Panelists

Puneet Mehta is co-founder of My City Way. In February the company won the popular and investors' choice awards in the NYC Big Apps competition with the versatile NYCWay app. Since then My City Way has expanded at break-neck speed to cities across the world.

Chris Mirabile is founder and CEO of The Hotlist, a geo-social aggregator launched from the NYU Stern Business Plan Competition. Prior to The Hotlist, Mirabile worked in Private Equity at Putnam Lovell Investment Bank and as a consultant to hedge funds on behalf of Morgan Stanley as well as independently.

Dan Melinger is CEO and co-founder of Socialight, one of the earliest New York startups in hyperlocal media. Over 500 customers, big and small, use Socialight to publish their own mobile apps and power communities around location-based content.

Murat Aktihanoglu is CEO and founder of Centrl, a location-based social network for the web and mobile phones. Aktihanoglu is also co-author of the book 'Building Location-Aware Applications' released this Summer from Manning Publications.

Panelists

Alistair Goodman is CEO of Placecast, a location-based advertising thought-leader and developer of the geo-fencing service ShopAlerts. Placecast runs location-based mobile marketing programs for brands like The North Face, Sonic Drive-In and American Eagle Outfitters.

Landy Ung is CEO and co-founder of 8coupons. The mobile coupon pioneer aggregates over 1 million deals from more than 300,000 local retailers nationwide and presents the deals to its users on a location-based map that is geo-personalized based on IP address.

Zane Friedman is founder and CEO of GroupTabs. Friedman previously served as an account executive at Citysearch, the largest local search directory in the United States. He launched GroupTabs in August 2010, using Foursquare's open API for check-ins. Friedman graduated from the University of Florida in 2006, with a bachelors in economics.

James Moran is CEO and co-founder of Yipit. The company aggregates and recommends personalized daily deals from local daily deal websites. Yipit serves deals to major metros including New York, Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco, Chicago, Boston and Atlanta.

Guest moderator

Anna Akbari has a Ph.D. in Sociology and teaches in the department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. She is the co-founder of Splice, a social media tool, and the founder of Closet Catharsis, her fashion consulting company. Additionally, she is a roller-disco superstar, a fake taxidermist, and the host of costumed karaoke parties.

James Spindler is the Chief Creative Officer of @radical.media, a multi-disciplinary media company. Spindler has worked with clients including Adidas, Kate Spade, the Discovery Channel, and Barney's New York.

In addition Spindler has been a featured guest lecturer at the Yale Graduate School of Design, the School of Visual Arts and Parsons, New York, and VCU Brand Center, Richmond, Virginia.

@Radical is working on a number of exciting projects with NASA, Conservation International and ESRI that simplify complex spatial analysis using innovative presentations, opening the world of geography and geographic science to a global audience.

James Spindler will present 19.20.21, a multi-year initiative with ESRI created to foster better understanding of the challenges facing the world's largest cities through the development of a standardized methodology for the collection, comparison and organization of data.

Two-thirds of the world's population live and work in cities, and many more will. 19.20.21 will explore the global implications of the rise of these supercities and the effects of this phenomenon in population change.

Panelists

John Valentine is a Business Development Executive at SCVNGR. The Cambridge-based location-based mobile gaming company has recently launched campaigns with the Showtime hit series Dexter, the city of Philadelphia, the New England Patriots and the movie Inception.

Sarah Hofstetter is Senior Vice President at 360i responsible for the digital agency's social, mobile, digital publicity, consumer insights and brand strategy groups. She provides strategic counsel to clients such as Coca-Cola, JCPenney, NBC Universal, Ralph Lauren, Reckitt Benckiser on utilizing digital to help marketers foster relationships and form emotional bonds between brands and consumers.

Ian Schafer is founder and CEO of Deep Focus. The interactive agency recently launched GEOfocus, a marketing practice built around location-aware platforms. Deep Focus partnered with Foursquare on a first GEOfocus campaign for Microsoft's Bing at SXSW and during the World Cup.

Allison Mooney is Vice President of Emerging Trends for MobileBehavior, an Omnicom company focused on understanding mobile consumers. She leads the agency's Intelligence efforts observing emerging trends in behavior and technology to provide strategic direction for clients and runs the company's blog.

Panelists

Tony Jebara is co-founder and Chief Scientist of Sense Networks, a New York based company that uses machine leaning technology to create actionable business insights from large quantities of mobile phone location and carrier call pattern data. Dr. Jebara is also Director of the Columbia University Machine Learning Laboratory and recipient of the Career Award from the National Science Foundation.

Jeff Holden is founder and CEO of Pelago. The company's flagship product Whrrl breaks people out of their Social Rut with Amazon-like recommendations for the real world. Prior to Pelago, Holden was the senior executive at Amazon.com responsible for the consumer website technology and experience, including personalization, social computing, search, ordering and Amazon Prime.

Andrew Turner is chief technology officer of FortiusOne, a Washington-based location analytics company. Turner was co-founder of Mapufacture, acquired by FortiusOne in August 2008, and is actively involved in open-data projects such as OpenStreetMap and VoteReport, as well as open-source projects like Mapstraction and GeoPress.

Kristy Sundjaja as Senior Director of the Center for Economic Transformation at NYCEDC oversees the development and implementation of policy recommendations and programs to strengthen New York's position as the global media and technology capital. She has spearheaded efforts to increase collaboration in the media industry between private companies and academic institutions with the creation of the NYC Media Lab and the BigApps competition, a software application competition that garnered 85 submissions from developers in its inaugural year.