SXSW Music Accelerator: Final Round
Music-Related technology start-up companies pitch their products and/or services in the final round to high profiled industry expert judges.
Finalists: TBA**
*The three finalists participating in this category will be determined at 3:15 PM on Wednesday, March 14.
For more information about the SXSW Accelerator event click here: http://sxsw.com/music/startupvillage/accelerator
Presenters
Brad King is an assistant professor of journalism at Muncie, Indiana's Ball State University, where his research examines how emerging technologies are changing the ways we tell -- and share -- stories. He is also one of six Emerging Media Fellows at the university.
A journalist since 1994, King earned his Master's from the University of California at Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism in 2000. He then when work for Condé Nast's Wired magazine and then its sister website Wired News covering the convergence of technology and culture. In 2002 he co-authored Dungeons and Dreamers, a book on the history of computer games, virtual worlds and their effects on American culture for McGraw-Hill. In 2004, he was hired as the senior editor and producer for MIT's Technology Review.
King helped launch blogs at Variety magazine and MIT. He also sat on the advisory board for the first Austin Game Conference in 2004. For the past several years, he has worked on the advisory boards for South by Southwest Interactive and Carnegie Mellon's ETC Press
Hany Nada is co-founder of GGV Capital and has worked as a long-term partner with more than 150 companies over the past decade to build companies that can succeed in today's global marketplace. He is a trusted resource to public and private company CEOs and management teams on global market development, customer introductions and M&A/IPO guidance across US and Asian markets. CEOs that have worked with Hany characterize him as their go-to advisor for both general direction and company growth strategies.
As a leading venture investor, Hany made his first investment in China in 2001, and has led the firm’s successful investments in athenahealth (NASDAQ: ATHN), Glu Mobile (NASDAQ: GLUU), Kintana (acquired by Mercury Interactive), Turbine (acquired by Time Warner) and Xfire (acquired by Viacom). Currently, he serves on the Board of Directors for Tudou, China’s leading video content provider, Vocera Communications, RootMusic, Glu Mobile, and Wild Tangent. In addition to actively making investments in the mobile and gaming sectors in the US and China, Hany is responsible for one of the industry’s most successful China/US investment teams as well as general oversight of the firm's funds.
Before entering the venture capital business, Hany spent ten years on Wall Street as a top-ranked research analyst at Piper Jaffray focusing on Internet software and infrastructure.
Hany is a graduate of the University of Minnesota where he earned a B.S. in economics and a B.A. in political science.
Ian Rogers, CEO
Ian has been helping artists make the most of the web since 1993. Until April, 2008 he was VP and General Manager of Yahoo! Music and Yahoo! Video. Previously he was President & CTO of Mediacode (sold to Yahoo!), Pres. of New Media at Grand Royal, Webmaster at Nullsoft (sold to AOL) and CTO at rVision. He dropped out of a Computer Science PhD program in 1995 to assist Beastie Boys on tour. He holds a BA in Computer Science from Indiana University.
After founding her influential art-punk band Throwing Muses at age 14, Kristin Hersh went on to spend the next 25 years confounding expectations and breaking rules. Throwing Muses first gained traction in Boston. Eventually, word of the Muses got back to highly regarded British indie label 4AD and the band became the label’s first American signing. In the US, they signed to Warner Brothers Records. In 2003, the band released the wild and wooly “Uses” album; widely regarded as a precursor to Kristin’s louder, faster trio, 50FootWave. Since 2004, 50FootWave has released a series of frighteningly intense mini-albums, all available for download free of charge and licensed for sharing via Creative Commons.
Her latest solo release, 2010’s Crooked, is an entirely listener-funded recording, written and demoed in public and in full conversation with the audience meant to consume it. It was also released as an art book, published by Harper Collins in the UK.
In 2007, Kristin co-founded the non-profit Coalition of Artists and Stake-Holders (CASH Music), originally for the purposes of experimenting with alternative economic models for artists. Over the past few years, CASH has not only completely funded Kristin’s own output, but has also powered dozens of other artist and label projects and has grown into a widely-recognized free & open-source software foundation focused on tools for musician businesses. Think WordPress.org or Mozilla, but for musicians’ tools.
Penguin published Kristin’s first book, Rat Girl, in September, 2010. Alternately harrowing and hilarious, Rat Girl is based on her teenage diary entries from 1985 and ’86, a period during which the teenage Kristin lived in her car, crashed on friend’s floors and in empty apartments, unable to sleep for hearing the strange songs for which she is now known.
Wednesday, March 14
