Women 2.0 presents "Social Gaming 101 for Fun and Profit: Tips, Tricks, and Best Practices" April 15, 2010

Join Women 2.0 for an evening with social game entrepreneurs on Thursday, April 15th, 2010, 6pm at Pillsbury in Palo Alto. Get your ticket for “Social Gaming 101 for Fun and Profit” and learn from entrepreneurs and developers who have built successful social games from the ground up. Panelists include:

» Mari Baker (President & CEO, PlayFirst)
» Amy Jo Kim (Co-Founder & CEO, Shufflebrain)
» Sue Zann Toh (Co-Founder & CFO, TheBroth)
» Dave Westwood (Co-Founder, BuddyPoke)
» Blake Commagere (CEO, stealth startup)

Moderator:
» Rebecca Weeks Watson (VP of Business Development, gWallet)

Hear trial-and-error stories that led to panelists’ successes as we discuss everything from experimenting with shaky new platform APIs, to scaling at break-neck speed and porting across platforms. These social games grow from zero to millions of DAU (daily active users), generating revenues ranging from zero dollars to figures with many trailing zeros! In 2009, the market for online social games exceeded $1B. Our panelists will share best practices, tips, tricks, and even pitfalls of designing and implementing social gaming with a user base experiencing exponential growth.

This Women 2.0 event on social gaming is open to both women and men. Ticket price includes cupcakes, sparkling beverages, and more. Special thanks to Pillsbury for sponsoring this Women 2.0 event, and Shirley Lin (Founder, YoXi123) for driving the program and panel.

Agenda:

6:00pm - 6:50pm | Registration, Networking, and Snacks
6:50pm - 7:00pm | Welcome and Introductions
7:00pm - 8:30pm | Panel on “Social Gaming for Fun and Profit: Tips, Tricks, and Best Practices”
8:30pm - 9:00pm | Networking

Panelist Bios:

Mari Baker (President & CEO, PlayFirst)
Mari is president and CEO of PlayFirst. Over 500M have played PlayFirst’s Diner Dash. Prior to PlayFirst, Mari was CEO of Navigenics, a company she helped incubate while an engineer-in-residence at Kleiner Perkins. Mari has been recognized in the San Mateo County Women’s Hall of Fame, Fortune’s list of Silicon Valley’s Most Influential Women, and Advertising Age’s Top 100.

Amy Jo Kim (Co-Founder & CEO, Shufflebrain)
An expert in online community architecture, Amy Jo is co-founder and CEO of Shufflebrain, a company developing smart games for social networks. She has helped design social games/architecture for companies such as Electronic Arts, Digital Chocolate, Viacom, eBay, Yahoo, and LimeLife. Amy Jo holds a PhD in Behavioral Neuroscience from the University of Washington, and a BS in Experimental Psych from UC San Diego.

Sue Zann Toh (Co-Founder & CFO, The Broth)
Sue Zann is a social application developer with a focus on monetization. She joined TheBroth to help develop social games like Barn Buddy, a farming game Sue Zann helped shape and grow to 1.7M daily active users. Most recently, Sue Zann has gained a reputation as a fierce competitor within TheBroth’s latest game, Hoop Fever Live.

Dave Westwood (Co-Founder, BuddyPoke)
Dave is a social game developer and software architect. He is credited for building BuddyPoke on Google’s AppEngine. BuddyPoke has had great success on eleven social networking sites, with 65+ million installs, and two years after launch BuddyPoke continues to do well with 6+ million weekly actives. Dave has over 12 years of experience building 3D graphics engines and games for the web and mobile. He is a huge fan of cloud services, and the phrase “have a healthy disrespect for the impossible”.

Blake Commagere (Founder & CEO of a stealth company)
Blake was previously co-founder and CTO at Ohai. Before that, he was a co-founder at Mogad, lead engineer at Causes (Facebook Causes), and a senior engineer at Plaxo. Blake was the creator of some of the most popular social games on Facebook - Causes, Zombies, Vampires, Werewolves, Slayers, etc.

Rebecca Weeks Watson (VP of Business Development, gWallet)
Rebecca leads Business Development for gWallet, a platform that helps publishers and social game developers monetize their audience through high-quality branded offers and ads. Previously, Rebecca was the director of business development at Real Girls Media. Prior to that, Rebecca was director of content for iMedia Communications and, before that, an investment banking analyst.

Sponsor:

Pillsbury is a full-service law firm with market-leading strengths in the energy, financial services, real estate and technology sectors. With offices in the world’s major financial and technology centers, we counsel clients on all aspects of global transactions and litigation. Our multidisciplinary teams allow us to anticipate trends and offer a 360-degree perspective on complex business and legal issues—helping clients take greater advantage of opportunities and better mitigate risk.

Official Website: http://www.women2.org/social-gaming-101-april-2010/