Rob Fried is President, Chief Executive Officer and Director of Ideation Acquisition Corporation and founder and CEO of SpiritClips, a digital media content company.
Fried is an Academy Award-winning producer who has worked at Columbia Pictures, Savoy Pictures and Fried Films, Inc. His films include the touching classic Rudy.
Rob Fried holds an B.S. from Cornell University and an M.B.A. from Columbia University Graduate School of Business.
Barbara Ley Toffler is considered one of the nation's leading experts on management ethics. She is a former Harvard Business School professor who has also taught at Boston University School of Management, Columbia Business School, and Yale School of Management.
Toffler is the Founding Principal of Resources for Responsible Management, Inc., a Boston-based consulting firm. She is also the author of "Final Accounting: Ambition, Greed, and the Fall of Arthur Andersen" and "Tough Choices: Managers Talk Ethics".
Toffler was a National Partner in charge of Ethics at Arthur Andersen for four years in the late 1990s.
Barbara Ley Toffler holds a bachelor's degree from Columbia University where she was designated a Woodrow Wilson Fellow, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Organizational Behavior from Yale University.
Mitt Regan is Co-Director of the Center for the Study of the Legal Profession at Georgetown University. His work focuses on ethics, corporations, law firms, and the legal profession.
Before joining Georgetown, Professor Regan clerked for Judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and Justice William J. Brennan, Jr. of the Supreme Court of the United States, and worked as an associate at Davis Polk & Wardwell in Washington, DC. At Davis Polk he worked on matters relating to white-collar crime and the defense of attorneys and accountants.
Mitt Regan received his B.A. from the University of Houston, his M.A. from the University of California, Los Angeles and his J.D. from Georgetown University.
Zach Shulman is a Senior Lecturer at Cornell University. He teaches courses on venture capital and law for high-growth businesses. He also serves as general counsel and faculty advisor to BR Ventures and BR Incubator, both Johnson School student-run organizations that provide business consulting services and investment funds. Shulman is also currently a partner at Cayuga Venture Fund, a venture capital firm located in Ithaca, NY.
Before coming to the Johnson School in 2002, Shulman served as general counsel and chief investor relations officer of Spike Broadband Systems, where he was responsible for general oversight of Spike's legal function, including: negotiating and closing strategic and business relationships; strategizing, negotiating and closing fund-raising efforts; investor relations; and various human resource matters. While at Spike, Shulman negotiated and closed over $80 million in venture capital financing.
Prior to joining Spike, Shulman was an associate at the law firm of Harris Beach in Ithaca, New York. At Harris Beach, Shulman focused his practice on representing private and public corporations in a wide range of capacities, including equity financing via private placements and venture capital, bank financing, mergers and acquisitions, and the establishment of corporate governance policies, including advising boards of directors and executive management.
Before Harris Beach, Shulman was an associate at Ropes & Gray in Boston, Massachusetts, where he represented predominantly public companies in equity and debt offerings, commercial lending, Securities and Exchange Commission compliance, mergers and acquisitions, and executive compensation matters.
Zach Shulman earned a bachelor of science from the Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations and graduated from Cornell University Law School.
Douglas McMeekin started working as a cultural and environmental consultant to the oil industry in the Amazon Region of Ecuador in 1986. In 1991, Douglas formed FUNEDESIN, the Foundation for Integrated Education and Development, and has dedicated his life since then toward improving the standard of living of the people of the region and the preservation of the tropical rainforest.
In 1995, FUNEDESIN opened YACHANA LODGE, the world renowned educational eco-tourism facility on the Napo River, accessible only by motorized canoe. Yachana Lodge is providing a source of income and training for the staff of locals from the region, and giving visitors a window into the life of the people living in the Amazon Region. One hundred percent of the profit generated by the lodge goes to support the work of the foundation.
One of the strongest features that Douglas McMeekin brings to his work with the foundation is innovation and ideas. One of these is the formation of a micro-enterprise, called YACHANA GOURMET in the year 2000. This company was created to develop food products from produce from the Amazon region of the country. The primary product is the unique Yachana Jungle Chocolate. This project is providing improved, Fair Trade income to the farmers. Yachana Gourmet will be a major financial supporter of FUNEDESIN's projects in the future.
Scott Kirsner is a journalist who writes about innovation, innovators, and their impact on the world. His work appears regularly in Variety and the Boston Globe, and he has also been published in Wired, Fast Company, Newsweek, The New York Times, The LA Times, BusinessWeek, and the Hollywood Reporter. He edits two blogs: Innovation Economy, which focuses on the entrepreneurial scene in New England, and CinemaTech, which covers emerging technologies and trends in the movies.
Scott has helped to start three conferences dedicated to supporting start-ups and entrepreneurship, the oldest of which is held on Nantucket every May. Scott is the author of several books, including "The Future of Web Video" and "Inventing the Movies," which he'll talk about today. The book tour to support "Inventing the Movies" has taken him to Google, Netflix, the Sundance Film Festival, Disney, MIT, and Industrial Light & Magic, George Lucas' special effects firm.
Scott Kirsner received his undergraduate degree from the College of Communication at Boston University.
Nick Donofrio is a 44-year IBM veteran who led IBM's technology and innovation strategies from 1997 until his retirement in October 2008. He also was vice chairman of the IBM International Foundation and chairman of the Board of Governors for the IBM Academy of Technology.
Donofrio's most recent responsibilities included IBM Research, Governmental Programs, Technical Support & Quality, Corporate Community Relations, as well as Environmental Health & Product Safety. Also reporting to Donofrio were the senior executives responsible for IBM's enterprise on demand transformation. In addition to that strategic business mission, Donofrio led the development and retention of IBM's technical population and enriched that community with a diversity of culture and thought. In 2008 IBM Chairman Sam Palmisano elected Donofrio IBM Fellow, the company's highest technical honor.
Donofrio joined IBM as a college co-op student in 1964 and worked on the memory technology for the legendary IBM System/360 mainframe computing system. After being hired full time at IBM in 1967, he spent the early part of his career in integrated circuit and chip development as a designer of logic and memory chips. He held numerous technical management positions and, later, executive positions in several of IBM's product divisions. He has led many of IBM's major development and manufacturing teams from semiconductor and storage technologies, to microprocessors and personal computers, to IBM's entire family of servers.
Rick Donofrio earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1967 and a Master of Science in the same discipline from Syracuse University in 1971.
Christie Chatterley is a member of the University of Colorado at Boulder chapter of Engineers Without Borders. Their chapter designed and implemented two high efficiency stoves to better utilize limited resources and provide cleaner more efficient cooking conditions for families in Rwanda. The stoves are made from all local materials including pumice, an abundant resource in the area with ideal thermal properties. Since these stoves are made from all local materials, the goal is the one day help to create microenterprises (small businesses) that will build and sell these stove models, helping to bring more financial stability to the area. These stoves are smokeless, offer a 70 percent reduction in firewood, and they are durable enough for daily use.
Christie Chatterley is a graduate student in Civil Engineering at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
Kevin Menear is the Director of R&D for Mechanical Systems at MineWerks. MineWerks was founded by a team of students at RPI dedicated to the eradication of such buried explosives as landmines and roadside bombs.
MineWerks' detection technology is being developed at a time when over 2,000 people are being killed or maimed by buried landmines and other explosives each month. Competing technologies are far too expensive, time-consuming, and hazardous to personnel on the ground to be capable of addressing the worldwide threat of unexploded ordinances in a meaningful way.
Kevin Menear is a graduate of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.