Paley Center's Next Big Thing

Paul Gollash

Paul Gollash is founder and CEO of Voxy.

Ari Jacoby

Ari Jacoby is CEO and Co-Founder of Solve Media. Previously, Ari co-founded VoiceStar, which was acquired in Sept 2007 by Marchex (Nasdaq: MCHX). Previously he served as a senior consultant in the Business-to-Business division at Google.

Before joining Google, Ari served as Director of Business Development for Reed Business Information-US, a division of Reed-Elsevier. Previously, Ari was the founder and CEO of Newsletters.com, where he led efforts in content aggregation, syndication, and affinity channel sales leading up to an acquisition by MarketResearch.com in 2000. Ari is a graduate of Georgetown University with a BA in Government.

Bradley Lautenbach

Bradley Lautenbach is co-founder of Rexly.

Melinda Wittstock

Melinda Wittstock is an award-winning broadcast and print journalist with 18 years' reporting and hosting experience in the highly competitive New York, Washington, and London media markets. Her work spans BBC Radio, TV News, ABC News, National Public Radio (NPR), MSNBC/CNBC, as well as London's Times, Guardian, and Observer newspapers. After covering U.S. national politics for more than a decade, Wittstock founded Capitol News Connection (CNC), which covers Congress from a local perspective for public radio stations nationwide. In two years, Wittstock built CNC from a staff of 3 serving 10 stations to a staff of 12 serving 230 stations. CNC's daily audience is now 1.86 million (Arbitron: Spring 2006). Brought up in New York and Toronto, Wittstock graduated with an Honors B.A. in political science from McGill University (American Government, International Relations, and Political Philosophy). At McGill, she began her broadcasting career on CRFM Radio McGill as a news anchor and talk show host and also edited The McGill Daily. She moved to London and joined the London Times as a correspondent when she was just 22. She spent five years on the newspaper, breaking several major exclusive investigative political and business stories, and started working for the BBC in 1990 as a newsmagazine reporter and live radio/TV pundit. In 1994, Wittstock joined NBC Europe as a financial news anchor, and the following year became one of the main primetime hosts/anchors of BBC World, the international TV news channel, where she covered most of the big breaking news stories of the time - from the Oklahoma City bombing to the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the death of Princess Diana, as well as the 1996 and 2000 Presidential election campaigns and Monica Lewinsky affair. In 1998, Wittstock moved back to New York to join ABC News, anchoring the network's overnight and early morning national news programs, World News Now, and World News This Morning. She continued to report for BBC Radio and TV, creating the nightly newsmagazine USA Direct from the BBC New York Bureau, and hosting the half-hour interview program, Hard Talk, and the discussion program, The Talk Show. She joined MSNBC and CNBC as a news reporter and anchor in 1999, before coming once more to Washington in 2000 to launch and host a new live NPR morning newsmagazine for Sirius Satellite Radio. Wittstock also freelanced as a congressional reporter for CNN and The London Observer while creating Capitol News Connection, which launched June, 2003. She lives in Washington D.C. with her husband Mark McDonald, the program director of WAMU 88.5 FM, their daughter Sydney, son Matthew Finn, and amiable but opinionated golden retriever, Pundit.