The Sway features speakers that are intended to inspire and inform, presenting their own experiences, their viewpoints, or their ideas about the future.

December’s speakers include:

Gary Andrews

Gary Andrews works in a communities role for ITV, and is driving ITV’s social media policy across the web. Before moving into PR & communities, Gary worked as a broadcast journalist for GCap Media, where he won Best Coverage of a Breaking News Story at the European Radio Awards.

In his spare time, Gary is a freelance writer, broadcaster and journalist and writes regularly for many different sports websites. He also co-hosts the weekly twofootedtackle football podcast with Chris Nee, and blogs at www.garyandrews.net.

Daniel Shore

Daniel Shore runs the @LDN Twitter account highlighting ‘Anything interesting about London’. Escaping the corporate rat-race a year ago he hopes to make his fame and fortune from Twittering and using new techologies to help people discover more of their city.

James Whatley

James Whatley is the Director of Engagement Strategy for 1000heads, the founder of The Mobile Geeks of London, Co-founder of The Really Mobile Project; a mobile-focused online video show and website, and Advisor to the mobile web-based Twitter service Dabr.

He was previously the Head of Digital and Social Media for the world’s leading voice-to-text company, SpinVox.

Outside his day job – James says he’s a ‘bit of a Mobile fiend’. In 2008/09 he was one of the lead contributors to The Mobile Industry Review show, but more recently, he has been focused on The Really Mobile Project.

Matt Churchill

Matt works in social media at Edelman Digital, where they let him play on Twitter and come up with cool things to do for clients, and is a media and communications blogger at Seldom Seen Kid as well as making contributions to Zath.co.uk and Crenk.

Matt’s background is in journalism and music, having previously written for Glasswerk, God Is In The TV Zine and Click Music, but his passion is for all things digital and how we use social networks, micro blogging platforms and the blogosphere to communicate.

Matt is a purist in his approach to the digital landscape. As a blogger, and generally subversive type, being honest, transparent and holistic in what he does both personally and professionally, is very important to him.

Past speakers include:

Alfie Dennen

Alfie Dennen co-founded the mobile blogging platform Moblog in November 2003, and now has close to a decade worth of experience in web-startups.

He is also well known for his online activism.

Alfie responded to the terrorist attacks on London’s public transport system by creating the website We’re Not Afraid – a site with a message of unity against terrorism. Within days of the bombings, around 3,500 images had been submitted to the site. We’re Not Afraid was the subject of a BBC documentary and coverage included Sky News, Channel 5, ABC’s World News Tonight and the New York Times.

Alfie has also been the driving force behind the Stopped Clocks project,and in 2008, he launched two art projects based around the creation of map-based images using mobile photography and GPS tracking.

Rob Hinchcliffe

Rob Hinchcliffe is a community manager, writer, editor and blogger based in London.
Ex-Editor at Yahoo! News UK, and founder of the award-winning blog Londonist.com, he is also a regular contributor to the London-based daily e-magazine Urban Junkies and a Contributing Editor for the popular weekly email magazine Flavorpill LDN.
Rob is the Community Manager at Qype, the social networking and user generated reviews site.

Sian Meades

Sian Meades is a freelance writer turned founding editor with her lifestyle blog Domestic Sluttery.

The site, launched earlier this year, is growing rapidly with a stable of nine contributers to date.

At The Sway, Sian will share her experiences starting her own site, and ask the question: How long ’til I start making money?

Gemma Cartwright

Gemma Cartwright has been blogging for ten years and was one of the first people in the UK to make a career out of it. She started the fashion blog Catwalk Queen in 2002 and continued to run it, in her role as Fashion Editor at Shiny Media, until April 2009.

Having left Shiny, Gemma is now editor of new celebrity shopping website The Nod (www.thenod.com) and she has also recently launched the side project Big Girls Browse (www.biggirlsbrowse.com) a shopping and style blog for women with curves.
She will be speaking her mind on the idea of cashing in on celebrities online.

Matt Bailey

Matt Bailey is the Head of Affiliate at i-level, and recently elected Chair of the IAB’s Affiliate Marketing Council. i-level are the largest independent digital agency in the UK and are a purely digital agency. They recently won the Digital Media Agency of the Year award at 2009’s A4U Awards. Matt is a passionate advocate of performance marketing, and at The Sway he will be discussing the question of branding vs acquisition.

If content owners are attempting to monetise their content through affiliate means they will only get paid if they are the last referrer which doesn’t acknowledge any branding they have done for the client. How do they intend to counter this?

Alicia Navarro

Alicia Navarro has a Bachelor of IT degree from the University of Technology in Sydney and won the University Medal as top graduate in the Computing Sciences faculty.

She has worked for IBM and Optus, Vodafone live! as Global Product Manager, and Head of Products for Smart Global. She later worked as a Business Development Manager for Fairfax Media in Australia, where she designed and rolled-out the monetisation capability for six online business sites.
In 2006, Alicia set out on her own and launched Skimbit, a social decision-making tool online. Recognising that her original business model would not work, she began offering Skimbit’s internal monetisation technology to other online publishers as a service called Skimlinks in 2008.
As one of the top UK-based web startups, Skimbit was selected for WebMission 08 and received a major seed funding deal in February 2009.
With the launch of Skimlinks, Skimbit has gone from being a web startup with limited revenues and recognition to being a revenue-generating company, planning to reach profitability within a year.

Katie Lee

Katie co-founded Shiny Media in 2004, launching over 35 blogs in the fashion, technology, games, lifestyle and sport sectors and creating the UK’s biggest and most successful blog network. She managed a team of 11 in-house writers, and over 50 freelance bloggers producing some of the best British blogs on the web, including Catwalk Queen , Shiny Shiny , Tech Digest , Bridalwave and TV Scoop . She also produced blogs for clients, including Top Shop takeover, River Island’s Graduate Fashion Week blog and AOL’s personal finance blog, WalletPop.

Katie has worked with clients to create numerous commercial campaigns, including Cisco (which also extended to European blog networks), Vodafone (including the Live Guy campaign) and LG (City Clickers blog and the LG Media Talent Award).

As a journalist, Katie has written for most of the major newspapers. She still does some writing work, producing a regular column for Look, Woman & Home and the Telegraph blog . She was the founding editor of Shiny Shiny – the first gadgets site for women.

In 2008, Katie was voted one of London’s 1000 most influential people by the Evening Standard.

James Bromley

James, Managing Director of Mail Online joined Associated in April 2008 as General Manager for Mail Online. Previously, he was Group Business Development Director for Trader Media Group (Auto Trader) where he had been instrumental in forming and driving the implementation of their online strategy to migrated revenue from print titles online. James first started working in the online space before it became fashionable in 1996, as the second employee of the UK’s first online sales house. Following which, he worked for an early online design agency before leaving this area for a short while to set up and run a radio station on the South Coast of England, later sold to Guardian Media Group.

Living in South West London James is a keen snowboarder, holder of a European motor racing licence and has just completed an MBA at Henley.

Vanessa Tindale

With over 12 years experience in media and marketing, Vanessa has worked with both major publishers and start-up ventures.

During her time as Commercial Manager for Shiny Media, she specialized in monetizing the folio of on-line properties, including amongst others, techdigest.tv and catwalkqueen.tv.

She believes there are huge opportunities out there for publishers that can demonstrate to advertisers the power of creative and innovative concepts and their ability to engage with audiences.  As part of the Sway meetup, she plans to share with us some case studies that have proved successful, giving some insight into how to monetize sites more effectively.

William Rowe

William Rowe runs Protein Media -  a “boutique network” that acquires, represents and develops independent and niche publications for a worldwide audience. Protein Media currently delivers over 21 million ads to 7 million individuals in 13 countries per month.

Georgie Coleridge Cole

Editor and entrepreneur Georgie Colerdige Cole launched her site SheerLuxe.com in 2007, and will present the story behind her success.

Check back here later to find out about our other guest speakers.