Vladimir Vulić, the program director of the Spark.me Conference is very pleased with this year's sixth annual conference, which hosted 580 people from 28 countries.
"Without a doubt, the majority of the guests expressed their opinion that this is the best conference ever. Two major changes: the key change is that we tried to get a little more out of areas that were exclusively related and shifted to business, digital marketing, and digital transformation. Last year we emphasized the role of social entrepreneurship, but this year we talked specifically how it can be applied to haute couture, video games, and many other areas that do not have technology as the essence of a business, but it has been proven that it perfectly serves them to help them further develop."
We made efforts to bring the best and most famous speakers of the business including Denise Lee Yohn (Branding expert, consultant and author of several bestsellers), Dhira Mukherjee (co-founder of Shazam, an application bought by Apple for $ 400 million in 2017), and Boyd Multerer (former chief engineer for the Xbox gaming console).
Lee Yohn spoke about brand leadership and how to build a powerful brand: "I really want to inspire and teach people how to build a strong brand. I think people come here to learn how to improve their business, how to better connect with customers, how to be ahead of the competition, and I enable them to do all of that by sharing my experience with big brands."
Lee Yohn is the author of the bestseller "What Great Brands Do: The Seven Brand-Building Principles That Separate the Best from the Rest", the electronic book "Extraordinary Experiences: What Great Retail and Restaurant Brands Do," and her latest book is "FUSION: How Integrating Brand and Culture Powers the World's Greatest Companies". She is a frequent guest in the media such as FOX Business TV, CNBC, The Wall Street Journal and NPR who are looking for her expert opinion on current business topics. She regularly writes for prominent Harvard Business Review and Forbes business journals, and often for Fast Company, Entrepreneur, and Knowledge @ Wharton.
Dhiraj Mukherjee, who founded Shazam Entertainment in 2000, was the first to develop music recognition on mobile phones. He was Director of Shazam from 2000-2003. He has been performing the role of the observer in the Shazam Committee since 2004 and actively contributes to the creation of a corporate strategy and product strategy. A prestigious business daily, the Financial Times, selected him in 2015 among the top 50 technology entrepreneurs in Europe. Mukherjee was previously the director of banking innovation at Virgin Money, where his recent project was to run the team responsible for creating the product of the new generation Virgin Money Digital Bank, which will be available to more than 2.2 million students in the UK. Muherji is also a business angel, a mentor for startups and a risk capital adviser. Currently, he is focused on researching new technologies, as well as assisting corporate innovators and social entrepreneurs.
Muherji emphasizes that it took 18 years of work to reach the present level of Shazam, one of the most popular applications that billions of people follow today.
Working in the Xbox team, Boy Malterer launched in 2000 and has been running Xbox Live for four years, an online platform that connects players and allows the sharing of multimedia content. In 2004, he founded XNA, a set of tools that enabled developers and designers to play a much more comfortable and more efficient game development. Since leaving Microsoft in 2014, Malterer has been researching and creating operating systems for Internet-related things.
Malterer emphasized his attendance at the conference: "For me, going to such conferences is a great opportunity not to speak in detail about the technical matters that I am preoccupied with, but it is my mission to educate people, so that when we meet with issues that we can predict, it will not be a complete surprise for us, although that does not mean that we will be able to solve those problems then. My goal is to prepare people at least mentally for problems when they appear, whether they are security oriented to the use of devices or other nature. So, we need to think ahead. "
