Ray Anderson
CEO, Bango

Bango is still innovating in and around the off-portal space, driving small companies into m-commerce with Bango Start and providing mobile advertisers with valuable metrics via Bango Analytics.

Marco Argenti
Just appointed VP of Media at Nokia (previously MD, Dada.net)

Dada was building mobile communities before most others thought about it. It’s now merging social media with music, and has an interesting partnership with Sony BMG. Argenti is also the MEF's global vice-chair.

Greg Ballard
CEO, Glu Mobile

Glu is one of the big three games companies still standing. Ballard and team have had a tough time on the public markets, but Glu commands enough deck space to be a force in the business.

Jim Beddows
Head of content and application partnerships, Microsoft

Microsoft is slowly gathering OS market share – at least in the US. Beddows has a formidable track record with Disney, Bandai Networks and 20th Century Fox. He currently serves as MEF Americas chair too.

Salil Bharava
CEO, Jump Games

With the backing of the giant Reliance corporation, India’s Jump Games was able to pull off a massive deal with Man Utd, and is now opening offices across the world. It’s also on the acquisitions trail – and there are bargains to be had.

Martin Blomkvist
Head of content acquisition and management, Sony Ericsson

Not a great year for Sony Ericsson as a whole, but big things are happening at the content unit. The PlayNow music store has started selling DRM-free tracks and is working with Omnifone on flat-rate music subscription. Blomkvist should be busy through 2009.

Mark Bookman
CEO, MCN

After good results in Japan with the major operators, MCN is now taking its ‘federated search’ concept into global markets. The novel approach, which aggregates results from various search engines, is now being expanded across Asia Pac, Scandinavia, the US and Turkey. MCN also offers an ‘Allwords’ ad bidding system.

Russell Buckley
VP of alliances, AdMob

The public face of AdMob, which serves four billion ads a month across indie WAP sites. He’s moving to a global ambassadorial role soon, which ties in nicely with his work as chair of MMA Global.

Andrew Bud
Executive chairman, Mblox

Bud saw the potential of premium SMS as a billing medium before most – and is now pioneering WAP billing and driving into the US. Recently elected chair of the MEF.

Rio Caraeff,
EVP, UMG eLabs

Universal is the world’s biggest music company, and was first to commit to Nokia’s game changing Comes With Music idea. Caraeff has been at the top of the mobile team since the beginning.

Stanislas Chesnais
CEO, Netsize

Netsize remains a major influence in mobile payments and marketing services – especially in mainland Europe. It is now directly connected to 80 operators in the continent. Its Netsize Guide is an industry bible.

Ron Czerny
CEO, PlayPhone

Czerny has built PlayPhone into a major force in US D2C, and is now one of the most powerful players in the B2B space, thanks to deals with Wal-mart and many others. Now expanding into Europe with Pitch.

Tom Daly
Group manager, strategy and planning, The Coca-Cola Company

One of the brands most committed to supporting mobile through banners, marketing and even advergames. Daly was recently made vice-chair of the MMA.

Javier Pérez Dolset
CEO, Zed

Zed has always done things differently – developing products almost entirely in-house, and moving into community services ahead of most others. It should turn over around $850 million this calendar year, and has a huge credit line with which to keep expanding.

Jay Emmet
General manager, OpenMarket

Amdocs claims to reach 98 per cent of US mobile subscribers, and runs the OpenMarket mobile commerce platform. Emmet joined in August from mBlox.

Venetia Espinoza
Group manager, mobile applications and partner programs, T-Mobile USA

T-Mobile may be the smallest of the major US operators, but Espinoza’s plan to move its portal towards an ‘open’ App Store model could have huge ramifications.

Andrew Gilbert
President, Qualcomm Internet Services

Gilbert moved from a European role to become the figurehead for Qualcomm’s internet services unit and propel the company’s ongoing drive into widgets, mobile TV and content distribution.
 
Gerard Grech
Director of strategy/biz dev, content division, France Telecom

Grech is responsible for a huge range of products and services – especially with France Telecom committed to a triple play strategy. He also chairs MEF EMEA.

Michel Guillemot
CEO, Gameloft

Gameloft has emerged from the consolidation in the games sector to share the top spot with EA. It’s achieved this via a vast distribution and developer resource.

Tim Harrison
Director of marketing, EA Mobile

Fabuously well-connected in mobile gaming, which is hardly surprising since Harrison went from the juggernaut that is Vodafone to the EA behemoth.

Thomas Hesse
President of global digital business, Sony BMG

Another towering figure in digital music, Hesse has presided over intriguing moves such as the JV with Italy’s D2C specialist Dada and the decision to join Nokia’s Comes With Music project.

Barry Houlihan
MD, Mobile Interactive Group

MIG keeps on growing, and is now a serious player in content, participation TV, mobile advertising and even ‘experiential’. Especially well connected with broadcasters, for whom it has all kinds of ideas in development.

Steve Jobs
CEO, Apple

Jobs claims Apple is the world’s third biggest vendor, with 13 million iPhone sales to date. What’s incontestable is the effect the device has had on UI and content retailing.

Sean Kane
Global head of mobile, Bebo

Third behind Facebook and MySpace, but with 45 million youthful users, Bebo is still a big player. It already has numerous carrier deals.

Jay Kim
EVP of APAC, WiderThan

WiderThan created the ringback tone and the successful music rental service Mel-on. Kim has overall control of WiderThan’s music strategy, and has served as a board member of MEF Asia.

Pieter Knook
Director of internet services, Vodafone

Knook was a big money transfer from Microsoft, hired by Voda to design a new services strategy. It’s been a bit quiet since then, but ME understands that Knook is masterminding an audacious new direction for the giant operator.

Marcus Ladwig
COO, Peperonity

Germany’s Peperoni has been beavering away at mobile social networking for years. Its Peperonity network has approximately ten million unique users and half a billion page impressions per month.

KF Lai
CEO, BuzzCity

BuzzCity’s myGamma social network service reaches 2.7 million users in 70 countries. Lai has used this as a base upon which to build an off deck ad network, and served 1.7 billion paid impressions in July 2008 alone.

Mitch Lazar
MD of connected life, Yahoo! Europe

Yahoo! has stolen quite a bit of business from the pureplay mobile search companies with its Go and OneSearch suite of services.It has also become a force in advertising. Lazar is a Yahoo! veteran with a big new job.

Rob Lewis
CEO, Omnifone

Had the vision to see the potential of subscription music for mobile through a rich media app. More importantly, he had the drive to make it happen. Now MusicStation is established with Vodafone and is going to LG and Sony Ericsson too.

Emma Lloyd
Head of mobile, Sky

Sky has a formidable presence on operator decks, and has put marketing oomph behind products like 24-7 Football. Lloyd can expect a more rewarding time at Sky than she had at the doomed BT Movio.

Brandon Lucas
Senior director of mobile business development, MySpace

The sheer brand power of MySpace has made it the world’s most popular mobile destination after Google. Lucas’s decisions could have a dramatic effect on the whole biz.

Jay McClary
Director, mobile search and advertising, AOL

The US has, probably unsurprisingly, taken to mobile advertising. McClary has quite a role to play, as AOL owns Third Screen Media (possibly biggest mobile banner ad agency in the US).

Rich Miner
Group manager, mobile platforms, Google
 
Originally part of the Danger handset team, which pitched the idea of mobile to Google over two years ago. Now leading the unit behind the G1 Android phone, which has just launched with T-Mobile.

Alistair Mitchell
VP, multimedia integration, RIM

The handsets are getting sexier and there’s a new app store coming in March. Mitchell will use his experience as founder of digital music firm Puretracks to define a media direction for Blackberry.

Mauro Montonaro
CEO, Fox Mobile

After a messy two years since Jamba was bought by News Corp, all eyes are on Montonaro after he was appointed to lead the newly merged Jamba/Fox entity last month.

Tero Ojanperä
EVP, entertainment and communities, Nokia

Ojanperä is the public face of Nokia in the entertainment and social media spaces. He’s made a lot of presentations in the last 18 months, and in 2009 he’ll start to find out whether they were all worth it.

Tony Pearce
CEO, Player X

Under Pearce, the veteran games distributor has stealthily moved into video and also store management. It now runs games retailing for O2 with its 100% portal concept. Opened a testing lab in India too.

Mauro del Rio
Chairman, Buongiorno

Buongiorno’s excellent recent results vindicated its decision to buy iTouch, move into marketing by acquiring Flytxt and invest in ‘mobile 2.0’ services such as Blinko and Bing. The company also has thriving B2B content outsourcing operation with networks worldwide.

Neeraj Roy
CEO, Hungama

Roy has an incontestable claim to be India’s premier mobile content ambassador. Hungama’s impeccable Bollywood connections make it the country’s foremost CP. It also has a flourishing marketing unit. Roy has just been appointed the new chair of MEF Asia.

Gautam Sabharwal
Director, Tanla Mobile

Under Sabharwal, Tanla Mobile began as a billing provider little known outside of India. But it can now offer its customers an array of payment and content services in Europe and North America.

Ralph Simon
Chairman Emeritus, MEF Americas

Still roving the world and getting inordinately excited about interesting new content ideas. Simon received ME’s ‘outstanding achievement’ award in 2007 – and quite right too. He’s the industry’s man in Hollywood, Silicon Valley and even Capitol Hill.

Vince Staybl
CEO, Gofresh

Staybl has thrown down the gauntlet to the web-based social networks with his pureplay service itsmy.com. Constant service innovation has gathered four million users. The next phase is an internal ad market.

Jed Stremel
Director of mobile, Facebook

Incredible year for Facebook. In mobile, the firm claims about ten million active users every month, with numbers doubling every six months. Its apps are increasingly being embedded by operators and handset vendors.

Anssi Vanjoki
Executive VP and general manager of multimedia, Nokia

ME’s ‘outstanding contribution’ award winner in 2008 has masterminded Nokia’s move into content services with Ovi, Nokia Music Store, Nokia Maps and N-Gage. He was also behind the very successful Nseries device range, although he failed to convince the trade to call them ‘multimedia computers’. Got quite a year ahead.

Jon von Tetzchner
CEO, Opera Software

Tetzchner and his colleague Geir Ivarsøy conceived Opera when they worked for Telenor Research in 1995. The made-for-mobile browser Opera Mini now has 21 million enthusiastic users worldwide.

Are Traasdahl
CEO, Thumbplay

Norwegian Traasdahl ensured Thumbplay was first into the embryonic US D2C market when it launched in 2005. Thumbplay now has deals with all major labels and s well-established among the US’s top off-portal players.

Lee Williams
Executive director, Symbian Foundation

The second life of Symbian, as an open source organisation, will be led by Williams, who switched from a similar role at Nokia Series 60 in October.

Midori Yuasa
President, Capcom Mobile

Yuasa was appointed in 2005 to head up Capcom’s mobile and interactive division. But her workload escalated when she was tasked to lead a fresh drive into Europe earlier this year.

Yingbo Zhu
VP, China Mobile

Everyone wants to cosy up to China Mobile, with its continent-sized user base. It’s not easy, and the operator remains quite inscrutable. Zhu is its representative in overseas markets.