Bernd Beuermann - Media Consultant - bimacon-Medienservice

Bernd Beuermann has worked as a press photographer for more than 25 years and at least in leading position of the "Imaging" department of the Göttinger Tageblatt, to which the areas of photography, electronic image processing and electronic archives belong. With the introduction of digital photography into the newsroom at the beginning of the 1990s, Bernd Beuermann set standards throughout Germany for publishing organisation. He is also active as a technical writer and lecturer both in Germany and internationally. B. Beuermann has already guided several Ifra training courses on the topic of "Digital Photography".

Frank Biederich - Sr. Engineering Manager, XMP Technology - Adobe

Frank Biederich is the Engineering Manger for Adobe's Extensible Metadata Platform (XMP). His team is responsible for delivering the XMP technology to most Adobe products as well as a variety of industry leading companies by the public and free XMPToolkit SDK and XMP specification. Before, he was leading Adobe GoLive and Adobe Version Cue development teams always dedicating his time to the problem of organizing, finding and sharing digital content aiming for more seamless user workflows across products and platforms. As the technical chair of the Metadata Working Group (MWG) - a consortium of leading companies in the digital media industry - he's driving towards the goal of a seamless metadata exchange when working with digital assets across systems.

Bernd Czichon - CEO - Picturemaxx

Bernd M. Czichon is Chief Executive Officer of picturemaxx AG since 2001 and an expert in the field of IT based workflow management in the media market. As the leading technological company in the photo and media industry, picturemaxx develops and operates comprehensive platforms for the archiving, distribution, marketing and management for the search and purchasing of media content. Born in 1966 in Saarbrücken, Germany, Czichon studied Business Management and Law and graduated in Business Management. He started his professional life at ALDI and the REWE Group in the field of sales and IT based controlling. In 1998 he joined Cybernet as Retail Manager for e-business solutions. In 2000 he founded Cydelion Technologies which later merged with picturemaxx.

Yves Schmid Dornbierer - Lead Engineer/Software Architect - AntZero

Yves Schmid Dornbierer worked on creating 3D engines for the video- games industry in the 1990s. He was a 3D real-time consultant for several studios around the world. In the early 2000s, he created the GarageCube label, under which he published a number of open-source projects and eventually the VJ software Modul8, which he co-authored. In 2007, he co-founded the AntZero studio, where he is working to develop an application suite for real-time audiovisual creation. This first program is a multimedia Digital-Asset Manager called AtomicView.

Lionel Faucher - Founder and CEO - AkaMedia

After a MS in engineering in Paris, Lionel participated in the launching of free magazines for students. The small publishing company was sold in 1992 to the French news magazine Le Point. Lionel created there two 'special editions' (one for students & one for executives) and the first website of the magazine (in 1995). He also participated in the digitisation of the magazine workflow. After an MBA in Sydney, Australia, he initiated the project of a 'new economy' contributive magazine (print & web) and started Akamedia in 2003 to act as a facilitator for the footage market. Lionel has extensive knowledge of the media industry, combined with a thorough understanding of the impact of (Internet) technologies on it.

Stéphane Guérillot - Head of International Technical Affairs AFP - Chairman of the IPTC

Head of International Technical Affairs for Agence France-Presse (AFP), he also supervises the technical division of AFP Subsidiaries in the world and the management of the Sale of Technology department.
Since June 2005 he is the Chairman of the IPTC which is a consortium of the world's major news agencies and news industry vendors.
From 2003 to 2007 CEO and Chairman of the Board of Fileas SA, an AFP subsidiary specialized in Content Distribution Services, mainly by Satellite.
Born in 1956 and graduated from ENST Bretagne (Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Télécommunications) he joined AFP in 1982 as a development engineer and quickly managed the “Research and Development” department with achievements in the field of digital photo and networks. From 1990 he managed the Networks and Telecommunications department. In 2001 he is appointed the Director for International Technical Affairs.

Ross Purves - Lecturer, GIScience Centre, University of Zurich, Co-coordinator, TRIPOD Project - Tripod Project

Ross Purves is a lecturer in the GIScience Centre at the University of Zurich. His research interests include Geographic Information Retrieval and the extraction of useful semantics from spatial data. In the case of the Tripod project, this includes techniques to derive "vernacular names“ that is to say placenames commonly used in everyday speech, but not found in traditional geographic databases, and methods to generate keywords from spatial data based on where an image was taken.

David Riecks - David Riecks Photography & ControlledVocabulary.com
Presenting on behalf of the Stock Artists Alliance

Photographer David Riecks is a sought-after consultant on digital imaging and metadata. Riecks is involved in recent standards initiatives, and has been a featured speaker at PhotoPlus Expo, Microsoft's Pro Photo Summit and last years Photo Metadata conference. He was the only stock photographer involved with the IPTC4XMP working group; authored the IPTC Core User's Guide and serves on the IPTC Photo Metadata working group. Riecks chairs the Stock Artists Alliance Imaging Technology Standards committee, was a founding member of UPDIG, serves as the Chief Technical Advisor to PLUS, and founded ControlledVocabulary.com to assist others with keywording and embedded metadata issues. His book on Digital Photo Management (Focal Press) is due this fall.

Amery von Schoultz - Developer - TT (The Swedish News Agency)

Amery von Schoultz started as a journalist at TT in the early '80s, and switched gradually to technical tasks in the late '90s, thereby becoming familiar with news text processing. In 2000, with little previous experience of video or photography, she put together a video production system for TT - searching for hardware, programming some software and suggesting staff organisation. Continued developing a flexible distribution system and archive, including a web shop for video and audio with optional streaming and statistics. Apart from that, she has worked mainy with web applications and enhancing understanding between IT and editorial staff.

Madi Weland Solomon - Keynote speaker - Pearson Plc

Madi Weland Solomon is the Director of Content Standards for Pearson, the international media company which owns The Financial Times, Penguin Books, and Pearson Education. She is responsible for the development and management of content management standards to ensure the support of current and new product models.
Prior to Pearson, she was the Corporate Taxonomist for The Walt Disney Company and a taxonomy and metadata consultant specializing in rich media. Her background is in the visual arts sector with the Getty Research Institute in Standards and Vocabularies and with The Broad Art Foundation.

Klaus Sprick - Chair of the epa Technical Committee - epa

Klaus Sprick, born in 1941, graduated in Electrical and in Nuclear Engineering. In 1968 he joined dpa, the German Press Agency. He was appointed Technical Director in 1974 and Senior Vice President Technology in 1985. At dpa Klaus Sprick focussed on streamlining business processes with IT for news creation and editing. Since his retirement from dpa in 2004, he works as an independent consultant.
Klaus Sprick joined the IPTC in 1969 and worked as chairman of the Technical and the Standards Committee on actually all IPTC standards. He was IPTC Chairman from 1990 to 1993 and now is “Honorary Member” and active in the IPTC Photo Metadata Working Group.

Michael Steidl - Managing Director - IPTC

IPTC Managing Director since 2003, Michael Steidl is deep in the business of creating, promoting and maintaining standards for the news industry. He has a long record with information technology for news as a consultant to news agencies for 20 years. Being an engineer by education he also worked as an editor and managing director for news agencies, hence knowing the news business in a broad sense. Among many other tasks at the IPTC he lead the development of the "IPTC Core" and "IPTC Extension" standards and is co-lead of the Photo Metadata Working Group.

Tom Tinervin - Managing Director - picturemaxx USA

Tom Tinervin has over ten years experience in global SaaS (software as a service) solutions as an executive officer and manager in dominant market leading companies: Digital Railroad, Getty Images, and Corbis. Unique to his accomplishments and vision has been the ability to advocate for artists rights and education of digital media best practices; having been at the forefront of leveraging the intersection between digital content providers and buyers. Prior to his leadership in the media industry, Tom founded OminFineArt, an art publishing company with an exclusive license to reproduce the masterworks of the Smithsonian American Art Museum as well as working in financial services with Smith Barney.

Dennis Walker - President and Founder - Camera Bits

Dennis Walker is the Founder and President of Camera Bits, based in Oregon.  Walker started Camera Bits in 1996 with its first product, the Quantum Mechanic noise filter plug-in for Photoshop.  The following year Walker released Photo Mechanic, now an eleven-year mainstay of digital photojournalists for photo captioning and workflow.  Walker is a graduate of UC San Diego with degrees in Computer Science and Cognitive Psychology.  Prior to forming Camera Bits, Walker worked with neural networks and image processing.  Walker is the 2004 recipient of the NPPA's J. Winton Lemen Fellowship Award in recognition of his continued efforts to improve photo editing software. In 1987, Walker co-authored the tremendously successful game Dungeon Master, the first 3D real-time role playing game.

Max Wieberneit - Managing Director - Corbis Germany

Max Wieberneit is Managing Director and Sales Director of Corbis Germany
GmbH, Corbis GmbH, Corbis Zefa GmbH since 2005. Before that he was with visual media international GmbH / zefa visual media GmbH as Managing director from 2001 to 2004, he conducted the sale of both companies to Corbis. After earning a degree in economics (Diplomkaufmann) from the Otto-Friedrich University in Bamberg (Germany) in 1996 he started his professional career as a consultant with Arthur Andersen until the year 2000.