2015

Lars Hinrichs is Founder and CEO of Cinco Capital, a private equity fund that invests in European and American tech companies. In 2003 he founded XING, a highly successful business networking platform. As Founder and CEO, Lars oversaw its IPO in 2006, making XING the world’s first Web 2.0 company to go public. In 2010 he founded HackFwd, an innovative pre-seed investment company that supported Europe’s most passionate geeks in launching the world’s most exciting tech startups. Lars is an active member of the Young Global Leaders (YGL) of the World Economic Forum and the Young Presidents’Organization (YPO). Since 2013 he is a member of the Advisory Board of Deutsche Telekom AG. His latest project is the Apartimentum, a smart home in Hamburg.

What are you presenting?

“Smart Home: Apartimentum“

What is your vision about the future?

“Everything that can be digital will be digital.”

Markus Durstewitz works for the Airbus Corporate Innovation team. His mission is the establishment of a sustainable innovation culture and effective innovation environment that delivers value to the customers. He has over twenty years of experience in the aerospace industry working in different key positions along the complete product life-cycle. Markus holds a PhD in Cognitive Engineering and Man-Machine Systems. Main interest is in user-centered design and impact of digitalization in offering new ways of collaboration along the complete value chain of aviation.

What are you presenting?

“How to anticipate the challenges of an ongoing digital transformation as a key driver and accelerator for change in our industry and air transport?”

What is your vision about the future?

“It’s all about connecting the people and ideas …“

This is one of Google‘s XPrizes, that pushes the limits of what‘s possible to change the world for the better. Google Luna XPrize organise the race to the moon. Aim: To land a privately funded robot on the moon. The Part Time Scientists are the one German team out of the last five. The goal is to make missions to the moon affordable and thereby discover the 8th continent, that inheres many important resources etc.

In 2007, Google set out the largest international incentive based prize of all times: 30 million $ for the private team who reaches the moon first and fulfills three tasks: land safely, move 500 meters across the lunar surface and send images to earth. It was initiated to promote private and cost – effective travel to the moon. 34 teams started the competition – now only 5 teams (The Part Times Scientists, Astrobotic, Hakuto, Moon Express and Team Indus) are left with a serious chance to complete the mission.

The Part Time Scientist is a Berlin based team competing in the new industries of private space technologies. Over the past 5 years PTS has been developing market-leading technological know-how to deliver space-grated products & services, partly in close cooperation with the German Aerospace Center.

The team is headed by Robert Böhme – an expert in computer system management – who formed this team in 2008 to achieve the goal of landing on the moon. He is the face to the public and in Germany he is already present on some TV shows and other media.

Since 2010 Lutz Freitag researches on robots with the focus on signal processing, perception and motion planning. He started studying computer science in 2007 at Freie Universität Berlin, worked from 2009 till 2013 at Hella Aglaia GmbH in tooling and R&D. Currently he works for Autonomos GmbH and Hanson Robotics in their respective R&D departemts. Lutz participated in the RoboCup with the FUmanoids in the KidSize league where humanoid robots play football autonomosly. Currently he develops software to give robots a sense of their bodies to create smarter and more natural moving machines.

When he is not playing/working with robots he enjoys reading, cycling, parks and most of all: traveling.

Maks Giordano is a Digital Strategist and Creative with 20 Years Experience in Digital. He co-founded the digital consultancy „kreait“ in 2011 with a focus on creating meaningful, user-centric and highly relevant digital services and helping organizations in their digital transformation. He is currently consulting BMW, Deutsche Telekom, eBay, UEFA and many others in Digital Innovation and played a vital role in the re-launch of Condé Nast´s Digital Activities in Germany.

Maks helped to bring the Mobile Monday to Berlin, launched the „Wearable Wednesday“ in Germany. He is an active Business Angel and Mentor to StartUps, serves on various boards as an advisor and was heading the Founder Institute in Berlin. Maks holds an MBA in Media & Communication from the University of St. Gallen Switzerland and is an Associate Professor, teaching „Entrepreneurship“ at Zeppelin University. He is a judge both to the Lovies and Webbys Awards, named the „Oscars of the Internet“, and loves to travel and practicing Yoga.

Sophie Kleber creates engaging user experiences that simplify complex functionality in a user centric way. She provides leadership in key stages of research, innovation, product definition and UI design for some of Huge’s largest clients, including IKEA, Chase and Thomson Reuters. With a background in industrial design she is a thought leader for the intersection of digital and physical, continuously pushing the boundaries of “what’s possible” to meet “what should be”.

Tim Leberecht is the author of the book The Business Romantic (HarperCollins, 2015) and the founder of The Business Romantic Society. He is the chief marketing officer of NBBJ, a global design and architecture firm that helps organizations such as Amazon, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Boeing, Google, Samsung, Starbucks, and Tencent create meaningful experiences. Previously, he was the chief marketing officer of product design and strategy firm Frog Design, acclaimed for its work with Apple and many other Fortune 500 brands. His writing has appeared in publications such as Harvard Business Review, Entrepreneur, Fast Company, Forbes, Fortune, Psychology Today, and Wired.

He has spoken at venues including TED, The Economist Big Rethink, DLD, the Silicon Valley CEO Summit, Commonwealth Club, Remix, and the World Economic Forum. His TED Talk “3 Ways to (Usefully) Lose Control of Your Brand” has been viewed by almost a million people to date. Leberecht is the co-founder of the 15 Toasts dinner series and an advisor to The Human Agency, a collective of social change-makers. He serves on the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Values and on the board of Jump Associates, a strategy and innovation consultancy. He was born and raised in Germany and lives in San Francisco with his wife and daughter.

What are you presenting?

“The New Romantic Era in Business and Tech.”

What is your vision about the future?

“A truly humane human enterprise.”

Born and raised in west Texas, Peter began his early career in classical music as a trained opera singer. His travels and interests in internet content eventually lead him to explore user experience and online discovery in 2005 when he began to develop skills in online marketing from SEO and display to performance marketing. Peter met partners Lucas and Lee in 2009, which gave him an opportunity to provide a solution for marketers with a data driven product for tracking and attributing performance for advertising relationships.

The original product, HasOffers.com, was a quick success and with only founder funds the company continued to grow at 100% year over year. In November 2011, the company launched MobileAppTracking.com which quickly became the global leader in attributing mobile app advertising with clients like Supercell, Kayak, ABC.com, Spotify, Uber, and HotelTonight, and in May 2013 TUNE raised $9.4 million from
Accel Partners. Peter resides in Seattle, WA, the location of the TUNE headquarters.

He is Co-founder and member of the Executive Board of advertising agency trautmann, heumann, jochum und kemper ag

After graduating from the University of Augsburg with a PhD in 1993, Michael Trautmann became a manager at Bossard Consultants. 1997 saw him assume a position on the Executive Board at ad agency Springer & Jacoby where, in 2000, he became a founding partner of Springer & Jacoby International and a member of the holding company’s Board. From 2002 to 2004, Michael Trautmann joined Audi in Ingolstadt as Global Head of Marketing. Then, in July 2004, he joined forces with André Kemper to establish the agency kempertrautmann gmbh, which underwent a rebranding in August 2012 to become trautmann, heumann, jochum und kemper ag – in short, thjnk.

Michael Trautmann sits on the agency’s Executive Board alongside Karen Heumann and Armin Jochum. thjnk ag employs 200 people across its three offices in Berlin, Düsseldorf and Hamburg – and clients include brands like Audi, IKEA, Henkel and Paulaner. André Kemper and Michael Trautmann were named Agency Men of the Year 2007. In 2009, kempertrautmann received the Global Newcomer Agency of the Year award. Michael Trautmann is a team member and business angel for the not-for-profit initiative dotHIV, which has been working towards establishing the top-level domain “.hiv” since 2010. This is the world’s first top-level domain with an exclusively social mission: to bring the red ribbon into the digital age. In 2013, Michael Trautmann was elected Vice President of GWA, the Gesamtverband der deutschen Werbeagenturen (Association of German Advertising Agencies).

Mark is a seasoned leader of product teams, with experience in consumer electronics, automotive, and product design.  His work has won international awards, including Best in Show in Automotive at CES 2012. He is a frequent presenter at technical and design conferences in Europe and North America, including a recent appearance at TEDx Kanata.

He is fascinated both by emerging technologies and by the design challenges that these new technologies pose. His role as Playground Director at Fuel Industries in Ottawa gives him plenty of opportunity to stay ahead of the curve technologically, while staying grounded in human-centred design principles.

What are you presenting:

“I will be presenting a talk on brand engagement and marketing in the age of makers. Working title: “Marketing in the Age of Makers” – how agencies and brands are joining the maker revolution.” 

Vision of the future:

“As far as my vision of the future goes, I believe that we are entering what could be a golden age of product design, powered in part by the rise of maker culture. The increasingly fast pace of commoditization of technology has given us, as designers, an amazingly rich set of tools with which to work.  So many technical problems have been solved; all of these roads, so to speak, have been paved. Instead of struggling with engineering hardware and software, we are now free to focus on design, on the invention and creation of meaningful products and services.”