Judges 2010

Lord Clive Hollick

Senior Adviser, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts

Lord (Clive) Hollick (Age 64, London) joined KKR in 2005. He heads the Media industry team in Europe, served as Chairman of SBS Broadcasting and a director of The Nielsen Company (formerly VNU Group) and is currently a director of ProSiebenSat.1. Prior to joining KKR, Lord Hollick was CEO of United Business Media, an international publishing, information, broadcasting and market research group. He began his career as an investment banker with Hambros and then built up a global money and securities broking business that subsequently became ICAP plc. He was a director of Logica, Havas and BAe Systems and Chairman of the South Bank Centre, Europe's largest arts center, and is currently senior director at Diageo plc and a director of Honeywell Inc. He founded the IPPR think-tank in 1986 and became a member of the House of Lords in 1991. He holds a B.A. and Doctorate from Nottingham University.

Kristian Segerstråle

Co-Founder & CEO, Playfish

Kristian is the CEO and co-founder of Playfish, one of the largest and fastest growing social games companies with over 50 million registered players. Prior to Playfish Kristian served as Managing Director of Europe of Glu Mobile (Nasdaq: GLUU), and was a co-founder of Glu Mobile Europe (Macrospace Ltd) in 2001. During his tenure at Glu, Kristian led the rapid growth of Glu's European business, the creation and distribution of 40+ mobile titles, as well as being a contributor to the company's successful IPO in Q1 2007. Kristian was voted one of top-50 most influential executives in Mobile Entertainment in December 2006 in ME Magazine. He holds an MSc from London School of Economics and an MA (Cantab) in Economics from Cambridge University.

Lars Hinrichs

Founder & Managing Director, Xing

Lars Hinrichs (32) founded the Company Cinco Capital GmbH, an independent investment company headquartered in Hamburg, Germany, in 2003 and is managing the Company as CEO. Cinco Capital is building a portfolio of holdings in private companies. Currently Cinco Capital holds investments in Europe and the U.S. in different industries such as technology, financial services, telecommunications, wholesale, marketing, media and others. 

In 2003 Lars Hinrichs founded the business networking platform XING and managed the Company as CEO up until January 2009. In December 2006 he oversaw the IPO of the Company, making XING AG the world’s first Web 2.0 company to go public. Lars Hinrichs became a Member of the Supervisory Board as planned at the beginning of 2009 in order to focus his efforts on new entrepreneurial enterprises in future. 

Mr. Hinrichs began his career as an entrepreneur in 1998 at the age of 22, after working as a consultant for several new media firms. In 1998, Hinrichs founded politik-digital.de, an award-winning platform for politics and new media. Two years later, he and a partner started Boettcher Hinrichs AG. From 2001 onwards, he shifted his focus towards investment and funding consulting, and successfully negotiated several rounds of financing for various enterprises. 

Manish Madhvani

Co-Founder & Partner, GP Bullhound

Manish is a co-founder and partner at GP Bullhound, the specialist investment bank focused on providing fundraising and mergers & acquisition advice to public and private companies in the technology sector.

Manish has worked on a number of high profile fundraising and M&A transactions in the digital media sector. Prior to co-founding the company Manish worked in the venture capital markets working in Europe and Asia working for Barclays Capital's Technology & Media Private Equity team. Manish recently advised the Treasury on "Entrepreneurship and Funding" and was short-listed for business person of the year in the KPMG London Business Awards.

Marcus Polke

Investment Director, Acton Capital Partners

Marcus Polke has been an Investment Director at venture capital firm Acton Capital Partners since its inception. Having worked in the Internet industry since the late nineties, he contributes in-depth operational expertise in the online and particularly e-commerce business to the Acton team.

In September 2007, Marcus joined Burda Digital Ventures (BDV) - the corporate venture team at global media company Hubert Burda Media, who were to found Acton Capital Partners soon after. He had already worked closely with the BDV team as a Managing Director of BDV's portfolio company AbeBooks Europe (2005-2007), which was later sold to Amazon. AbeBooks is the world's largest online marketplace for used and out-of-print books.

Prior to that, he led all e-commerce activities at AOL Germany between 2001 and 2005. From 1998-2001, Marcus was one of Amazon.de's first employees, building up product management and leading two product lines. He started his career at German media company Axel Springer after obtaining a degree in Economics and Management at the Technical University of Berlin and completing a banking apprenticeship at Berliner Bank AG.

Martha Lane Fox

Founder & CEO, Lucky Voice

Martha Lane Fox co-founded lastminute.com in 1998 with business partner Brent Hoberman, floated the business in 2000 and remained on the company's board until its sale in 2005. It is currently still Europe's largest travel and leisure website.

Martha is founder of Lucky Voice which currently has four bars and a growing online application. Martha is also Founder and Chair of Antigone.org.uk, her own grant-giving foundation. Martha is a Non-Executive Director at Marks & Spencer plc, Channel 4 Television and Mydeco and a Trustee of Reprieve.

Michael Nutley

Editor-in-Chief, NMA

Michael Nutley, Editor-in-chief - New Media Age, has been a business journalist for 22 years, covering a number of areas including software, telecommunications, construction and leisure. He took over as editor of New Media Age in July 2000, and was promoted to editor-in-chief earlier this year.

As editor-in-chief he maintains a strategic overview of the entire new media sector, from both a client and a service provider perspective. He's also particularly interested in online advertising, the convergence of TV and the internet, and the transformative effect of interactive media on organisations.

Mike Reid

Managing Director,Frog Capital

Mike is Managing Partner of Frog Capital, a European fund actively looking for investments in the Digital Media industry. In his early career, Mike managed various operational business units within British Gas before spending twelve years at 3i as a venture and growth equity investor. At 3i, he worked at board level with many successful companies, amongst them Magic4 (sold to Openwave), Marlborough Stirling (LSE IPO), Adaytum Software (acquired by Cognos), Instone International, Connectivity, SBL Vaccine (acquired by Crucell) and Q-Matic (acquired by Altor).

Nancy Cruickshank

Executive Director, Digital Development, Telegraph Media Group

Nancy joined Telegraph Media Group (TMG) in May 2009 as Executive Director, Digital Development. Nancy's focus is on growing TMG's digital proposition and revenues. This includes the award winning Telegraph.co.uk which attracts over 30million unique users per month globally.

Prior to TMG, Nancy was Global CEO of VideoJug, the market-leading How To website. Nancy has worked in the digital industry for over 10 years in a range of high profile and senior roles, including Managing Director at Hearst Digital and Handbag.com.

At Hearst (following their buy-out of The Handbag Group for £22m in late 2006), Nancy oversaw their portfolio of web properties including Handbag.com, cosmopolitan.co.uk, netdoctor.co.uk and menshealth.co.uk. Under her leadership, the Handbag audience grew to over 1.3 million women per month and launched three subsidiary titles, getlippy.com, allaboutyou.com and gomamatoday.com.

Nancy lives in London and Devon with her husband, Jim and two daughters.

Ola Ahlvarsson

Co-Founder & Chairman, Result

Ola has a background as a successful entrepreneur and in1997 Ola pioneered European Internet as a co-founder of Boxman, at the time the largest European e-commerce store selling CD's online. Ola sits on boards and serves as chairman for a number of media and internet companies, and he is now working mainly as an Internet strategist and a managerial advisor for small medium sized enterprises, Fortune 500-companies and as a business accelerator and growth partner to expand companies, all under the umbrella of his venture Result.

Ahlvarsson has authored the book Ola "Mission Possible" Ahlvarsson which talks about different "types" of entrepreneurs and facets of entrepreneurship. Originally published in Swedish by Midas in 2005, an English version is to be released.

Ahlvarsson is a frequent speaker at various international industry events, holds an MBA from the University of Stockholm, the course director and the executive MBA Program Faculty member at Stockholm School of Economics in Riga and a kick boxing world champion.

Richard Brass

Director, Schroders Private Banking

Richard joined Schroders Private Banking in early 2008 having spent much of his career in investment banking. Richard previously worked for Compass Advisers, the international investment banking partnership, where he co-founded the European office. He joined Schroders from Montpelier Asset Management, an emerging markets investment firm. He began his career with KPMG in 1994 where he qualified as a chartered accountant before moving into its corporate finance team. He has a degree in Mathematics from the University of Sussex.

Seb Bishop

CEO, (RED)

Seb Bishop is International CEO of (RED), the business founded by Bono and Bobby Shriver to fight AIDS in Africa. (RED) works with iconic companies such as Apple, Microsoft, Armani, Starbucks, American Express, Converse, Dell and Gap, to create (RED) branded products with up to half profits going to Global Fund, to help fight AIDS in Africa.

Seb is also Chairman of the board of Steak, one of the fastest growing digital marketing agencies, a director of the digital media company MIVA (NASDAQ:MIVA), a non-executive board member of AdJug; a new Internet advertising marketplace and an independent non-executive director at Future Publishing PLC

Sherry Coutu

Angel Investor

Sherry Coutu is an angel investor and serves on the boards of companies, charities and universities.

As an entrepreneur, Sherry established and successfully sold two businesses in the financial services industry. The first (acquired by Euromoney plc) has operations in more than 70 countries. The second was floated in 2000 on London and Nasdaq and the company was valued at more than $1 billion before being acquired (by AMP plc). Sherry is active in early stage investing and has raised several rounds of venture capital and public equity totaling more than $200 million.

Sherry has decades of experience serving companies which range from fast growth private early stage to public and boards with turnover of more than £ 1 bn.

She is a frequent public speaker, and presents regularly at top business schools. She specialises in consumer, internet, information services and clean energy.

Current university affiliations include Cambridge University and Harvard Business School. Charitable / Government affiliations include the Prince's Trust, Cancer Research UK and NESTA.

Siobhan McElhinney

Head of Corporate, Kemp Little

Siobhan heads up the Corporate team at the leading TMT law firm Kemp Little LLP.  Kemp Little is recognised as an outstanding technology, digital media and telecoms specialist law firm. It provides cutting-edge and effective legal advice to businesses that sell, buy or rely on technology, media and communications – helping businesses to innovate and succeed. Siobhan acts for a wide variety of businesses particularly US corporates on their European acquisitions, management teams on VC/PE fundraisings and exits and for investors in technology rich companies. Siobhan is recommended in Legal 500 for M&A and is described as " quick, responsive and intelligent” and is also recommended in their Venture Capital section.

Steve Rosenblum

Founder & CEO, Pixmania

After successfully building Pixmania.com to one of Europe's largest retail website, with over €725m revenue in 2007, 75% of the company was sold to DSG International in July 2006.

The Rosenblum brothers remain part of the management team, whilst still being shareholders of the company, and are leveraging their experience by investing in fast growing Internet companies. Jean-Emile and Steve Rosenblum, founders of the Pixmania.com Group, founded Dotcorp Finance Private Equity Fund III to invest in early stage and growth stage Internet companies worldwide.

Tim Green

Executive Editor, Mobile Entertainment

Tim Green is currently the executive editor of Mobile Entertainment, the leading trade publication for the wireless content sector.

He has been writing about mobile entertainment since the market's inception in 1999, first as mobile editor of MCV (the games industry trade magazine) and then as a senior analyst with market forecaster Screen Digest.