It’s been a lot of fun putting this together – a “who’s who” lineup for Kelsey’s Drilling Down on Local: Marketplaces, which takes places April 30-May 2 in Seattle (my favorite city).
This show, entirely inspired by Kelsey’s Marketplaces research program, which I run, takes a fresh stab at everything, with a major focus on verticals, community and classifieds – all from an exclusively LOCAL perspective.
Keynotes are being handled by Adam Bain, who is building up MySpace for Fox Interactive Media; Rich Barton, the founding Expedia boss who has gone on to launch Zillow; Eric Jorgensen, who makes the big decisions on local for Microsoft; Chris Saridakis, the PointRoll wizard who has just been named as the new Chief Digital Officer at Gannett; and Merrill Brown, a great visionary thinker (and a prime mover at MSNBC, Court TV, Channels Magazine etc.).
And we’ll have in-depth executive interviews with Pat Marshall, who is working on a new order as chief digital officer at YellowBook; Dan Pulcrano, the king of geo-domains at Boulevards; and Tom Bates, who is developing Kudzu for Cox Enterprises. We also have special presentations from Patricia Lee Smith, who runs Seattle Times Interactive; and Rob Barrett, who runs LA Times.com.
But the heart of the show, inevitably, is the extensive look at the verticalization of local.
We’re delighted at the participation of great people like Mitch Golub, who runs Cars.com; Michael Yang, who runs Yahoo! Real Estate and Autos; David Liu, who runs The Knot; …..the list goes on. (really, I could highlight any of the 40+ speakers).
If you take yourself seriously as a player in this space, you probably want to be there. Join us!