Day 1 VR JAM // Junction x Slush
Badge PickUp & Warm Up event hosted by Beringer Finance at Kex Hostel
Panel & Pitch event The Nordic Web & Northstack at Kex Hostel
Day 2 of VR JAM // Junction x Slush PLAY
September 28 - 29 th @Reykjavík University
"At Junction, we're all about building cool new things, and that's exactly what the VR Jam is meant for. If you build something cool enough, you get to the stage of Slush PLAY!"
For more information: JunctionSlush PLAY Conference Day 1
Master of Ceremony:
Games Editor at Mashable
Chelsea Stark is Mashable's Games Editor, where she covers video games both great and small, virtual reality, esports and how all those connect to our culture. For the last four years, she's lead Mashable's gaming section, covering news, as well as features and reviews.
Welcome to Slush PLAY
CEO of CCP Games
The view from Wall Street - How investors are thinking about VR/AR
VP at Goldman Sachs
Marshall Roslyn is a Vice President in TMT Investment Banking at Goldman Sachs. Based in San Francisco, he helps lead Goldman’s Virtual and Augmented Reality Investment Banking efforts and also advises companies in the technology, media and education sectors.
Prior to re-joining Goldman Sachs, Marshall was a member of the investment team at Learn Capital where he worked in both Beijing and Silicon Valley. Earlier in his career, he was a Princeton in Asia fellow in Shanghai and worked as an analyst in Goldman Sachs’s Executive Office.
Marshall received his MBA from Tsinghua University and his undergraduate degree from Princeton University.
How to bring the future foundation for a VR world
Head of Global Business Development of gumi Inc
Nogi is head of Global Business Development of gumi Inc., one of Japan’s leading mobile gaming companies, listed within the 1st section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange. gumi founded $50M size VR fund called The Venture Reality Fund with local General Partner Marco and Tipatat in Silicon Valley which focuses seed or early stage startups and Tokyo VR Startups/Seoul VR Startups which organizes the first VR incubation program in Tokyo/Seoul and Japan’s top VR community. Nogi is a 15-year veteran of international business, he has been instrumental to the acceleration of gumi’s overseas business outside of Japan that now accurately contributes nearly half of worldwide revenues. Nogi was the former CEO of gumi Korea and the CEO of GCREST America, a provider of PC online and mobile social games.
Virtual Reality in 2016. What have we learned from the launch.
Developer at Valve
Fireside Chat: The Business of VR
Moderator: Neil Murray
CEO of CCP Games
Virtual Reality Investments, LLC (VRI)
Don is working with a group of four partners to raise the world’s first VC fund for Web VR startups. Prior, he has helped operate an angel fund for VR, completing seven VR investments in 2016; Upload VR, Omnivirt, Visby, SVRF, Visby, Wonder and one stealth.
Principal, Samsung Global Innovation Center Co-Founder and Managing Director, Empire Angels
Christina is a Principal at Samsung’s Global Innovation Center, based in New York, focused on early stage investments in software and services. She is also Co-Founder and Managing Director of Empire Angels, a member led angel group of young professionals investing in technology startups with a focus on supporting young entrepreneurs. Christina is a Regular Contributor for the Wall Street Journal on startups and small business, a columnist for Inc.com, a mentor at The Brandery and Venture for America and a member of VFA’s Rise Committee focused on increasing diversity in entrepreneurship. She is a frequent speaker and panelist at events in the U.S., Europe and Asia and was recognized by the New York Business Journal as a 2016 Woman of Influence.
Christina was previously a Vice President at Citigroup with background in capital markets, emerging markets and structured finance. She serves as Chairman of Hope on a String, a non-profit, grassroots organization that seeks to foster an environment of social transformation and economic development in Haiti through participation in music as well as Vice President of the Board of Governors of the Hotchkiss School Alumni Association.
Managing Partner at Presence Capital & Advisor at Horizons Ventures
Co-Founder & CBDO, The Rogue Initiative
Hrish is Co-Founder and Chief Business Development Officer of The Rogue Initiative. The Rogue Initiative is a Los Angeles-based entertainment company composed of award-winning entertainment industry professionals including alumni from Amblin Entertainment, Pixar, Dreamworks Animation, Disney and Activision Entertainment creating new cinematic interactive virtual reality, feature film, and television content. Hrish was a founding Managing Partner of EastLabs, a seed stage venture capital fund based in Kyiv, Ukraine. He was the Senior Business Developer/Global Evangelist at Toptal, backed by Andreessen Horowitz, providing elite software engineers to companies globally. He was previously in venture capital at SpencerTrask Ventures in NYC, an investment banker at HSBC Securities, and at UBS Investment Bank in investment banking/M&A and in global business development at management consulting firm Aon Hewitt. Hrish earned a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science/Pre-Med from Rice University, a Master of Public Health and MBA in Finance and Entrepreneurship from the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Tech journalist and Founding Editor of The Nordic Web
Neil S W Murray is a European tech journalist and Founding Editor of The Nordic Web, the number one resource for data and analysis on the Nordic startup scene.
Neil is a passionate community builder and is involved in many projects across the region to help promote and grow the Nordic startup community.
Virtual reality: Human capital challenges and opportunities
Chairman and Co-Founder of the SES Group
The reality of virtual reality
Partner at Beringer Finance
Steinar Svalesen has over 25 years’ experience with mobile and digital businesses. His focus has been on business development and investments in disruptive early-stage and transformational growth companies. He has built, managed and sold companies in Norway and USA. Steinar has management experience from leading international telecom operators and infrastructure providers. He is on the board of various early-stage Scandinavian technology companies, and more recently he has been working actively with projects within the FinTech industry.
Fireside Chat: VR, AR and Life: The Inevitable Integration
Moderator: David Traub
President at Lifelike & Believable Animation Design, Inc.
User Experience Engineer at Sólfar Studios
Founder of Eye Mynd Brainwave VR
Founder & CEO at Aemass, Inc.
VR Media Producer
Startup Pitch Part 1 // Hosted by SLUSH
Success of Failures
Co-Founder of Wargaming
How King uses data to launch successful games
Business Performance Director at King
Jacob currently works as Business Performance Director at King in Stockholm where he uses King’s massive amount of player data to improve the games’ engagement, virality and monetization. He was part of the Candy Crush Soda Saga team making use of data to optimize game content and maximize the chance of a successful launch. Jacob is also an app entrepreneur with a couple of apps in his portfolio.
Virtual storytelling - the final frontier
Technical Sales Director, EMEA, Unity Technologies
Fireside Chat - Games: Creativity & Design
Moderator: Kish Hirani
VP Game Design at King
As well as elevating game design, narrative and creative direction across King’s studios, Stephen overlooks a team of 144 Game designers, Narrative designers and Level designers. With 20 years of Game design experience; covering console, handheld, MMORPG and Mobile, Stephen has worked for companies such as Bullfrog, Nickelodeon, Namco, and Disney/Pixar.
Founder & CEO of Lemonsqueeze
Mik has a impressive track record as an enthusiastic and highly motivated leader with 15+ years of proven success in strategic sales, building new businesses, being the catalyst of new sales processes and experienced builder of businesses in all sizes.
This includes innovative customer strategies and well thought strategic partnerships with companies like UN, Redbull, Nike, The Atlantic, Adidas, VICE, V Magazine, New York Times, Smithsonian and 100+ other high-end brands. As an intrapreneur at Mecom, Mik founded and grew stand-alone solutions like Sweetdeal in 5 countries and more than 80 cities and initiated the US expansion for the digital publishing company, Issuu.
Today Mik’s company Lemonsqueeze has helped more than 50 companies enter and expand in the US and currently Lemonsqueeze houses 16 companies from their awesome incubator, Lemonsqueeze Space, in New York. Hopefully the birth place of many unicorns! Lemonsqueeze is a market expansion platform that helps European business quickly establish and scale in the United States. Their turnkey solution transforms any US strategy into an established, staffed and active on-the-ground operation in a period of weeks. Lemonsqueeze will remove the hurdles to expansion and grow any business in the US quickly and efficiently, allowing companies to remain focused on managing their core markets.
Creative Squirrel & UX Designer at Lucid Trips
Founder of Color Switch
From humble beginnings, former U.S. Army medic and professional magician turned self-taught, smash-hit game developer, David Reichelt, caught lightning in a bottle with his release of global phenomenon COLOR SWITCH. With an indomitable work ethic, Reichelt had already published over forty titles before striking gold with Color Switch. Reichelt leverages non-technical environments to build his games, and serves as an archetype for the modern gaming entrepreneur. Now, David spends his time traveling the world to share the lessons he learned, and help other aspiring entrepreneurs realize their dreams of standout success.
Assistant Professor at Reykjavik University
David Thue is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Reykjavik University, where he teaches and conducts research in Game Design, Artificial Intelligence, and Interactive Storytelling. His research explores software systems that can automatically adapt to individual players, toward managing their experiences in a personalized way.
Consultant
Lessons from Stugan: Perfect recipe for life-long learning
General Manager of Stugan
Startup Pitch Junction VR Jam / Winner
September 28 - 29 th @Reykjavík University
"At Junction, we're all about building cool new things, and that's exactly what the VR Jam is meant for. If you build something cool enough, you get to the stage of Slush PLAY!"
For more information: JunctionSlush PLAY // Marioke
Slush PLAY Conference Day 2
Master of Ceremony:
Games Editor at Mashable
Chelsea Stark is Mashable's Games Editor, where she covers video games both great and small, virtual reality, esports and how all those connect to our culture. For the last four years, she's lead Mashable's gaming section, covering news, as well as features and reviews.
Creating VR StoryWorlds: Hollywood 2.0
CCO of Virtuosity
An award winning and innovative filmmaker with over 25 years of Hollywood experience, Brett Leonard is one of the industries visionaries in the advancement of storytelling through digital media.
Mr. Leonard became a globally-recognised pioneer of digital filmmaking after directing and co-writing the cult classic Lawnmower Man, popularising the concept and term of VR to global audiences. Mr. Leonard is the co-founder of Virtuosity, a premiere VR consultancy group and is a sought after speaker in the VR/AR industry as a leading expert on defining interactive storytelling and on ethical frameworks for these powerful new mediums.
The road from Hollywood to VR
Co-founder and Creative Director of RVX
Dadi Einarsson is co-founder and Creative Director of RVX and has lead the company from its formation in 2008 as Framestore Reykjavik.
He has comprehensive international experience in visual effects after working with The Mill and Framestore in London, New York and in Reykjavik.
Dadi has worked with groundbreaking directors and his credits include Harry Potter, Contraband, The Golden Compass, 2 Guns and Gravity.
He is currently supervising the VFX for the feature film Everest, directed by Baltasar Kormákur.
Fireside Chat - VR and Movies
Moderator: Dennis Mitzner
CCO of Virtuosity
An award winning and innovative filmmaker with over 25 years of Hollywood experience, Brett Leonard is one of the industries visionaries in the advancement of storytelling through digital media.
Mr. Leonard became a globally-recognised pioneer of digital filmmaking after directing and co-writing the cult classic Lawnmower Man, popularising the concept and term of VR to global audiences. Mr. Leonard is the co-founder of Virtuosity, a premiere VR consultancy group and is a sought after speaker in the VR/AR industry as a leading expert on defining interactive storytelling and on ethical frameworks for these powerful new mediums.
VR Strategy & Innovation / Creative Partnerships at Live Planet
President of Interactive Ventures & Games at Lionsgate
CEO & Managing Director at RVX
Freelance Tech Journalist
Startup Pitch Part 2 // Hosted by SLUSH
Innovation in the EVE Universe
General Manager at CCP
Stefania is the general manager for CCP Iceland. She joined CCP six year ago to work on the critically acclaimed science-fiction game EVE Online first as a content manager, before taking over the position of Senior Producer and later Development Director. Stefanía worked for CCP Shanghai from 2014 to oversee production of EVE Online in China and emergent projects including virtual reality action game Gunjack, dubbed “highlight of the Gear VR” (Variety) platform from Samsung and has since been released on Oculus Rift, HTC Vive and is forthcoming on PlayStation 4.
Stefania has been working with multidisciplinary teams at CCP and her vision is to continue to innovate at CCP and motivate and support teams to deliver on their full potential.
She has also served as a board member and Chairman of the board for the Icelandic Gaming Industry.
Stefania holds a M.Sc. degree in Environmental Science from the Engineering faculty from the University of Iceland and in her spare time she learns Chinese.
Meeting the visual demands of immersive VR content
Director & Business Development CRYENGINE at Crytek
George has been playing games since the 70's when he started playing his favorite game Dungeon and Dragons as a child. He entered the video games industry back in 1998, working at Sony Online as part of the original team that developed MMO's such as EverQuest, Star Wars Galaxies and DC Universe Online. He later went on to work at British Developer Splash Damage with the development teams who created award winning titles Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory, Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, Batman Arkham Origins and Gears of War: Ultimate Edition. His career focus has been on improving quality, user experiences and community engagement. His current role at Crytek is Business Director focusing on growing the CRYENGINE and VR businesses.
Fireside Chat - Gaming and VR
Moderator: Leo Mirani
CEO & Game Designer at Resolution Games
While he’s known for shepherding Candy Crush Saga to mobile – and so helping to bankroll King’s $7 billion IPO in 2014 – Tommy Palm’s success story stretches back to the 1980s, when he began programming games for the Commodore 64. Between then and the dizzying success of King’s bestseller, Palm founded five including this latest venture, Resolution Games, a development studio with an eye on creating virtual reality games experiences everyone can enjoy. Their first major mobile VR fishing game, Bait!, is already proving their concept as its known as one of the most popular VR titles of all time. Turning towards the embryonic potential of VR rather than resting on his mobile gaming laurels might seem a bold bet for Palm. But, this serial mover and shaker prefers being ahead of the pack when it comes to new technology, saying it’s the only way to be in the sweet spot when the revolutionary is ready for the limelight.
Director & Business Development CRYENGINE at Crytek
George has been playing games since the 70's when he started playing his favorite game Dungeon and Dragons as a child. He entered the video games industry back in 1998, working at Sony Online as part of the original team that developed MMO's such as EverQuest, Star Wars Galaxies and DC Universe Online. He later went on to work at British Developer Splash Damage with the development teams who created award winning titles Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory, Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, Batman Arkham Origins and Gears of War: Ultimate Edition. His career focus has been on improving quality, user experiences and community engagement. His current role at Crytek is Business Director focusing on growing the CRYENGINE and VR businesses.
Technical Visionary and Investor
Ólafur Andri Ragnarsson is a technical visionary and investor. He was co-founder and former Chief Software Architect at Betware, now Novomatic Lottery Solutions (NLS). Today, NLS is one of the leading providers of online lottery and gaming platform software. NLS's platform is running the most innovative lotteries and gaming operators in the online and mobile market. Ólafur Andri serves as Technical Visionary at NLS.
Ólafur Andri has a faculty position as an adjunct a Reykjavík University School of Computer Science. On fall term, he teaches a course on Software Design and Implementation. On spring term, a course called New technology, covering emerging trends in technology and how to understand technology disruptions.
Ólafur Andri is also an active investor and consultant to gaming startups. Among companies he is involved with are Solid Cloud, Raw Fury Games and Armada Interactive.
CEO & Co-Founder of Aldin Dynamics
Hrafn Thorri Thórisson is the CEO and co-founder of Aldin Dynamics, a virtual reality company working on next-generation development tools for VR. Before the founding of Aldin in early 2013, Hrafn specialized in design & development of virtual worlds, AI systems and simulations.
CEO and Co-Founder of Sólfar
News editor at The Economist
Independent but not alone
Partner & Game Patron at Raw Fury Games
Building tough teams
Senior Producer at King
Fireside Chat - Swimming in a red ocean
Moderator: Will Freeman
Chief Strategy Officer at Wargaming
Sean Lee is the Chief Corporate Development Officer at Wargaming, a leading global online game developer and publisher, where he has been since the beginning of 2013. He manages the key strategic initiatives of Wargaming including M&A, investments, strategic partnerships and key market expansion.
Prior to Wargaming, Sean was the Director of Business Development at Tencent’s headquarters in Shenzhen, China, and helped cover global business and investment opportunities across broader technology, with a focus on Internet and gaming.
CTO / Founder of Klang Games
Reality Distortionist at Raw Fury
General Manager of Stugan
Founder of Plain Vanilla Games
Freelance video game journalist
Will Freeman is a freelance video game journalist, having written for national newspapers and the consumer, specialist and trade press for 10 years, contributing to titles including The Guardian, Edge, Eurogamer, The Observer and Develop. His writing focuses on not just the games medium, but also the technology, business and creative process of the games industry itself. Will equally serves as a consultant, events producer, mentor, researcher, speaker and script editor in the world of games. And he still spends as much time with an arcade cabinet as he does playing games on console or mobile.
VR’s changing tool chain: impacts and opportunities
Director, Developer Relations at AMD
Only dead fishes float with the stream
Marketing Director Live Services at EA Games, DICE
Fireside Chat - #FightClub - for the love of VR
Moderator: Julie Heyde
Developer at Valve
Creative Squirrel & UX Designer at Lucid Trips
#ChickenBitch at VRUnicorns
Closing Remarks
Vignir Örn Guðmundsson - IGI Chairman
CEO & Co-Founder of Radiant Games
Vignir graduated from Reykjavik University with a BSc. degree in Mathematics and a MSc. degree in Computer Science. He is the CEO and co-founder of Radiant Games and the chairman for the Icelandic Gaming Industry federation (IGI). In the last 2 years, Vignir and his co-founders at Radiant Games have worked hard at trying to create the best playful coding experiences possible. The first experience that they have created is a mobile coding game called Box Island, which introduces kids to the fundamentals of coding through an exciting adventure. The game won “Best Fun for Everyone” at the Nordic Game Awards 2016 and was featured this summer on the App Store as #1 Kids app in over 75 countries.
Slush PLAY // X-hugvit Final Party