Nicholas Negroponte is one of the foremost futurists of our time, a fine speaker with a distinguished history of valuable insights on innovation, technology and their impact on business that few can match.

Professor Negroponte was the first to predict and describe how digitalization would affect every industry in every part of the world. He is the author of the 1995 New York Times bestseller Being Digital. He has continued to understand the directions that technology is taking business and society and to effectively forecast the transformations that are defining our future.

He is the founding chairman of MIT’s Media Lab, one of the world’s leading interdisciplinary research centers. A graduate of MIT, Nicholas was a pioneer in the field of computer-aided design, and has been a member of the MIT faculty since 1966. Conceived in 1980, the Media Laboratory opened its doors in 1985.

Negroponte is the driving force behind One Laptop per Child, a project to bring durable, affordable and innovative computers to children worldwide.

In the private sector, Nicholas serves on the board of directors for Motorola, Inc. and as general partner in a venture capital firm specializing in digital technologies for information and entertainment. He has provided start-up funds for more than 40 companies, including Wired magazine.

Credentials

• Co-Founder, Chairman Emeritus, MIT Media Lab, 1984
• General Partner in four Venture Capital Funds
• Board of Directors, Motorola, since 1995
• Technical Advisory Committee to the FCC
• Advisor to the European Commission
• Founder and chairman, the 2B1 Foundation
• Founder, Architecture Machine Group, MIT, 1968
• Founding chairman, International Federation of Information
  Processing Societies
• Computers in Everyday Life program, Amsterdam, 1980
• First executive director, World Center for Personal Computation
  and Human
• Development, France, 1982
• Taught at MIT, Yale, Michigan and the University of California at
  Berkeley

Craig Saint-Amour is the head of the Microsoft U.S. Capital Markets team of sales and strategy professionals. With 30 years of U.S. and International business experience, including responsibilities for sales, operations, and strategic planning, Saint-Amour has focused the last 20+ years on the Financial Services industry.

Before joining Microsoft, Saint-Amour had a distinguished nine-year career with SUN Microsystems, both in WW Capital Markets Industry Solutions and running the #1 Financial Services Corporate Account JPM Chase. Prior to SUN, Saint-Amour spent 10 years with Digital Equipment Corporation within their Corporate Accounts Program. He also had tenures with Wang Laboratories and IBM.

Saint-Amour holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Business Administration from Babson College, and graduated from the IMD Program of Executive Strategic Planning in Lausanne, Switzerland in 2000.

Rebecca Jacoby has more than 11 years of experience at Cisco in a variety of operations and IT leadership roles. Jacoby is responsible for making the Cisco IT group a strategic business partner and for producing significant business value in the form of financial performance, customer satisfaction and loyalty, market share, and productivity.

Previously, Jacoby had responsibility for customer service and operational systems and played a key leadership role on the Business Process Operations Council, which drives the transformation agenda at Cisco. Her strong commitment to operational excellence, innovative approach to business problems, and aptitude for partnering cross-functionally are reshaping and elevating the role of IT at Cisco.

Prior to joining Cisco, Jacoby held a variety of planning and operations positions at UB Networks, Inc. and Amdahl Corporation.

Jacoby has a bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of the Pacific and an MBA from Santa Clara University.

Marten Mickos oversees the database group within Sun's Software division. He joined Sun in 2008 through its acquisition of MySQL AB. As CEO of MySQL for seven years, Mickos helped grow that company from a start-up to the second-largest independent vendor of open source software in the world.

Prior to MySQL, Mickos held multi-national CEO and senior executive positions in his native Finland. He holds a M.Sc. in technical physics from Helsinki University of Technology

Greg MacSweeney has covered technology for the past nine years, mostly in financial services. A frequent moderator and speaker at industry events, Mr. MacSweeney is currently Editor-in-Chief of Wall Street & Technology Magazine, a TechWeb publication.

Prior to joining Wall Street & Technology magazine, Mr. MacSweeney also worked for Insurance & Technology Magazine and Bank Systems & Technology Magazine, both TechWeb publications. In addition, Mr. MacSweeney covered technology for buy-side institutional investment organizations at Global Investment Technology, a biweekly news magazine.

During his career Mr. MacSweeney also covered automation technology and enterprise applications for the manufacturing industry while he was managing editor for Managing Automation Magazine, a Thomas Publishing Co. publication.