldwide is a leading enterprise and consumer technology company, Anthony has corporate responsibilities as Senior Vice-President.

Jim Cathey, a 17 year technology industry veteran, is vice president of business development for Qualcomm MEMS Technologies, Inc. (QMT). In this role, Cathey cultivates new revenue opportunities, and also oversees applications engineering, technical product marketing, product management and marketing communications worldwide. Under his leadership, QMT’s innovative mirasol display has transitioned from a little-known, emerging display technology to an award-winning product incorporated in a diverse portfolio of mobile devices slated for global markets.

Peter Collingridge has 12 years experience in trade publishing, web, film, and digital marketing, working at Canongate Books, Screenbase Media and Apt Studio before co-founding Enhanced Editions.

He has been named as one of the “50 Most Influential” in publishing by the London Evening Standard, and shortlisted for the UK Publishing Entrepreneur of the Year.

Jeff Gomez, CEO of Starlight Runner Entertainment, is a pioneer of transmedia storytelling and a leading expert at developing entertainment properties and premium brands into highly successful transmedia franchises. As a creative consultant to Fortune 500 companies, he contributes strategic planning and production for the cross-platform implementation of content. Jeff also extends niche properties such as toys, animation or videogame titles across multiple touchpoints, which generate multiple revenue streams. He has gone on to work with such franchises as Pirates of the Caribbean, Fairies, Prince of Persia and Tron for The Walt Disney Company, James Cameron’s Avatar for 20th Century Fox, Halo for Microsoft, Happiness Factory for The Coca-Cola Company, and most recently Transformers for Hasbro. Jeff is a board member of the Producers Guild of America East, and sits on the advisory board of the PGA New Media Council. Jeff and company Starlight Runner have recently been featured in Forbes, BusinessWeek, Variety and the WallStreet Journal.

Ramy Habeeb graduated from McGill University with a double major in Literature and Religious Studies, after which he lived in Okinawa, Japan for three years.

Returning to Egypt in 2004, Ramy saw that Egyptian Literature was not reaching an international audience due to two disadvantages the local publishing industry had yet to overcome: Distribution and Censorship. Seeking to bypass these problems, he established Kotobarabia.com in September 2004, becoming the first Arabic language e-book publishing house in the Middle East.

Through the Internet, Kotobarabia’s books can reach Arabic readers anywhere in the world at the click of a button. Furthermore, due to the lack of Internet regulations, Kotobarabia is able to publish books that have previously been banned by local governments, publishing books from all religions and political opinions side by side.

To date, Kotobarabia has acquired the e-rights to over 1,300 Arab authors and has digitized over 5,000 titles.

Ramy’s vision is to build a Library of Alexandria that cannot be burned down, preserving and distributing Arabic literature for people today and generations to come.

In April 2007, Ramy was awarded Egyptian Young Publisher of the Year by the British Council.

Arianna Huffington is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post, a nationally syndicated columnist, and author of twelve books. She is also co-host of “Left, Right & Center,” public radio’s popular political roundtable program, and is a frequent guest on television shows such as Charlie Rose, Real Time with Bill Maher, Larry King Live, Countdown with Keith Olbermann and The Rachel Maddow Show. In May 2005, she launched The Huffington Post, a news and blog site that has quickly become one of the most widely-read, linked to, and frequently-cited media brands on the Internet. In 2006, she was named to the Time 100, Time Magazine’s list of the world’s 100 most influential people. In 2008, she was named Media Person of the Year by I Want Media, and wrote the introduction to The Huffington Post Complete Guide to Blogging. Originally from Greece, she moved to England when she was 16 and graduated from Cambridge University with an M.A. in economics. At 21, she became president of the famed debating society, the Cambridge Union.

Brewster Kahle, digital librarian and co-founder of the Internet Archive, has been working to provide universal access to all knowledge for more than twenty-five years.

Since the mid-1980s, Kahle has focused on developing technologies for information discovery and digital libraries. In 1989 Kahle invented the Internet’s first publishing system, WAIS (Wide Area Information Server) system and in 1989, founded WAIS Inc., a pioneering electronic publishing company that was sold to America Online in 1995. In 1996, Kahle founded the Internet Archive which may be the largest digital library. At the same time, he co-founded Alexa Internet which helps catalog the Web in April 1996, which was sold to Amazon.com in 1999.

Kahle earned a B.S. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1982. As a student, he studied artificial intelligence with W. Daniel Hillis and Marvin Minsky. In 1983, Kahle helped start Thinking Machines, a parallel supercomputer maker, serving there as a lead engineer for six years. He serves on the boards of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Public Knowledge, the European Archive, the Television Archive, and the Internet Archive.

Ray Kurzweil invented the first CCD flat-bed scanner, the first omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano, and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition. Ray’s latest book, The Singularity is Near, was a New York Times best seller.

Tim O’Reilly is the founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media, Inc., thought by many to be the best computer book publisher in the world. O’Reilly Media also hosts conferences on technology topics, including the O’Reilly Open Source Convention, the Web 2.0 Summit, and the Gov 2.0 Summit. Tim’s blog, the O’Reilly Radar “watches the alpha geeks” to determine emerging technology trends, and serves as a platform for advocacy about issues of importance to the technical community. Tim is on the boards of CollabNet and Safari Books Online, and is a partner in O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures.

William Patry is Senior Copyright Counsel, Google Inc. He formerly served as copyright counsel to the U.S. House of Representatives, a Policy Planning Advisor to the Register of Copyrights, a full-time law professor, and was a private lawyer for 12 years. He is the most prolific copyright scholar in history.

Frances Pinter is the Publisher at Bloomsbury Academic, a new imprint recently launched by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, specialising in humanities and social sciences. She is experimenting with new open content business models. She is also a Visiting Fellow at the London School of Economics. She has been a consultant to Creative Commons and ran an action research project for the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) called PALM Africa looking at Publishing and Alternative Licensing Models.

She was Publishing Director for the Soros Foundation Network (Open Society Institute). She founded EIFL (Electronic Information for Libraries), pioneering the consortium approach to the dissemination of electronic journals through countrywide site licenses. She was the founder of Pinter Publishers that specialised in the social sciences, also owned Leicester University Press and established Belhaven Press, an imprint devoted entirely to environmental issues.

Skip Prichard is President & Chief Executive Officer of Ingram Content Group Inc. Ingram Content Group provides a broad range of physical and digital services to the book industry. Ingram is a leading wholesaler of trade books, spoken audio, magazines, and a leading provider of demand-driven printing and digital solutions for publishers. Ingram’s operating units are Ingram Book Company, Lightning Source Inc., Ingram Digital, Ingram Periodicals Inc., Ingram International Inc., Ingram Library Services Inc., Spring Arbor Distributors Inc., Ingram Publisher Services Inc., Tennessee Book Company LLC, and Coutts Information Services. Ingram Content Group employs thousands of associates with operations throughout North America and Europe.

Prior to his appointment at Ingram Content Group, Mr. Prichard was President and Chief Executive Officer of ProQuest Information & Learning, a respected global publisher and information provider serving the education, government, and corporate markets with offices in the Americas, Europe and Asia. He led ProQuest through a successful turnaround – achieving double-digit growth and returning the company to profitability. Earlier in his career, Mr. Prichard held a number of executive positions with LexisNexis, where as Vice President of corporate and federal markets he provided business information and risk management solutions to the largest global corporations.

Mr. Prichard received his Bachelor of Science degree from Towson State University and his Juris Doctor degree from the University of Baltimore School of Law.

Sameer Shariff is a serial entrepreneur with a passion for turning ideas into real businesses.

As the founder and CEO of Impelsys Inc., Sameer drives Impelsys’ business vision, strategy, value and growth. Impelsys is his second start up and he has grown the company into a leader in online content delivery for the global publishing market. Impelsys’ products and services help over 300 publishers with their online content delivery strategy. Customers include major publishers Reed Elsevier, McGraw Hill, Wolters Kluwer, Thomson, Springer, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt to smaller publishers Marshall Cavendish, Benchmark Education and Prufrock Press.

Sameer is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned his BS degree in Entrepreneurial Management from the Wharton School of Business. He has served as a guest speaker at several industry events including Delhi Book Fair, O’Reilly TOC Conference 2009, International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF): Digital Book 2009, Association of Educational Publishers (AEP) Summit and American Medical Publishers Association; and has been featured in Forbes, India Today, CMS Wire, Professional Publishing Report, Gilbane, Seybold Report and Silicon India among other publications.

New York Times best-selling novelist Scott Sigler is the author of ANCESTOR, INFECTED and CONTAGIOUS, hardcover thrillers from Crown Publishing.

Before he was published, Scott built a large online following by giving away his self-recorded audiobooks as free, serialized podcasts. His loyal fans, who named themselves “Junkies,” have downloaded over eight million individual episodes of his stories and interact daily with Scott and each other in the social media space.

Scott reinvented book publishing when he released EARTHCORE as the world’s first “podcast-only” novel. Released in twenty weekly episodes, EARTHCORE harkened back to the days of serialized radio fiction. His innovative use of technology puts him at the forefront of modern-day publishing and has garnered brand-name exposure among hundreds of thousands of fiction fans and technology buffs.

In 2009, Scott created Dark Øverlord Media to publish THE ROOKIE, a limited edition hardcover with a 16-page, full-color insert. Each copy is individually numbered and signed, and personalized on request. He’s been covered in Time Magazine, the Washington Post, the New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, Entertainment Weekly, Publisher’s Weekly, The Huffington Post, Business Week and Fangoria. He still records his own audiobooks and gives away every story – for free – to his Junkies at www.ScottSigler.com.