Upcoming hi5 Speaking Appearances

hi5 employees will be speaking at a variety of upcoming events.  Come find out the latest at these appearances:

OMMA Publish, June 17, 2009
Crowne Plaza Times Square, New York, NY
Michael Trigg, VP of Marketing, hi5

10:30 AM -- The Payment Plan: Pipe Dream or Promise?      
Like clockwork, whenever publishers see their ad sales dip online, talk about the necessity of the pay model re-emerges. It didn't work in 1997...or 2002. Is there something different about 2009 that will make consumers pay now, when they actually have less disposable income? Are pay-to-play ideas simply non-starters that waste publisher resources? Or perhaps there are other revenue streams and packaging types this time around? We bring together publishers who are revisiting the pay-to-play model, skeptics from the media buying community, and some content providers who say they need models outside of advertising.
Moderator: Terence Kawaja, Manager Director, GCA Savvian Advisors
Panelists:

• Krishan Bhatia, SVP Strategy & Development, Comcast Interactive Media
• Michael Kelly, Senior Advisor, Veronis Suhler Stevenson
• Sean Nolan, VP Online Operations and External Online Marketing, Rodale
• John Squires, EVP, Time, Inc
• Michael Trigg, VP, Marketing, hi5 Networks, Inc.

Social Gaming Summit, June 23, 2009
Hotel Nikko, San Francisco, CA
Andrew Sheppard, Executive Producer, hi5

11:00 AM -- Panel: Social Games - A Platform Perspective
Panelists:

• Jason Oberfest, MySpace
• Gareth Davis, Facebook
• Andrew Sheppard, hi5
• Joe Chen, Xiaonei
• Michael Arrington, TechCrunch

Casual Connect Seattle, July 21, 2009
Benaroya Hall, 200 University Street, Seattle, WA
Andrew Sheppard, Executive Producer, hi5

2:00 PM -- Designing, Balancing, and Managing Virtual Economies
With economies of virtual items & currencies (aka "microtransactions") having been established as the revenue growth engine for online games with frightening speed, we're all wishing we'd paid a lot more attention in those college Economics & Statistics courses. Apparently, the visionaries who planned our Liberal Arts curriculum saw this coming, but we were too myopic (or perhaps too, um, hungover) to recognize it. Well, now we know, and so we really can use this panel of experts to help us put in context the questions we never thought we would ask, but nonetheless have started to. Questions like: If a 2% paying customer base is good and a 5% customer population is great, how do I take gameplay developed in an 'everybody pays' business model and make it profitable at the lower customer percentage? Millions of people are playing my Flash games, and no one's paying more than tip money - what's going on! How often should I be modifying prices on items? I have a huge surplus of unspent currency, is this bad? What do I do about it? How do I define and measure key economic indicators in my economy?
Panelists:

• Craig Sherman, CEO Gaia Online
• Andrew Sheppard, Executive Producer hi5 Networks
• Lisa Rutherford, VP of Strategy and Business Development Twofish