Topic: New Technologies

Pau Garcia-Milà Pujol

Pau García-Milà is the founder of eyeOS which he founded at the age of 17. The company was founded at the start of the Cloud Computing and Social Networking era. Pau is also the founder of Bananity, a social networking company.

As an entrepreneur, Pau has achieved significant recognition and won several awards as the Innovator of the Year for 2011 by MIT (TR-35), the Prince of Asturias & Girona award "IMPULSA Empresa 2010" and the National Communications Award 2009 (Spain).

A frequent speaker, Pau is also the youngest professor of ESADE (in Digital Business Master). In the audiovisual field, Pau has contributed to a number of radio programmes (Catalunya Radio, RAC1) and is the presenter of Empenta, the only radio program dedicated 100% to entrepreneurs.

On television, Pau appears on a weekly programme, Catalunya Divendres about entrepreneurship. Pau also codirected a mini-series in the summer of 2012 with Andreu Buenafuente called Verano Amarillo.

Nathan Schulhof

For more than 35 years, Schulhof has been involved in a wide variety of entrepreneurial ventures, ranging various entrepreneurial adventures as a young man growing up near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to starting an air charter service in Florida in the 1970s.

While attending two years at Lincoln University Law School in San Francisco, Schulhof worked as an agent for New York Life before deciding that neither law nor insurance were ideal matches for him. Schulhof entered the technology world in the late 1970s when he began working on a software idea that eventually bore fruit as Silicon Valley Systems, the developer of Word Handler, the first and best-selling high-resolution graphics word processor for the Apple II computer. SVS was also the first technology firm to implement a telemarketing effort targeting the retail channel.

Prior to co-founding audiohighway.com, Schulhof formed TestDrive Corporation, a pioneer in the distribution of encrypted computer software on CD-ROM and the first company to distribute a CD-ROM inside a magazine. TestDrive was later sold to R.R. Donnelley & Sons Co.

He also participated in the DotCom craze of the late 1990s, leading the transformation of Information Highway Media Corporation into audiohighway.com, one of the leading destination web sites for downloading and streaming media in the world. Schulhof also helped take audiohighway.com public in 1998 on the Nasdaq Stock Market. Schulhof co-founded Solar Components, LLC, Silicon Valley-based firm in the solar power industry. His current focus is dedicated to finding a more productive use of alternative energy.

Through the years, Schulhof has been extensively quoted and featured in technology and consumer media, including pieces in the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Businessweek, Inc., Success, among others. He has spoken extensively at industry events (including COMDEX, CES, Fall Internet World and Apple Computer’s Independent Developer Conference, among others), and has raised tens of millions of dollars in private and public equity.

Matt Mullenweg

Matthew Charles Mullenweg (born January 11, 1984 in Houston, Texas) is an entrepreneur, web developer and musician living in San Francisco.

He studied at the University of Houston, majoring in Political Science, before he dropped out in 2004 to pursue a job at CNET Networks.

Mullenweg left CNET in October 2005 to focus on WordPress and related activities full-time, announcing Akismet several days later.

He is the founding developer of the popular open-source blogging software WordPress and writes a popular blog Photo Matt.

After quitting his job at CNET, he has devoted the majority of his time to developing a number of open source projects and is a frequent speaker at conferences.

In late 2005, he founded Automattic, the business behind WordPress.com and Akismet.

In October 2004, he was recruited by CNET to work on WordPress for them and help them with blogs and new media offerings.

He moved to San Francisco from Houston, TX the following month.

In December 2004, Mullenweg announced bbPress which he wrote from scratch in a few days over the holidays.

Mullenweg gives back to the startup community through his angel investment firm Audrey capital, which has backed nearly 30 companies since 2008. In 2011 he backed Y Combinator startup Earbits.

In July 2011, WordPress blogs pass the 50 million milestone, powering over 50 million blogs globally. Mulleweg's 2011 State of the Word revealed that WordPress has grown to power 14.7% of the top million websites in the world and data shows 22 out of every 100 new active domains in the US are running WordPress.

He has been named one of PC World’s Top 50 People on the Web, Inc.com’s 30 under 30, and Business Week’s 25 Most Influential People on the Web.

In December 2012, Mullenweg was listed in 2012 Forbes's 30 Under 30 in Media.

Pekka Himanen

Pekka Himanen (born October 19, 1973) is a Finnish philosopher.

Prof. Himanen is one of the internationally best-known researchers of the information age, whose works on the subject have been published in 20 languages from Asia to America (English, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Taiwanese, Indonesian, Ukrainian, Turkish, Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan, French, Italian, German, Dutch, Croatian, Estonian, Swedish and Finnish).

After obtaining his PhD in Philosophy as the youngest doctor ever in Finland at the age of 20 (University of Helsinki 1994), Himanen moved to carry out research first in England and then in California (Stanford University and the University of California, Berkeley). The best-known publication of this research is the book The Hacker Ethic (Random House 2001). Himanen has also coauthored with Prof. Manuel Castells the influential book The Information Society and the Welfare State (Oxford University Press 2002), which has been discussed worldwide in the leading academic and political circles. Himanen is nowadays a popular lecturer around the world.

As a sign of his impact, Himanen’s work has been recognized with several awards, such as the World Economic Forum’s respected Global Leader for Tomorrow Award in 2003. Dr. Himanen has also had an important role in the actual making of the information society policy. Recently, he has advised the International Labor Organization’s High Level Commission on Globalization on the building of a socially sustainable global information society. In Finland, Dr. Himanen has recently finished the preparation of a new information society strategy for the Finnish Parliament’s Committee for the Future.

Himanen’s untraditional work has always also had a broader cultural impact. This includes the media: Himanen is frequently interviewed by the media around the world, from TV programs to newspapers. He has also authored numerous articles, e.g. to Time Magazine, and hosted his own TV series called The Net Academy (the Finnish TV1). Himanen’s cultural figure has even inspired a provocative theater play, Cherished Disappointments in Love, that has been performed in Finland and in London (Soho Theatre). This satirical play of Jouko Turkka is a story of an older female newspaper editor falling in love with the young philosopher “Himanen”!

Prof Himanen positions:
Professor, Aalto University (2005-2014), Visiting Scholar, University of California, Berkeley (2013-2014), Visiting Professor, Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford (2005-2013), Principal Scientist, Helsinki Institute for Information Technology (joint institute of the University of Helsinki and Helsinki University of Technology, 2005-2010), Visiting Professor, Internet Interdisciplinary Institute, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (2010), Visiting Scholar, UC Berkeley & Director of the Berkeley Center for Information Society (2000-2003).

He is a member of selected international research networks.

Professor Himanen is a Co-Founder of the Global Dignity initiative in 2005, with Crown Prince Haakon of Norway and John Hope Bryant, a member of President Obama’s advisory council on financial capability. It has operated in over 50 countries worldwide. Global Dignity initiative includes Nobel laureates Professor Amartya Sen, Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu, President Martti Ahtisaari as well as Sir Richard Branson and Ambassador Andrew Young as its Honorary Board members.