 RFID Journal LIVE! Europe will feature a preconference seminar for investors which brings together the leading RFID pure-play companies from the United States and Europe. We will be posting the names and biographies of speakers as they are confirmed. Among those who have already committed to participating are:
Ohad Bashan, President and CEO, OTI America
Andrew Berger, Vice President, Europe, Alien Technology
Dominik Berger, Co-Founder, RF-iT Solutions
Chris Bishop, CEO, Wavetrend
William Colleran, President and Chief Executive Officer, Impinj
Stina Ehrensvard, Co-Founder and Vice President of Marketing, Cypak
Wilhelm Gantner, CEO, Identec Solutions
Tom Grant, Chairman and CEO, ThingMagic
Jeffrey Jacobsen, President, Applied Wireless Identifications
Bruce Jacquemard, Executive Vice President of Worldwide Sales, Savi Technology
John Koenigs, President and CEO, Globeranger
Jacek Kowalski, President and CEO, Inside Contactless
George Kypreos, Vice President & CFO, SAMSys Technologies
Christopher J. Marangi, Vice President of Research, Gabelli & Company
Bruno Moreau, Deputy General Manager, ASK
Michael Mullagh, CEO, Vivotech
Eric Peters, CEO, True Demand Software
Sanjay Sarma, CTO, OAT Systems
Edward Schneider, General Partner, Quan Ventures
Elie Simon, CEO, Tagsys
Ashley Stephenson, CEO, Reva Systems |
Jacek Kowalski started his career as the smart card chip design engineer at SGS-Thomson in France. He joined Gemplus in 1988 as chip design group manager, where he created a chip design activity and developed low power chips for security. Jacek created Inside Contactless in 1995 and succeeded in raising approximately €21.8 million in capital from European and Asian Venture Capital Funds. The company revenue reached approximately €8.3M in 2004, and a total of 80 million chips have been delivered to the market. Mr. Kowalski is a holder of 50 international patents and has been elected a Smart Card Market Visionary by Card Technology Magazine in 2004.
George Kypreos is the vice president and chief financial officer for SAMSys Technologies Inc., a provider of radio frequency identification reader solutions. He is responsible for the company’s accounting, financial operations, administration, human resources and investor relations activities. He is a chartered accountant and has been with SAMSys since 1998. While there, he has been instrumental in helping to raise over $40 Million for the company. 
Christopher J. Marangi is vice president of research at Gabelli & Company, the institutional broker-dealer arm of asset management firm GAMCO Investors, Inc. Christopher joined the firm in 2003 and covers companies in the RFID and business services sectors. He began his career as an investment banking analyst with J.P. Morgan & Co and later joined Wellspring Capital Management, where he evaluated and executed middle-market private equity transactions. He graduated Magna Cum Laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Williams College with a B.A. in political economy, and received an MBA with honors in finance from Columbia Business School. 
Bruno Moreau has been working for more than 20 years in the smart card arena. He was a director of Innovatron for 10 years, managing venture capital activity, as well as a board member of smart card companies Gemplus and Activcard. He initiated early work on contactless technologies, which led to ISO 14443 type B, and and in 1997, he co-founded ASK with Georges Kayanakis.
Michael Mullagh is the CEO of ViVOtech, Inc. He is an experienced wireless industry leader who has served as the head of two wireless carriers (Rogers Wireless and BC Tel, now Telus Corporation) and two growth-stage start-ups (Telephia and Whisper Communications). With 18 years of executive-level experience, Michael has a successful track record of building and managing fast-growth businesses. He received a BA Honors Degree in economics from Trinity College Dublin and a Masters Degree in economics at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia.
Eric Peters is the CEO and co-founder of TrueDemand Software, an application software company focused on building supply chain business applications that take advantage of RFID and event driven data. Eric has over 20 years’ experience in supply chain and is a leading authority on the subject of RFID and the supply chain. Prior to helping start TrueDemand, he was executive vice president of strategy and business development at Manhattan Associates, where he led the launch of Manhattan’s “RFID in a Box” initiative. Previously, he was CEO of an Accenture operating company and an associate partner in Accenture’s Supply Chain Strategy Practice. A respected thought leader, Eric regularly speaks at industry events and has been featured and quoted in hundreds of articles on supply chain and RFID. He also is a contributing author to several books on the subject of supply chain.
Sanjay Sarma is an associate professor of mechanical engineering at MIT and CTO of OAT Systems (on leave from MIT). He was a co-founder of the Auto-ID Center, and until recently, chairman of research. Sanjay received his Bachelors Degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, his Masters from Carnegie Mellon University and his Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley. In between degrees, he worked at Schlumberger Oilfield Services in Aberdeen, UK, and at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratories in Berkeley, California. Sanjay is an executive board member of OAT Systems, a leading company in RFID middleware. He has authored over 50 academic papers in computational geometry, RFID, automation and CAD, and is the recipient of numerous awards for teaching and research. 
Edward Schneider is the founding general partner of Quan Ventures, an active investor in the RFID sector. Mr. Schneider has implemented a top-down strategy of investing in emerging hardware IT niches. Prior to founding Quan, he managed equity mutual funds and an external venture capital portfolio at Lloyds TSB Bank. He was also an entrepreneurial founder of a Geneva-based technology start-up. He holds an M.I.M. from the American Graduate School of International Management and a B.A. from Emory University.
Elie Simon is a recognized senior IT industry executive, greatly respected for his innovative, pragmatic and results-driven business leadership. Prior to TAGSYS, he was president of Sun Microsystems' EMEA region, where he was instrumental in bringing a sharp and quick turnaround to the business, increasing the region's share of Sun's worldwide revenues from 28 percent to more than 36 percent. Elie Simon is a board member of 6WIND, a pioneer in advanced IP networking software, and the European chairman of Exanet, a breakthrough SW vendor in Open NAS storage.
Before co-founding Reva Systems, Stephenson was the CEO and chairman of Boston-based Xedia Corporation, a venture-backed developer of advanced Internet access equipment, up until its acquisition by Lucent in 1999. In 1998, he was named CEO of the Year by the Massachusetts Telecommunications Council for his work at Xedia. Earlier in the 1990s, Ashley was the vice president of marketing at ISIS Distributed Systems, a provider of software and integration services for Reliable Group Messaging acquired by Stratus Computer in 1993. Stephenson began his career in Hi-Tech at IBM R&D in the United Kingdom. In recent years, he has taught entrepreneurship as an adjunct professor in Babson College’s MBA program. He has also served on the boards of directors of several venture-backed startups and industry consortia. Ashley is a graduate of Imperial College, London (physics), and an associate of the Royal College of Science. He is the holder of several U.S. patents.
Wilhelm Gantner holds an electrical engineering degree from the Technical University Munich (Germany) and a Masters Degree in economy from the University of Washington in Seattle (USA). Since 1999, he has also been a professor. Wilhelm started his career during his studies and was always active in the development of electronic devices and computers. In 1974, he established Gama GmbH, which rapidly became a market leader in developing specialized high security systems for nuclear power plants and Military Installations. In 19982, Mr. Gantner sold his share in that company to the largest Austrian private investor group at that time. Subsequently, he established Gantner Electronic GmbH. From 1992 to 1994, he was a member of the Federal Council in the Austrian Parliament; currently, he is Chairman of the Board of the Economic Promotion Institute, Chamber of Commerce, Austria. In April of 1999, the long-range RFID division of Gartner Elecetric was spun off into Itentec Solutions GmbH, where Mr. Gantner is the CEO. He is also a substantial shareholder of IDENTEC SOLUTIONS as well as GANTNER ELECTRONIC.
In addition to being CEO of ThingMagic, Tom Grant is an early stage venture investor and business advisor, with 28 years' experience in Boston's high-technolgy industries. He is the founder and managing partner of Protos, and a general partner for Applied Technology, both early stage venture investment funds. He was previously with Softbridge MicroSystems, a PC software development company, and Data Resources, Inc., where he was group vice president. Tom serves on the boards of directors for several corporations, including Adesso Systems and Nexus EnergyGuide.
Ohad Bashan has served as head of global marketing and strategy development for On Track Innovations Ltd (OTI) since June 2000; as president, CEO and director of OTI America, Inc., since August 1998; and as a director of OTI's board since June 2005. From 1996 to August 1998, he served as OTI's business development manager. Ohad holds a B.A. in business from the College of Business Management, Tel Aviv, with specializations in marketing and finance, and an M.B.A. from Pepperdine University, California. 
William Colleran brings 20 years of experience in the semiconductor industry to Impinj. Prior to joining the company, he was director of business development for Broadcom. Earlier, he was the CEO of Innovent Systems, later sold to Broadcom. Colleran has extensive engineering-design experience, both as a consultant for Fortune 500 companies and as senior staff engineer.
Stina Ehrensvärd serves as the vice president of marketing for Cypak AB, an innovator and pioneer in the field of combining RFID with microprocessors and sensors based in Stockholm, Sweden. Ehrensvärd co-founded Cypak in 1999, the year she was the winner of the European Information Society's grand prize for excellence in IT innovations. Ehrensvärd is the inventor and designer of several of Cypak's disposable paperboard computer concepts, and is involved in the company's intelligent pharmaceutical packaging initiative. Ehrensvärd was educated as an industrial designer at National College of Art, Craft and Design in Stockholm. 
Netherlands-born Frans-Peter Scheer attended MsC Wageningen University from 1988 to 1994, attaining a degree in agricultural engineering with a specialisation in logistics. From 1995 to 2001, he worked as a logistics planner, industrial engineer and quality-assurance manager for Lamb-Weston Meijer v.o.f., a French