Bio
Master of Ceremonies: Scott Budman
Scott Budman is an Emmy Award winning reporter and anchor, reporting on business and technology for NBC Bay Area and hosting the station's long-running weekly technology program, Tech Now! Weekday afternoons, he also reports business news on KNBR Radio and is a regular blogger for Forbes and other publications. He began his broadcast career as a business reporter for KMNY radio, Anaheim; then worked as general assignment reporter and business anchor/producer at the Orange County News Channel. He was then reporter and weekend anchor at KEYT in Santa Barbara. Budman won a national Iris Award for a documentary about gays in the military and has received Golden Mike Awards from the Southern California Radio and Television News Directors Association. He has a degree in political science from UCLA.
Moderator: Jon Fortt
Jon Fortt joined CNBC as technology correspondent in July 2010. He covers the companies, startups and trends that are driving innovation in the industry. Fortt came to CNBC from Fortune Magazine, where as a senior writer he covered both large technology companies and trends. He appeared regularly on the KNTV Press:Here technology show and analyzed tech trends on CNNi Quest Means Business. Before joining Fortune in 2007, Fortt was a senior editor at Business 2.0 magazine. From 1999 to 2006, he wrote and edited at the San Jose Mercury News, the newspaper of Silicon Valley. As the paper's first senior web editor he helped develop a blog and podcast network, managed the creation of multimedia projects, and served on the board of the Associated Press Managing Editors.
Ina Fried
Ina Fried covers wireless issues and devices, including tablets, smartphones and even some phones of average intelligence at All Things Digital. Her road to becoming the woman she is today has been a long one. Before joining ATD, she spent a decade at CNET where she covered, among other things, Microsoft and Apple. Her reporting spanned several continents, two genders and included chronicling the Hewlett Packard-Compaq merger, Bill Gates' transition from software giant to philanthropist, as well as the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver. Prior to joining CNET in May 2000, she covered chips for Bridge News and was a writer at the Orange County Business Journal and Orange County Register. She graduated from Miami University in Ohio.
Maryfran Johnson
Maryfran Johnson, an award-winning IT journalist and editorial executive, is Editor in Chief of CIO Magazine & events. She is a leading IT journalist, editor, and well-known moderator of CIO and IT industry forums, running 11 CIO events a year. She began her career in daily newspapers, later moving into tech reporting, editing and management roles with IDG's Computerworld, TechTarget's CIO Decisions and Evanta's CIO Executive Summits. The first national winner of American Business Media's Timothy White Award for editorial integrity, Maryfran was also named one of the "21 Most Intriguing People in Publishing" by Min's B2B Magazine. She holds an M.A. in Journalism from The Ohio State University, where she was a Kiplinger Fellow, and a B.S. in Journalism from the University of Florida.
Michael Liedtke
Michael Liedtke has been a business and technology writer for 28 years, including the past 12 at The Associated Press in San Francisco. During that time, he has covered the peak of the dot-com boom, the devastation of the bust and the Internet comeback spearheaded by Google. He has also covered a wide range of business topics beyond technology, including banking, finance, real estate and retailing. His orbit of coverage currently revolves around Google, Yahoo, Netflix, Microsoft, Oracle and Hewlett-Packard — all of which requires him to know a lot about Facebook, Apple and Amazon, as well.
Joseph Menn
Joseph Menn joined Reuters in San Francisco as an investigative technology reporter in January after three years with the Financial Times and 10 years with the Los Angeles Times. His books include the definitive Napster biography as well as the influential 2010 bestseller "Fatal System Error: The Hunt for the New Crime Lords who are Bringing Down the Internet", a real-life thriller that first brought the modern face of cybercrime to a mainstream audience. "Fatal System Error" revealed collaboration between governments and organized cybercriminals and was placed on the official reading list of the U.S. Strategic Command while being compared by the New Yorker to the novels of Stieg Larsson. A two-time Loeb Awards finalist, Menn has spoken at security industry conferences RSA and DefCon and training sessions convened by federal law enforcement and bank regulators.
Nicole Perlroth
Nicole Perlroth is a technology reporter at The New York Times and the Bits blog. Before joining the San Francisco bureau in 2011, she was a deputy editor at Forbes where she covered venture capital and Web start-ups and produced the Midas List, the magazine's annual ranking of top tech deal makers. Her reporting often extends beyond technology to topics like food, bioethics and education. Perlroth is a graduate of Princeton University and Stanford University's Graduate School of Journalism.
Jordan Robertson
Jordan Robertson is a technology reporter for Bloomberg News in San Francisco. He covers computer networking, security and privacy. He joined Bloomberg in 2011, and has covered tech since 2005, when he began writing about it for the Associated Press. His reporting has taken him inside a real-life Fight Club for Silicon Valley techies; covering a Christmastime tiger mauling at San Francisco Zoo; and shooting Tommy guns with the FBI in what began as an attempt to learn about cyber crime. He attended University of California, Berkeley for his master's degree in journalism.
Bruce Upbin
Bruce Upbin is Managing Editor at Forbes Media, responsible for technology and wealth coverage. He joined Forbes as a Reporter in April 1995 and became its Midwest Bureau Chief in 1997, returning to New York in 2000 to manage the teams covering technology and healthcare. In 2006, he became one of the youngest Forbes editors to be named Assistant Managing Editor. He has written and edited dozens of cover stories and regularly provides business commentary on CNN, NPR, CNBC and the BBC. Prior to joining Forbes, Upbin worked as a speechwriter and freelance journalist. He holds a B.A. from Northwestern University and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Arizona. He serves on the board of the Reading Odyssey.
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