Hear From ngmoco, mixi, DeNA and More at the 2010 SmartPhone Games Summit

The event’s speakers are listed below, and of particular note is the inclusion of several Japanese companies in this year’s line-up. They’ll be bringing some key expertise from abroad, where mobile virtual goods have been profitable for years. You can read more here, as well.

Also, it would be good to let you know that in addition to being able to sign up for the standalone event, we’ve recently introduced Social Times PRO, a service that allows you to sign up for a year’s subscription to our monthly social games, virtual goods and Facebook reports as well as attend 10 conferences, all for one low price. It’s essential for companies in the social space, and carries an extremely high value as a bundle. Check it out here.

AKIRA ABE is the head of business development atmixi, the largest SNS in Japan. At mixi, he is initiating strategic alliance with potential partner on mixi Platform. Starting his career at NTT DoCoMo, he was in charge of a wide variety of cross boarder M&A deals including investment in AT&T Wireless and strategy planning after the investment. Akira joined a mobile startup company that provided mobile entertainment services used more than 100 million times by most Japanese teens based on the image recognition technology. He has an M.A. in Commerce from Doshisha University and MBA from University of San Francisco.

TRACY CHAN is the Senior Product Manager atngmoco:) Tracy drives product strategy and development for the Plus+ developer platform including social, monetization and analytic products. ngmoco:) is backed by leading investors including Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Institutional Venture Partners, Norwest Ventures and Maples investments. Prior to ngmoco:) Tracy served as lead Product Manager for reporting and analytic tools at YouTube/Google, where he worked on monetization products, ran internal business intelligence and led the team that created YouTube Insight used by tens of millions users including YouTube partners, advertisers and end users. Tracy has spoken at various industry events including the ad:tech, and the Advertising Research Foundation’s Audience Measurement and Re:think conferences. He has appeared in a variety of publications including The New York Times, The Wall St Journal, Forbes, MediaPost, LA Times, Reuters, AP, CNET and TechCrunch.@tracypchan

MICHAEL CHANG is responsible for Greystripe’s market vision and execution. He was most recently at Incubic Venture Capital and was responsible for investments in Internet and software companies. It was at Incubic that Michael and Andy conceived of the ad-supported mobile business model. Michael has an MBA from Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business and has held engineering and marketing product management roles at SAN pioneer Gadzoox Networks. Michael has a BS in EE from Carnegie Mellon University.

JASON CITRON is Founder & CEO of Aurora Feint, makers of the hit game series with the same name as well as OpenFeint, the largest social gaming platform on the iPhone & iPod Touch. As of May ’10, OpenFeint has over 22 million players and 1800 games live in the app store including mega-hits such as Space Invaders, Pocket God, Enigmo, geoDefense, and Bomberman along with many other Top 100 games. Aurora Feint has received a strategic multi-million dollar investment from DeNA, the operator of Japan’s largest virtual goods economy and mobile social gaming network.@jasoncitron
DAVID ‘DC’ COLLIER runs Pikkle KK, a social game publisher based in Tokyo. Pikkle provides social games to the major platforms in Japan, and has also received investment from Mixi, Japan’s largest social network. Previously DC was the Business Creator for Namco in Tokyo, overseeing expansion into new markets such as China. In 1996 DC founded Gamelet in San Francisco, one of the first producers of internet based games. Gamelet was acquired by PacketVideo Corporation in 2001. In the early ’90s, DC founded Game Developer TripMedia in London, designing BURN:CYCLE and VIRTUAL NIGHTCLUB CD ROM games. He wroteCollier’s Rules, a required text at many design colleges, and in his spare time founded JGram.org, a community site for students of Japanese grammar.

HILL FERGUSON is responsible for product strategy and marketing at Zong. A payments veteran, Hill spent the last decade developing and managing new payment services in Silicon Valley. As General Manager for Yodlee’s Personal Finance Products, Hill led the development and distribution efforts for several new and innovative payments products currently being used by top banks and web portals. At Yahoo! Hill produced and managed several consumer products, including a consumer bill payment product and a peer-to-peer payment service. In his spare time he manages LoanBack, a “friends and family” loan management service he co-founded in 2005. Hill earned a BS and an MBA, both from Vanderbilt University.@hillferguson

JIM GREER is the founder and CEO of Kongregate, a startup that combines over 30,000 Flash games and MMOs with achievements, high scores, chat, profiles, payments, and other community features. Kongregate reaches 10M uniques who spend 24M hours per month earning over 5M achievements. Developers share in ad and virtual item revenue and retain all rights to their games. Kongregate was acquired by GameStop in July 2010 and operates as an independent subsidiary. Before founding Kongregate in June 2006, Jim was Technical Director for Pogo at Electronic Arts. He has worked in the game industry since 1991 and holds a Computer Science degree from Princeton. @jimgreer

MARC GUMPINGER is the Co-Founder and CEO of venture-backed Scoreloop. Scoreloop is a mobile social gaming company that provides infrastructure, implementation services and enhanced end user experiences for game publishers. Scoreloop’s Core Social, white-label and cross-platform technologies andPremium Integration Services allow publishers to integrate social gaming features including: online high scores, player challenges, achievements, viral distribution, virtual currencies and more. @mgumpinger

RON HIRSON is the SVP of Marketing & Business Development for BOKU, Inc. Ron brings over fourteen years experience in product and general management in the consumer Internet space to the BOKU team. Most recently, Ron served as VP of Product at AT&T Interactive, which he joined through the acquisition of service marketplace and performance advertising company Ingenio. Ron spent 6 years at Ingenio, where he served as VP of Product Management. Prior to Ingenio, Ron was co-founder and CEO of The Digs Network, an early social network focused on Gen Y, which was bought by iDrive. Prior to his role at BOKU, Ron served as Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Khosla Ventures and actively advises several companies in the consumer Internet space. Ron is frequently sought out for opinions and advice in the mobile payments space, and has been quoted recently in Business Week, The San Jose Mercury News, and Bloomberg News.@hirson

CHARLES JU is the Founder and CEO of PlayMesh, one of the leaders in social gaming on the iPhone. PlayMesh has developed over 15 top 25games, connected over 10 million players with over 20 million application downloads. The most popular games produced by PlayMesh are iMafia, a graphically-enabled massively multiplayer role-playing game, All-in-1 Games the leading games aggregator on the iPhone, and Fishies, an aquarium simulation for players to raise fish and compete with friends. Charles Ju has a B.S. in Computer Science from UCLA.@charlesju
KEITH LEE is the CEO and co-founder of Booyah. Keith co-founded Booyah to revolutionize the consumer experience. Booyah is defining an exploding new market called Real-World Gaming — blending new forms of interactive entertainment by bringing together elements of the real world and the digital world. As featured by the New York Times and played by over 2 million people, MyTown is the most popular location-based mobile social game. Keith is a veteran of the interactive entertainment industry with a proven track record of helping create best-selling video games, developing compelling experiences, and attracting broad audiences into the gaming space. Prior to founding Booyah, Keith was the Lead Producer for Blizzard Entertainment’s Diablo III franchise. Before Blizzard, Keith’s time at Insomniac Games helped propel the Ratchet & Clank series to surpass 10 million units sold. Leading up to the games industry, Keith worked at several investment banks, including Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs. Keith graduated from Stanford University with a BS in Computer Science and a BA in International Relations and Economics. @keithlee0

LEE LINDEN is the co-founder of Tapjoy. Lee previously worked in product development at Microsoft, helping engineer both enterprise and consumer offerings. He also co-founded ContestMachine.com, a self-service online promotional marketing service with thousands of small business customers. Lee studied computer engineering at the University of Michigan and has an MBA from Stanford’s Graduate School of Business

TOMOKO NAMBA founded DeNA in 1999. In her previous employment at McKinsey and Co, she had become only the third Japanese woman in the company’s history to be made a partner. Under Namba’s leadership, DeNA is committed to the delivery of outstanding service while also striving to instill environmental awareness in its rapidly expanding consumer base. Namba has also been involved in a number of national government efforts, such as the Prime Ministers’ Council for the Promotion of Regulatory Reform. She has also worked with the IT Strategy Headquarters. Namba holds an MBA from Harvard.

JASON OBERFEST is the Vice President, Social Applications at ngmoco:). He works on the Plus+ developer platform and seeks out social games that can be adapted to iPhone, iPad, Android and other mobile devices. ngmoco:) is backed by leading investors including Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Institutional Venture Partners, Norwest Ventures and Maples investments. Prior to ngmoco:) Jason served as SVP of Business Development at MySpace where he worked with Zynga, Playdom, Playfish, Twitter, RockYou, Slide and other partners to launch the MySpace Open Platform and grow the platform to over 30 million monthly active users in nine months. Jason has lectured at Stanford University and has been a frequent speaker at industry events including South by Southwest, Social Gaming Summit, Silicon Valley Microfinance 2.0 Summit, GamesBeat, TieCon, SNAP Summit, OMMA Global, Engage Expo and AdWeek DC. He has appeared in a variety of publications including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Mashable, PaidContent, The Wall St Journal, BusinessWeek, USA Today, Variety and CNET. @joberfest

STEWART PUTNEY is the founder and CEO ofMoblyng, the leading developer and publisher of HTML5-based games for web and mobile devices. Prior to Moblyng, Stewart co-founded iPlayMusic, an internationally distributed line of music creation and education software. Before co-founding iPlayMusic Stewart was a Business Manager at Knight-Ridder Digital, managing their local shopping and coupon product lines. He also has management experience with Electronic Arts, FusionOne and Pointcast. Stewart holds a BA in History from St. Lawrence University and an MBA from Stanford’s Graduate School of Business.

SI SHEN is the co-founder and CEO of PapayaMobile Inc.,which is one of the biggest mobile social networks and mobile social game developers on Android. Papaya has 3.5 million registered users in the US and Europe although the company is based in Beijing. Papaya has recently opened its platform for third-party developers to develop their applications through Papaya’s SDKs and open APIs. PapayaMobile was invested by DCM. Before starting PapayaMobile, Si was the product lead for mobile in Google Beijing. She used to be a product manager for search and mobile advertising in Google Mountain View. Si got her master’s degrees in Computer Science and Manage Science and Engineering from Stanford, and her bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from Tsinghua University.@sishen

CHRIS WILLIAMS has spent over 12 years devoted to working in the interactive entertainment industry. Mr. Williams rose through the ranks of LucasArts Entertainment, where he first worked as an artist. As the Director of Mobile and Console at PlayFirst Mr. Williams leads the efforts to bring emotionally engaging games to those platforms through high-quality, native applications. He is responsible for building and managing development teams, as well as overseeing and shaping business strategy. His early emphasis on the iPhone and iPod touch platforms resulted in over 5 million downloads and helped Cooking Dash and Diner Dash reach #2 on the App Store sales charts. Most recently, Mr. Williams led the efforts on the critically-acclaimed Diner Dash: Grilling Green which was available at launch for the Apple iPad.