Monday, June 2, 2008

Some pictures from the weekend...

Our weekend began on Thursday with a gorgeous VIP event at Park Road Post.

Park Road Post = Amazing... and I was stoked to hear from Marcelino Ford-Livene's girlfriend (I'm SO sorry... your name escapes me??) that all their LA friends will be uber-envious that they got to wine and dine in Peter Jackson's studio ;)

Would have been nice to have name-tags at the pre-event.. but nevertheless Adele and I managed to get in some great conversations with some very cool people. The amazing people who attended XMediaLab as speakers and mentors:

Tom Duterme
New Business Development, Google (Mountain View)

Sam Morgan
Founder, Trade Me (Wellington)

Chris Adams
New Media Pioneer; Co-Founder, Participant Productions (Los Angeles)

Brian Seth Hurst
CEO, The Opportunity Management Company; Vice Chair, Academy of Television Arts & Sciences (Los Angeles)

Suresh Seetharaman
Founder and President, Virgin Comics and Virgin Animation (Bangalore, New York)

Chris Deering
Chairman, Codemasters; formerly President of Sony Computer Entertainment
–Europe (London)

Noah Falstein
President, The Inspiracy (San Francisco)

Hugh Mason
Partner, Pembridge Partners LLP (London)

Marcelino Ford-Livene
General Manager, Interactive Content, Services and Advertising Development, Intel Digital Home Group (Los Angeles)

Richard MacManus
Founder and Editor, ReadWriteWeb (Wellington)

Sean Kauppinen
Vice President, TriplePoint (San Francisco)

Jason Roks
Emerging Technology & Digital Distribution Analyst (Toronto)

Alvin Wang Graylin
CEO and Co-founder, mInfo Inc (Shanghai)

Rod Drury
Founder and CEO, Xero (Wellington)

Meg Pickard
Head of Communities and User Experience, The Guardian (London)

Xin Chung
CEO and Founder, Vykarian Studios (Shanghai)

Helen Baxter
Managing Directrix, Mohawk Media (Auckland)

Marcia Lyons Programme Director of Digital Media Design, Victoria University of Wellington (Wellington)

On Thursday night after the opening event a group of us (Noah Falstein, Xin Chung, Rory Kent, Chris Adams, Keren Flavell, Adele and myself) went out to Chow - a fantastic restaurant in Wellington that serves a 'fusion of Asian cuisines'. We followed this with a visit to Matterhorn (106 Cuba Street, Wellington) where we finished our night with a few amazing bottles of wine (Thanks Rory...:) ) and some delectable treats... cheese, chocolate, bread, pears... oh yes.

Friday (bright and early!!!) was spent listening to speakers talk about idea generation, designing ideas, turning ideas into business and then celebrating successful businesses. Around 150 people (or more?) attended this event at TePapa and the feedback I have been hearing has been extremely positive - great value, great speakers, great content etc etc.

One (minor) issue for myself was the lack of internet access in the conference room... made it hard to blog/email - but I managed to find another room in TePapa that gave me easy wireless access :)

The weekend (Saturday and Sunday) was designed as a 'workshop' environment for 16 start-ups to get some extremely valuable time with the international and NZ mentors to work through commercialising their ideas and/or taking them to the next stage. Each group had 3 minutes to present their idea to everyone on Saturday morning and then scheduled times with the mentors of their choice throughout the day on a large white-board.

Adele and I weren't participating in the workshops, but we hung around and took stole opportunities to chat to the mentors and take some pictures for Megan.

Here are some pics...

Suresh Seetharaman working with one of the groups:

Noah Falstein working with one of the groups:


Chris Adams working with one of the groups:


The iStock team and Rod Drury having lunch:


Noah Falstein and Tom Duterme serving their lunch...

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