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iWeek 2007 Speaker Profiles

Njeri Rionge
Chief Executive Officer, Ignite Consulting and Ignite Technologies, Former CEO & Co Founder/Director Wananchi Online Limited
Niall Murphy
Co-Founder & Chief Strategy Officer, The Cloud
Rael Lisoos
Director, Magnolia Wireless and VIKO
William (Bill) Manning
Consulting Scientist, CenterGate's UltraDNS
Nick Wenban-Smith
Senior Legal Counsel, Nominet UK
Tony Willoughby
Chairman of Experts, Nominet UK
Rudolph Muller
Founder of MyADSL
Beaunard Grobler
Commander, Cyber Crime Unit, Crime Intelligence, South African Police Service
Mike Fairon
Head of Product Management, MTN NS
Douglas Reed
Chief Executive Officer, Vox Telecom Limited
Elia Tsouros
Business Development Executive, Verizon Business
Dave Gale
Director of Business Development, Storm
Greg Hatfield
General Manager, Voice Solutions, Internet Solutions
Antony McKechnie
Head of Product Development, i-Burst SA
Dr Angus Hay
Executive Head, Strategy and Products, Neotel

Njeri Rionge - Director, Magnolia Wireless and VIKO

Njeri Rionge, Chief Executive Officer, Ignite Consulting and Ignite Technologies,Former CEO & Co Founder/Director Wananchi Online Limited

Ms Rionge sits on a number of Boards, ICANN (Internet Corporation of Assigned Names and Numbers, IOD K (Institute of Directors Kenya), AAR Holdings, AAR Kenya, and Unilever Tea Kenya. She is also a member of many professional associations including the National Association of Corporate Directors USA.

Ms Rionge says:

I am an entrepreneur, a manager, a motivational speaker, a mentor, a management coach, a change agent, a community developer, an auditor and a business quality systems and re-engineering specialist. Words like dynamic, competent, focused, organized, passionate, articulate and inspirational best describe me. I think "outside the box" and I encourage others to do so.

I practice what I preach. I am an engaging, stimulating communicator, poised and capable of projecting enthusiasm, warmth and of mentoring other people. I have a strong sense of urgency, initiative and competitive drive to get things done, with emphasis on working with and through people in the process. Thus, I understand people well and take advantage of that understanding to effectively influence and persuade others to act.

Niall Murphy - Co-Founder & Chief Strategy Officer, The Cloud

An entrepreneur with a history of founding and developing successful TMT businesses, Niall co-founded The Cloud with George Polk in the United Kingdom in 2003. He directs and manages the company's strategic development. Today The Cloud is Europe's largest public WiFi network providing a mobile internet experience in the UK, Germany, The Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Italy. An acknowledged pioneer in the internet space, Niall was trained as a computer scientist and mathematician. He founded an ISP in South Africa in the early 90s subsequently a digital marketing and services group, building and selling off several successful online content businesses. He is a co- founder of The Digital Thinking Network Foundation in Amsterdam.

The emerging mobile Internet & a case study on wireless broadband models (Abstract)

Niall will provide a view on the opportunity, drivers and demands of the emerging mobile internet and wireless broadband market space. He will provide a discussion on the business model and technical models, and the challenges. In addition Niall will case study experiences and models from the European market and provide some views on their application in the South African context.

Rael Lisoos - Managing Director, VIKO Magnolia Wireless

Rael has been involved in education technology for the last 15 years. Rael began his career as an Economics lecturer. Rael founded Channel Campus this company created interactive video based material for University Level Courses. Later this company merged with William Smith of SABC fame to form a company called Learning Channel Campus. This company developed South Africa's first educational web-site http://www.learn.co.za. It also developed the educational supplements that we now see in all the major South African newspapers. The company also created interactive school CD's, Videos and Learning software. This company was later taken over by Johnnic and seeded the establishment of Mindset.

Rael then went on to found Learnthings http://www.learnthings.co.uk, http://www.learn.co.uk, http://www.learnpremium.co.uk. This was a joint venture with the Guardian Media Group in the UK. This company became the largest provider of browser based educational content and has over 2500 schools in the UK as well as many other countries. The Guardian took a 100% stake in the company two years ago; Rael stayed for a few months then started a new company to focus on rich media educational content delivery. The new company has deployed its system in Ghana, Lesotho, South Africa and Kenya. It has a holistic and efficient system to deliver educational content. Rael’s company continually researches all new technologies and sees how they can be most effectively applied to the educational field.

Currently as director of Magnolia Wireless and VIKO, Rael is deploying broad based distribution solutions to rural and urban schools. These include VOIP, Wireless (WIFI, Satellite, GPRS, MultiCast and UHF VHF) Learning Management Systems, Media Streaming Solutions etc. Rael has also started to deploy a wide range of Open Source Solutions.

During the installations of remote schools Rael realized there was a serious problem in communication systems in the under serviced areas due to both infrastructure and price. So in some of the wireless rural connectivity a VOIP server was included. The ability for all the schools to call each other for free was included. This led to the formation of http://www.voip.co.za South Africa’s first free Sip server—(this is currently being rebuilt for new applications).

This roll-out was expanded upon to form a telecommunications company called Dabba. Dabba has developed a voice and data solution for rural and township areas. Dabba is currently testing in 2 township areas close to Johannesburg and one in the Erkhurleni.

The system includes the wireless network, back-end software, client devices and management systems for a local deployment. Extensive testing has taken place and various solutions have been tried. Metrics of Capacity, Price, Scalability, Stability and ease of deployment have been considered.

William (Bill) Manning - Consulting Scientist, CenterGate's UltraDNS

IPv6 implications for electronic communications: What comes after the Internet (Abstract)

William Manning is a contributing scientist on CenterGate's UltraDNS, and serves on the research staff at USC's Information Sciences Institute. His primary technical interests are in network operations and naming systems.

At Texas Instruments, Bill was responsible for the deployment of IP networking first in the Semiconductor division and then throughout the corporation. He then joined Rice University to become the lead engineer for the NSFnet's SESQUINET regional network. Based on his responsibility and performance handling the migration of SESQUINET and MIDnet from the NSFnet to commercial networks, he was asked to assume a role in the NSFs Routing Arbitor project at ISI.

He is active in the IETF, and has been active in the DNS and Routing working groups as an active participant, working group chair and code developer. Bill was responsible for specifying the method for adding NSAP support to the DNS, and then developed and implemented a plan to expand the Internet root server system to add four new nodes.

He continues to work on enhancing DNS code to track the growth of IP networks. He is also currently working with the IPv6 developers and implementers by managing the IP6.INT domain, which is the functional equivalent of the in-addr.arpa zone.

Bill is on the program committees for the North American Network Operators Group (NANOG), the Asia Pacific Regional Internet Conference on Operational Technologies (APRICOT), and the African Network Operators Group (AFNOG). He is also a member of the Advisory Council of ARIN (American Registry for Internet Numbers).

Nick Wenban-Smith - Senior Legal Counsel, Nominet UK

Following his degree in Natural Sciences at Cambridge University, Nick completed legal training in the City of London and qualified as a Solicitor of the Supreme Court of England and Wales in 1997. Nick specialises in corporate and commercial law and is currently Senior Legal Counsel at Nominet UK, a role which includes the leadership and management of Nominet's Dispute Resolution Service.

Prior to joining Nominet, Nick held senior in-house legal positions at PowderJect Pharmaceuticals plc, an Oxford University biotech spinout, and Huntswood, a consulting and outsourcing business backed by 3i, where he was General Counsel and Company Secretary.

Tony Willoughby - Chairman of Experts, Nominet UK

Professional Experience

Tony qualified in 1970 and worked in the Trade Marks Department of The Distillers Company Limited (now part of Diageo) until joining Herbert Smith in 1973. He became a partner in 1977 and remained there until 1994 when he left to join Rouse & Co (now Willoughby & Partners). Tony was a partner at Willoughby & Partners until April 2006, he is now a consultant to the business.

He has specialised in all aspects of intellectual property (contentious and non-contentious) since he was admitted to practice. He has had the conduct of some patent infringement actions, but most of his work has been in the field of trade marks, passing off, copyright and confidential information. He has particular experience of parallel imports/grey market and anti-counterfeiting litigation, and the Anton Piller/Search Order and Mareva//Freezing Injunction and, more recently, the law relating to domain names.

He is a firm believer in the use of mediation to resolve intellectual property disputes and has been heavily involved in the mediation of such disputes both as mediator and practitioner. He has successfully completed mediation training courses conducted by WIPO (Geneva) and the Chartered Institute of Arbitrators (London).

Tony has acted in a variety of leading reported IP cases and is a panellist for the WIPO ICANN and Nominet UK domain name dispute resolution procedures. He has also been appointed Chairman of Experts for Nominet UK.

Professional memberships: The Law Society of England and Wales; TIPLO
Personal Interests: Golf; Music; Gardening

Rudolph Muller Founder of MyADSL

Rudolph is the founder of Mybroadband.co.za (aka MyADSL), a community based website formed in 2003 to serve the needs of the broadband and IT community.

For the last two years he was a lecturer at the University of Johannesburg in the department of Business Information Technology, and is still partly involved in research activities in conjunction with staff at UJ. His areas of research and interest involve broadband and Internet services and provisioning, broadband benchmarking, e-commerce, web based technologies & trends and GUI. Rudolph is a guest broadband columnist for the Citizen, Moneyweb, News24, Beeld and others.

Qualification:: MSc in IT with distinction (University of Liverpool).

Beaunard Grobler - Commander, Cyber Crime Unit, Crime Intelligence, South African Police Service

Beau has spent most of his career as a functional police officer in the South African Police Service Division: Crime Intelligence.

Beau joined the South African Police Service (SAPS) in 1977. During his career he obtained a National Diploma: Police Administration. During 1994 he was admitted to the Commissioned Ranks of the SAPS. He attended several Network, Internet and Information Security certificates courses at the University of South Africa (UNISA), Rand Afrikaans University (RAU) and Business Training Colleges. He has developed advanced evidential intelligence and investigation skills, using the Linux open source operating system.

Currently, he serves as the Chairperson for the Interpol Working Party on IT Crime for Africa.

He attended Computer & Network Forensic courses offered by the French Embassy (Scientific Police of France), the Embassy of the United States of America (FBI) and United States Secret Services. He is certified by Guidance Software, Pasadena, USA as an Encase Certified Examiner in Computer Forensics.

The city of Welkom (Free State) awarded him a certificate of merit for his contribution to outstanding policing for peace and order in the community.

Latterly, he has conducted Law Enforcement training, workshops and presentations on computer related crime for the South African Police Service, South African National Defence Force, Belgium, Singapore, the Royal Swazi Police in Swaziland, SARPCCO Countries and to victims of computer crime.

Mike Fairon - Head of Product Management, MTN NS

Mike Fairon is Head of Product Development at MTN Network Solutions. He has held numerous senior positions in the Information & Communications Technology industries. Over the last 15 years he has held numerous consulting, business development and product development positions within the Information Technology, Financial Services and Telecommunications industries. He has a passion for assisting organisations to utilise technology to deliver business requirements and drive strategic initiatives.

Douglas Reed - Chief Executive Officer, Vox Telecom Limited

Doug Reed (47) is an entrepreneur whose biggest passion is starting up and growing successful businesses - especially when other people think it's impossible. He joined DataPro nine years ago after being approached by Control Instruments Ltd to turn the company into an Internet Service Provider (ISP). Since then he has seen DataPro's value grow 300-fold, from R1.2m in the mid-1990s to a current market capitalisation of R350m - and made several millionaires among the staff in the process.

Before taking the lead at DataPro, Douglas started up and led Mica Distributors for the Mica Hardware Group. In tune with his belief that an entrepreneur should be able to better the results anyone else thinks is possible with given resources, he did it on a shoestring budget of R150,000. As managing director of Mica Distributors and later a board member of the Mica Hardware group, Douglas led the group's merchandising strategy.

Douglas has found a natural home in the telecommunications industry where, as he says, "the moment you think of an idea you're already behind". He prizes DataPro Group's achievements in helping to reduce South Africa's inflated telecoms costs and has taken great pleasure in growing three times faster than the opposition on more limited resources. The company is well on track to achieving his goal of being the leading, independent alternative telecommunications service provider in South Africa.

Dave Gale - Director of Business Development, Storm

Dave Gale is the Director of Business Development at Storm, a Voice and Data service provider serving the South African business market. He has over fifteen years of Business Development, Product Development and Management, General Management, Business Solutions Development and Project Management experience in the field of Telecommunications.

He currently focuses on Storm’s strategy, product roadmaps, regulatory issues and strategic relationships and projects. Dave completed an MSc in Electrical Engineering at UCT in the late 1980’s before working off his bursary at Telkom where he fulfilled various engineering roles from Operations Manager of their fledgling eCommerce service to Senior Project Manager of Corporate Solutions. He spent 18 frantic months as Service Delivery Manager and then Programme Manager at Iridium Africa, the satellite phone company. He joined Storm on a two year contract in 1999 with a brief to expand the range of products the company sold and ensure sustainable revenue streams into the future. He’s been having too much fun to leave.

Dave is regularly asked to comment on developments of a technological and regulatory nature in the South African telecommunications market and is known to be outspoken and passionate about developing an affordable telecoms ecosystem in South Africa.

He writes a blog called “hittingthewire” at http://www.hittingthewire.co.za where his quirky sense of humour and enquiring mind are open to scrutiny.

Elia Tsouros - Business Development Executive, Verizon Business

Elia Tsouros has spent the past ten years in the Information Technology (IT) industry. After completing his Bachelor of Commerce (Honours) Degree, Elia began his career in sales at Unifoods. Two years later, he joined Pipex SA as Operational Manager and in 1999 moved to Verizon Business (then UUNET SA) as Financial Manager. Elia then moved into a systems analyst role at the company and in 2001 was appointed to Verizon's business development team. In 2003, Elia was appointed to the role of Systems Operation Manager. He currently has executive responsibility for business development.

Greg Hatfield - General Manager, Voice Solutions, Internet Solutions

Greg has been at Internet Solutions for 10 years in various positions throughout the company. With a VPN background from his days at OmniLink, in 2001 Greg started and was the first GM of IS’ VPN business unit. This unit is now a core line of business for the company. Following various strategic and operational positions Greg was part of the team that developed IS’ VoIS services in late 2004. Since that time he has been GM of Voice Solutions at IS with responsibility for the strategic and commercial success of the business stream.

Antony McKechnie - Head of Product Development, i-Burst SA

Antony McKechnie has 15 years experience in the SA Telecommunications industry. Antony graduated from WITS with a BSc in electrical engineering in 1992 and completed his MSC in Engineering Management in 1996. Antony started his career working for Transtel, has worked as a consultant in the industry for many years and has held a senior management position as an Internet Service Provider. Antony has also been involved in starting up a VoIP solutions company. Antony started at Wireless Business Solutions as a consultant and has been intimately involved in the iBurst project from the very initial stages. As Head of Product Development at iBurst he researches potential opportunities and global trends while determining consumer requirements and demand to ensure that the product strategies meet iBurst’s goals, strategies and objectives.

Dr Angus Hay - Executive Head, Strategy and Products, Neotel

Dr Angus Hay, PrEng, CEng, MIEE, FSAIEE, was born and educated in Johannesburg, South Africa, and has a BSc(Eng)Elec (1987) and a PhD in digital transmission (1998) from the University of the Witwatersrand.

Dr Hay joined Neotel at its inception in 2006, and is currently Executive Head – Strategy and Products. He was previously Chief Technology Officer of Transtel, the telecommunications division of Transnet Ltd, where he was involved in positioning the organisation for participation in the second national operator. He has been involved in a variety of areas of telecommunications, including mobile radio, internet, data networking, transmission, fixed-line telephony, cellular telephony and access technologies. As a postgraduate student in the early 1990s, he took part in the establishment of the Internet between academic institutions in South Africa.

Dr Hay received the annual Young Achiever award of the SA Institute of Electrical Engineers in 1999. He is a Fellow of the SAIEE, and on the SAIEE council, and was chairman of its Electronics and Software committee in 2005. He has written a number of papers on telecommunications, deregulation and professional mobile radio for local and international conferences and publications.

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