I'm speaking at Digital Hollywood in LA today

I’ll be moderating a panel from 3:50 – 5:00 pm at the Digital Hollywood conference in Santa Monica.  My panel is called “Micropayments & MicroEconomies – Establishing a New E-Commerce Gateway to the Future”.  I didn’t name it.  Had I named it, it would simply be called “Microtransactions and Virtual Goods, the next big business model”.  You know, something catchy and simple.

 The speakers on my panel are

• David Wallersten, Executive Senior VP of International for Tencent  [China's largest portal with 236 million active users.  65% of their revenue comes from microtransactions and virtual goods/services sales.]
• Craig Sherman, CEO of Gaia Online.  [Craig is a super interesting guy and would be great on a panel on just about any topic.  At a billion posts total and 1 million new posts a day to its forums, when might Gaia overtake Yahoo! Groups in usage?]
• Susan Choe, CEO of Outspark.  Outspark is a casual MMO company that is taking already successful Asian games, primarily from Korea, and porting them to the Western market.  They plan on releasing a handful of games this year, so it will be interesting to see if their portfolio approach to aggregating titles pays off.  Susan’s background in overseeing part of the development of CSFB’s online retail brokerage system has given her a unique perspective as to why it’s so challenging to create a clearing house and exchange for microtransactions across multiple sites/properties.  Someone’s gotta be the bank, and it’s probably not going to be your average casual MMO company.
• James Hong, Co-Founder of HotorNot.  James recently walked away from $500K a month in primarily subscription revenue to reinvent HotorNot as a free service.  It’s a big gamble – cannibalizing your existing revenue base and experimenting on new business models. 

If you’re at Digital Hollywood, come by and say hello to us.