Speaker bios 2009/2010
Wendy Tan White
Wendy is an entrepreneur, technologist and designer. She is the founder of fast growth website
building software company Moonfruit and CMO for internet services provider Gandi Group which includes www.moonfruit.com and sister company www.gandi.net, a leading European, ethical domain name
registrar and cloud hosting provider, turnover €20m.
Her first degree in Computer Science from Imperial College and training with Arthur Andersen led her to a rewarding career in tech and finance. She was in the start-up team which set up
www.egg.com in 1997, the world’s first Internet bank. She founded www.moonfruit.com in 1999, DIY website building software, for building ‘Beautiful websites, simply’. 2m+ websites have been
built to date with the award winning software. As CEO raising significant venture capital from Bain, Macromedia and LVMH. Moonfruit was sold to Gandi Group in 2005, the group’s investors are US
private investment bank, Stephens Inc.
Wendy was also part of the original team who set-up ground-breaking www.zopa.com in 2004, the first European peer to peer lending website and as part of the ‘Gandi Supports’ programme, provides
advice and hosting to the award winning, market disruptive, citizen journalist site www.demotix.com started in 2007.
Wendy is on the investment panel of Mobius Lifescience Fund and advisor for digital agency Project Metal part of the Next Fifteen communications group.
Wendy also has an MA in Future Textiles from Central St. Martins and loves smart, sustainable materials and design. She lives with her husband and two children in West London.
David Erasmus
His rapid journey took him from advertising sales manager at 18 to running his own advertising agency at 19, before becoming a social entrepreneur overseeing projects in South Africa and Tanzania at 22.
David went straight into advertising after leaving school, deciding against further study. “I felt I could get more accomplished in four years in the world rather than staying in university studying it,” he says. “I have always wanted to get out there and do it.”
He shot up the ranks and became the agency’s sales manager within 6 months. He then set up his own advertising agency from his bedroom at his parents’ house, and three year’s later sold his stake in the company at 21 years old. Despite his massive success in the world of advertising, David would eventually find working in this field less and less rewarding. He has no regrets over selling the business and moving into social enterprise instead.
“In the closing months before the sale of the business, the appeal of selling and managing advertising space was lost on me,” David says. “I love making people excited about things (that’s pretty much all I can do), but the only thing I feel that I can commit to wholeheartedly is a cause that is unquestionable in its value. That, for me, is trying to address the issues that face my generation. In a global village I can’t see any problem that does not involve my neighbour, therefore it is my problem too.”
In June 2008 David set up a social enterprise in Cape Town that aims to provide employment, training and computer skills internships. He is also one of a team of young entrepreneurs and charity directors developing a project aiming to put computers into every secondary school in Tanzania. The NoPC project is also supported by David’s fellow Make Your Mark Ambassador Robert Wilson.
Closer to home, David runs a tutoring agency based in Surrey called Teach Me 2. Teach Me 2 aims to tailor tutoring to suit the individual and increase their pupils’ confidence and motivation as well as boosting their grades. David hopes that this venture will widen the access to premium teaching that might not otherwise be available.
David’s driving force through all this is his faith, and he feels a great personal responsibility to care for others in any way he can. “I am only young but there is much I can do,” he says.
Karen Gadd-TRIZ
About Karen Gadd:
Thousands of engineers and scientists have learned TRIZ from Karen and her Oxford Creativity colleagues in the last seven years. Karen runs Oxford Creativity as well as teaching TRIZ in
companies such as ABB, Airbus, BAE Systems, Bentley, Borealis, and BNFL (to keep it alphabetical and current in the last 12 months). Karen has selected and trained all the Oxford Creativity
workshop leaders and developed all the Oxford Creativity materials.
Karen studied Mechanical Engineering at Imperial College, and has an MBA from London Business School. After working in strategy and corporate planning in the City of London she returned to live in Oxford and was a tutor at Oxford's business school the European School of Management ESCP-EAP (based in Paris, Oxford, Madrid and Berlin). From 1995-2002 she was a Governor of Coventry University. Karen also founded and ran both MUSIC at OXFORD and the European Union Baroque Orchestra - these successful music organisations still flourish.
Karen has worked on nothing but TRIZ since discovering and learning its power to give us all the routes, to all the solutions, to all problems. In 1998 Karen started Oxford Creativity to concentrate on developing simple and practical TRIZ problem solving for the European market. Oxford Creativity has taken TRIZ to major companies including Rolls-Royce, British Nuclear Group, Bentley Motors, BAE Systems, Esso, Glaxo, Nissan and Pilkington. Oxford Creativity is now well established as one of the world's top TRIZ companies and has helped to make TRIZ well known and widely used throughout Europe and encouraged top companies to create expert TRIZ teams for innovative problem solving.
Karen is married, has four children and lives happily in Oxford and the Lake District. Concerts and singing are still part of her interests and activities, as well as speaking at conferences throughout the world on the success and power of TRIZ.
About TRIZ:
TRIZ is the science of creativity derived from all scientific and engineering solutions. TRIZ is a problem solving toolkit; the principal TRIZ tools direct us to find all the ways of solving a
problem, to find new concepts and the routes for developing new products. TRIZ has simple general lists of how to solve any problem; these TRIZ solution triggers are distilled from analysing all
known engineering success. There are also tools for problem understanding, for system analysis and for understanding what we want.
TRIZ offers systematic innovation; by learning TRIZ and following its rules we can accelerate creative
problem solving for both individuals and project teams. Companies that successfully apply TRIZ are using the success and knowledge of the whole world, and are not dependent on the spontaneous and
occasional creativity of individuals, or groups of engineers, within their organisation. TRIZ is not just powerful for technical problem solving but is also successfully used on a wide range of
management issues.
Keith Barnham, Quantasol
Professor Barnham, Emeritus Professor in the Department of Physics, set up spin-out company QuantaSol in 2007 to commercialise his research in
photovoltaics (PV)- solar power technology that converts sunlight into electricity. The company has pioneered 'Quantum Well Solar Cells' which use semi-conductor gallium arsenide and achieve
better efficiency than silicon PV cells.
"Our technology is capable of more than double the efficiency of the silicon PV cells currently on the market," he explains, "and our latest top cell is better than that of the present world
record cell."
QuantaSol's highly efficient products appeal to an expanding global market for concentrator solar systems which focus light onto small cells so that fewer are needed for significant electricity
output. QuantaSol's PV cells can also be used for new applications, such as 'smart windows' that can track sunlight and darken when necessary to act as blinds, while the PV cells provide
electricity.
QuantaSol has strong ethical policies, something Professor Barnham believes is important. He hopes the company's technology will provide electricity to the many parts of the developing world
where there is lots of sunshine but no electrical grid, in the same way that mobile phones have provided lifelines in these areas without a telephone network.
"The gallium arsenide chips in mobile phones have made this method of communication cost-effective," he explains. "A square metre of concentrator PV cells contains the same amount of gallium
arsenide as in two mobile phones and could supply electricity for one household in the developing world. However we need to drive the cost down by expanding the PV market."
Professor Barnham thinks the UK should follow the German example-Germany has similar sunshine levels to the UK but already 200 times the PV capacity. He says: "In the UK more than 60 per cent of
electricity is used within buildings. There is seven times more solar energy that falls on those buildings than is consumed inside, therefore solar alone could supply their electricity
Biography:
Keith Barnham is Emeritus Professor of Physics and Senior Research Investigator in the Physics Department at Imperial. He lead the Quantum Photovoltaics Group which for 15 years has pioneered the
application of quantum wells and quantum dots to photovoltaics publishing over 100 papers in this area and holding a number of patents. The group was shortlisted for the prestige international
award the Eni Italgas Prize for Energy and Environment in 2006. They presented 4 oral papers at the recent World PV conference, one of which was chosen as a conference highlight. At the previous
World conference in Osaka a group presentation received a prize for its outstanding contribution to PV.
Having been a Professor of Physics since 1997, and Acting Head of the Experimental Solid State group in 2004 he took early retirement in 2005 to concentrate on the research and its commercial
exploitation in two spin-out companies, Solarstructure and QuantaSol which are being incubated with help from Imperial Innovations and the Carbon Trust. He started his research career as an
Experimental Particle Physicist at the University of Birmingham, CERN Geneva, Berkeley California and Imperial, co-authoring over 100 scientific papers in this field. He then spent 5 years as
Senior Tutor in the Physics Department. This was followed by a Royal Society/SERC Industrial Fellow at Philips Research Laboratories studying Low Dimensional Structures before joining the
Experimental Solid State Physics group at Imperial in 1986.
Giles Andrews, ZOPA
About Zopa:
Social Lending is a smarter, fairer and more human way of doing money. It's like borrowing and lending with your friends and family - except there are thousands of people you can lend and borrow with.
Both lenders and borrowers get better rates, because Social Lending is more efficient than the traditional banking model. Banks have massive overheads, with thousands of employees to pay and hundreds of branches to maintain. So they have to take large margins on the money that passes through them.
An online marketplace where people meet to lend and borrow has huge cost advantages - which is why Zopa members get a fairer deal when it comes to their money.
Zopa was the world's first lending and borrowing marketplace. By demonstrating that Social Lending works on a large scale, Zopa has changed the financial sector for good.
In Zopa's wake, copycats - such as Prosper in the US, Smava in Germany and Boober in the Netherlands - have sprung up across the world.
About Giles Andrews
:
Giles spent the first ten years of his career in the motor industry pursuing his interest in all things automotive. This included co-founding Caverdale in 1992, a start-up taken to a £250m
turnover motor retailer and sold in 1997. After an MBA at INSEAD he set up his own consultancy business whose clients included Tesco and Tesco Personal Finance. Giles co-founded Zopa in 2004 and
led 4 fundraisings as CFO, raising a total of $33m from European and US investors. UK Managing Director since July 2007 and CEO since January 2009, he has led the company through a period
of dramatic growth that has seen it established as a real threat to the banks.
Guy Kawasaki and the Twitter Mafia
Guy Kawasaki has been involved in the tech biz for a while: He cut his teeth as an "evangelist" for Apple's Macintosh computers in the mid-1980s, and has been involved in a wide variety of media technology companies since then. His venture capital firm, Garage Technology Ventures, has been operating for over a decade, and he currently also heads up the start-up news aggregator AllTop.com.
Nick Halstead - CEO & Founder of TweetMeme.com one of hottest real-time news aggregators based upon twitter, Nick has been in development for 20 years and is now an active participant in the London Tech scene who likes to evangelise the use of twitter, data portability and the use of the social web for business.
Mario Menti - founder, twitterfeed.com - the de-facto standard to send blog and RSS updates to your twitter account automatically. online market research expert with 20 years experience in the market research software space, having worked as Solutions Architect for GMI (Global Market Insite, Inc.) and SPSS.
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