Mark Skaggs is an award winning game developer and most recently known for creating the world-wide phenomena FarmVille and CityVille for Zynga.

With a career spanning 18 years, 3 AIAS awards, 4 console transitions and a track record of creating games which have sold over 16 million copies at retail, Skaggs is also known for creating multi-million selling RTS games such as “Command and Conquer: Red Alert 2”, “Command and Conquer: Generals” and “Lord of the Rings: Battle for Middle-earth”.

Skaggs joined Zynga in 2008 and is currently Senior Vice President of Product Development, leading the charge to create new and interesting games in the social gaming space.

Mark Skaggs is an award winning game developer and most recently known for creating the world-wide phenomena FarmVille and CityVille for Zynga.

With a career spanning 18 years, 3 AIAS awards, 4 console transitions and a track record of creating games which have sold over 16 million copies at retail, Skaggs is also known for creating multi-million selling RTS games such as “Command and Conquer: Red Alert 2”, “Command and Conquer: Generals” and “Lord of the Rings: Battle for Middle-earth”.

Skaggs joined Zynga in 2008 and is currently Senior Vice President of Product Development, leading the charge to create new and interesting games in the social gaming space.

Ian Livingstone is a leading pioneer of interactive entertainment and fiction, and one of the top players behind best selling games such as 'Tomb Raider' and 'Hitman'.

In 1982, he devised Fighting Fantasy, the series of interactive game books that sold over 15 million copies in 23 languages. He wrote more than 20 books in the series including his best-selling Deathtrap Dungeon.

At Eidos – the UK's leading developer and publisher of video games - he was instrumental in securing many of the company's major franchises including Tomb Raider and Hitman.

In 2000 he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Technology by the University of Abertay Dundee.

In 2002 he was awarded the BAFTA Special Award for his outstanding contribution to the interactive entertainment industry.

Ravi Polimera, is a project lead in Sierra Atlantic handling projects across various platforms like the DS and browser games. Prior to Sierra Atlantic, he was the Founder and CEO of GoLive gaming Solutions, selected one of India’s most promising startups by PROTO. Staring as a professional gamer and a game developer, Ravi and later GoLive has become the most popular professional gaming community representative in India.

Ramaraju is having more than 10 years of experience in the IT industry in different business domains. He is working in Electronic Arts for more than 2 years. He is working on EA online technologies and provides services for different game teams across the world in conducting the performance analysis and optimization.

Billy Pamier started in the gaming industry in 1988, working on platforms such as the Commodore 64, Amiga and Atari ST. Following his education in the US and UK, he worked with console studios such as Fox Interactive, Vivendi, Eurocom and Rebellion Developments. Billy led efforts on games such as the AVP series, No One Lives Forever, Predator, Judge Dredd, Tetris and Need for Speed.

He jumped into the mobile world with Disney, where he built their entire QA & Certification team and went on to hold positions with Airborne Mobile and EA Mobile as Product Manager and Development Manager respectively. Billy has worked with teams in Hyderabad, London, Montreal and Sao Paulo, has a deep passion for games and learning about new cultures.

He has been in 3D Game industry for last 6 years. Specialized in game character modeling & texturing. Also has experience in rigging & animation.

He started his career with 2D cell animation in Kolkata. Has experience as Graphic designer in Pre- Press.

He Joined Indiagames in 2005 as a character artist. Presently working as an Art Lead …responsible for all 3D art assets produced for various platforms including mobile, PC & consoles.

Animation director with extensive experience in creating content for film, TV and games. Has worked for Jim Henson Studios,Warner Bros. and Sony on film and game projects. www.angupte.blogspot.com

Based in Mumbai, Gowree Gokhale is a Partner at the Nishith Desai Associates. With over 14 years of experience. Gowree has established her expertise in laws applicable in various industries such as

Technology, Media and Entertainment, Gaming Telecom and pharma. Her areas of specialization include IP, litigation, Joint ventures and M & A in the said industries.

She has authored research reports and articles on variety of subjects.

Almost 10 years since he accidentally fell into it, Pratik's love affair with the game industry continues...

His initial years saw him in a variety of roles (Beta Tester, Game Designer, Studio Head) at Indiagames Ltd., working on more than two dozen mobile titles, published world-wide.

Since starting Idealabs Interactive, he's been busy leveraging the power of interactive technology to create content for a range of clients, over a variety of platforms. As long as it's digital and interactive, he's game for it!

Amar is a Sr. Engineering Manager at Zynga and currently serves as head of engineering in a game studio. Previously, he was the founding team member of the Systems Engineering Group at Zynga responsible for building software and services required to run Zynga games on the cloud. In this role, he focused on building a scalable database called membase, as well as game platform software, cloud management software, and performance improvement in the cloud.

Prior to Zynga, Amar was an Engineering Manager at Google where he led development and migration of Google internal systems to cloud (enterprise in the cloud). He built one of the first production-ready systems using GWT and helped open source it. He also built reporting and recommendation services on Google cloud and Bigtable. Prior to Google, Amar founded a web software company. He built a web scraper that was licensed by several enterprise companies and sold source code rights to a Fortune 500 company.

Amar is a recipient of International Engineering Consortium’s (IEC) InfoVision Award for building one of the first commercial enterprise products on Linux.

The last 4 years he is a Creative and Art Director for Trine Entertainment Ltd. in Mumbai, India. Yiannis is a passionate gamer and developer with over 17 years experience in Art and Game Production and over 27 years of Gaming.

He has created Art material for nearly every gaming platform and various other purposes using mainstream and off the shelf tools for International Projects of every size. He has been a Digital Animation and VFX Instructor at N.Y.F.A. in Athens for 4 Years.

A member of Autodesk's Media and Entertainment Closed Testing Team and his work as lead Artist has been awarded with the European Möbius Award for Best Multimedia Cultural Product of 2006, "Acropolis of Athens".

Sumit has 11 years of industry experience in video game production. After completing his Bachelor’s in Computer Science from Fergusson College, Pune University in 1999 where he submitted a 2 player “snake” game as the final year college project done in C++; he got his first job as a java script programmer, making online games for a website; he later moved on to make PC games at Paradox Studios.

In 2005, Sumit got a break into Microsoft and started working on Xbox 360. After spending 5 years in Microsoft Game Studios working on Kinect, Windows Phone 7 and Xbox, Sumit returned back to India to head up Jump Games. Sumit has 18 credits to his name and specializes in Product management and Game production.

Abhishek Raut is working with Ubisoft as Senior Programmer and Technical Consultant. He is a part of development team for the games on Xbox360, PS3.

He also has an experience in Engine and Tool programming. He has worked on titles such as Splinter Cell HD, Splinter Cell Pandora Tomorrow HD, Splinter Cell Chaos Theory HD, Bloody Good Times, 100 All Time Favorites etc.

Shan Kadavil is Country Manager, Zynga India, the leading social gaming company on the web. In this role, Shan is responsible for building the first and largest center outside the US for Zynga. Zynga India’s charter involves building exciting games that define the future of social gaming and also in engineering the Infrastructure used for the game play by millions of Zynga users.

Shan has a good mix of entrepreneurial and engineering experience. Before joining Zynga, Shan was the founder of Dbaux Technologies, a cloud/appliance based product company. Prior to that, he held dual roles as the India Country Manager and Vice President of Products for SupportSoft (NASDAQ: SPRT – now Support.com/Consona CRM). He started his career as a programmer specialized in the network and security areas of product development at MAPS geosystems (now ESRI). He has also been involved with other consulting and technology firms in the US. Shan has also been instrumental in setting up Zircon Automations – an office automation company based in the Middle East. Shan’s strongest skills involve building scalable organizations, attracting and mentoring the best talent, motivating them to harness their true potential and fostering a fun and productive culture in the organization.

Shan holds a bachelor’s degree in Computer Engineering from Model Engineering College, Cochin, India and is also a level 33 farmer in Farmville.

Rajesh Rao is the founder and CEO of Dhruva Interactive, India’s oldest & most respected Games Company. Rajesh is recognized worldwide as a pioneer of gaming in India. In his bestselling book on globalization “The World is Flat”, Tom Friedman describes Rajesh as one of the most dynamic entrepreneurs he met in India and used Rajesh and Dhruva as a metaphor to explain ‘triple convergence’ – how a young entrepreneur and his startup from India plugged into the global games industry by leveraging the new forces of globalization that are ‘flattening’ the world.

10 year old Dhruva Interactive has pioneered gaming in India. Today, Dhruva Interactive develops and publishes games for consoles, PC and mobile wireless devices. Dhruva’s PC &Console division is a leading provider of production services for the global videogames industry, having worked on 15 AAA videogame titles in the last 6 years. Dhruva’s mobile division is a top rated developer of mobile games in the world. Dhruva's product initiatives are focused on the emerging Indian market, it’s first original PC product is a feature-rich 3D multiplayer pool game called Pool on the Net

In his role as Country Manager of Sony Computer Entertainment, Mr. Bose is responsible for undertaking and spearheading Sony Computer Entertainment’s marketing, promotional and developmental efforts. Sony Computer Entertainment Europe (SCEE), based in London is responsible for the distribution, marketing and sales of PLAYSTATION®3, PlayStation®2 and PSP™ (PlayStation®Portable) software and hardware in 102 territories across Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Oceania. SCEE also develops, publishes markets and distributes entertainment software for these formats, and manages the third party licensing programs for the formats in these territories.

Operating out of India’s financial capital Mumbai, Mr. Bose mentors the marketing team in order to successfully implement adopted strategies. He manages the media plan, advertisers, wholesale retail partners and online distribution partners.

Mr. Bose began his career in Sales with the consumer durables division of Philips India Ltd. After the initial sales stint, he became Product Manager for the Color TV segment. Post Philips, he joined UDV India Ltd, which was part of the international liquor giant Diageo Plc as Group Product Manager for the White Spirits range for the Indian market - key brand being Smirnoff. He then joined Rediff.com India Ltd and was part of the online Subscription business team and the ECommerce team.

Mr. Bose holds a degree from the prestigious Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad and a B.E.E in Electrical Engineering from Jadavpur University.

He is the undisputed gaming guru in India. With over 20 years of experience, he has been a pioneer in the Indian video games space, has developed the first 3D game engine in India and has been responsible for setting up & running one of the largest animation studios of India. He is also a regular speaker at the GDC and NASSCOM events.

His process-driven mindset has given Lakshya the huge advantage of SWAT®, a comprehensive workflow application that binds the company and its clients together seamlessly.

Despite his stern looks, Manvendra is a people's person at heart - a fact amply demonstrated by the fierce loyalty of his team and staff members. It's thanks to him that Lakshya has the lowest attrition rate in the industry!!

Rahul is responsible for reinforcing relationships and conversations between users of the ibibo social network through the paradigm of games - answering the entertainment needs of users and using games as a glue to connect people within the social network. His team has been working on rolling out social role playing games with local content, live multi-player games, and also rich-experience client based multi-player games. Rahul has thirteen years of diverse experience in various media comprising television, Internet, interactive media, and documentary films. Before joining ibibo.com, Rahul has worked with best of the breed organizations like Sony Entertainment Television, Cyber Media, and Satyam Computers. He is a professionally trained architect, having done his B. Arch. (Architecture) from the School of Planning And Architecture, New Delhi. He has also done an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management, Indore (IIM, Indore).

At Indiagames, Samir serves as its Chief Operating Officer, responsible for the firms Asia Pacific operations. He is responsible for setting efficient systems and overlooking day to day operations of various aspects of the mobile business in India and the Asia Pacific region. He has played a crucial role in the launch of the Company’s PC games business, in corporate governance, investor relations and corporate finance related initiatives of the company. One of his key responsibilities has been leading the recent strategic investment of UTV in the company.

Prior to Indiagames, Samir has been with Ernst & Young India’s M&A advisory team where he served as a Vice President and at IL&FS Investment Managers (IIML) where he was part of the team investing in the media and technology sector. Samir has advised over $200 mn in venture financing and/or M&A transactions in his roles on the buy side and sell side.

Samir has been closely associated with the company from the time of its inception. He was instrumental in the seed stage financing of Indiagames by IIML in 1999. Further, in his capacity as advisor to Indiagames, Samir led the strategic investment of Tom Online, Cisco and Macromedia in the company in 2005.

Samir is an MBA in Finance and has a Bachelors Degree in Commerce.

Session 1: Specialization Prospects for programmers

Chetan Shah joined Synygy in 1993 and is currently Chief Operating Officer with oversight for global sales, professional services, and technology initiatives that support the delivery of client solutions. As Managing Director of Synygy India Pvt. Ltd. and Director of Synygy Europa, Romania, Mr. Shah is also responsible for Synygy's worldwide operations. Chetan has helped Synygy achieve “Hall of Fame” status on the Inc 500 List a feat accomplished by only 65 companies in the 22year history of the list. In addition, under his tenure Synygy has experienced 15+ consecutive years of profitability.

Chetan's accomplishments at Synygy include establishing the largest software organization and professional services staff focused on developing sales compensation management and other sales performance management applications and creating the only in-house data center operation dedicated to on-demand SaaS delivery of sales performance management applications.

He also has been instrumental in leading Synygy's technological innovation, including the first 100% web based software suite in the sales performance management space and the first web 2.0 and mobile enabled sales portal for sales people. He is responsible for delivering complete end to end, fully integrated sales performance management solutions for Fortune 500 companies globally that can be implemented quickly and eliminate the risks common to patched together alternatives.

Chetan's leadership philosophy centers on People, Productivity, and Profits. He strongly believes in investing in people thereby enhancing productivity resulting in superior financial performance. He is heavily involved in the business community and a member of many executive committees, including Young Presidents’ Organization (YPO, Pune), President for Software Exporters’ Association of Pune, Charter member TiE, Pune, Greater Philadelphia Senior Executive Group, and Society for Information Management, USA. He has a strong passion for coaching and mentoring and serves on the Board of several start-up companies worldwide.

Vishal started his first company FACT at the age of 16. In 1999, he founded Indiagames, then a five member team. Indiagames is primarily engaged in publishing and developing games across various platforms like Internet, PC, broadband, mobile phones, PDAs, handheld gaming devices and consoles.

Considered the most important gaming developer and publisher in India, Indiagames controlled in 2005 a 60% share in India's game-related wireless value-added services market. In 2009, Indiagames had over 300 employees and offices in Mumbai, Beijing, London and Los Angeles.

In 2005, he sold a majority of stokeholds (adding up to 76,29% of the company) to TOM online Games a subsidiary of TOM Online Inc. Although he kept his position as CEO. In December 2007, the Indian company UTV Software Communication acquired a majority stake in Indiagames.

In 2008, he launched Sweat and Blood Venture group in order to invest in startups at a seed level.

In 2011, Indiagames was acquired by Disney.

He has been part of the Nokia Advisory Council for Games and actively advices Nokia on wireless and gaming technologies.

Vishal Gondal was chosen E&Y Indian Entrepreneur of the year award nomination in 2004 and in 2005. He was listed among the top 50 executives in the mobile content space by the UK based ‘Mobile Entertainment’ Magazine. He was also featured among the 20 Fab Indians to watch out for in 2006 by The Week magazine.

Indiagames was featured amongst Red Herring (magazine) Asia’s Top 100 companies in 2005. Vishal is also known as the “Gaming King” in India.

Coming from a five-year stint as a partner in a small software startup in Seattle, Washington, Jason joined Griptonite in 2001 with a knack for making great games even better. A jack of many trades, he served as Lead Tester, Designer/Writer, Programmer and Lead Programmer with 15 shipped titles under his belt before landing at the head of the programming department of Griptonite.

He is motivated by his passion for management and technology, as well as a drive to nurture a creative and innovative environment in which to build exciting, high-quality games.

Uditha Bandara is specializes in Microsoft XNA Game development for Windows Phone, Xbox 360, PC, and Zune. He is the South East Asia`s First XNA/DirectX MVP (Most Valuable Professional). He had delivered sessions at various events and conferences in Singapore, Sri Lanka and India. He has published several articles, tutorials, and game demos on his XNA Game Development Blog – http://uditha.wordpress.com

He is motivated by his passion for management and technology, as well as a drive to nurture a creative and innovative environment in which to build exciting, high-quality games.

Haider Choonawala is a Game Designer at Ubisoft Pune. He has worked on titles on both the iPhone and Facebook platforms. He is currently working on an undisclosed project for a big Ubisoft IP.

Hemanth Sharma is a Platform Evangelist at Adobe Systems. He has been working on Flash Platform for over 11 years now. A certified expert in Adobe Flash, Hemanth has extensive experience in developing applications targeting the browser, desktop and multiple mobile devices and TV/STB. He has a flair for UI design and considers building rich user experiences as a priority in anything he builds -- games or business applications. He also has expertise in development for Flash for Digital Home and RIA for Web. In his spare time Hemanth writes articles, tips and tricks and tutorials on his blog – http://www.hsharma.com/tech

Srinivasan has 7+ years experience working in the gaming domain. He currently heads the 3d team at Indiagames Ltd here in Mumbai. He team has worked on major titles on mobile which include BioShock, Bruce Lee, Godzilla, Cricket T20 Fever and many more. His team is the creator of the cross platform 3d technology called "ICE 3D" which were used by all 3d games developed by his studio.

Pauline joined Ubi Soft in 1998, working as a Producer on some of the best-selling brands including Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon and Rayman. In May 2007, she became Executive Producer of the new casual games division at the company.

She is the managing director of Ubisoft India.

Rudrasen is founder and principal at 7 Level Studios, a freelance game development firm that operates from Pune & Silicon Valley. His company focuses on social & casual game development on Web , Android and IOS platform.

Rudrasen is a senior software engineer who moved to Pune after a decade in the Silicon Valley where he worked in large enterprises such as Intel and small internet consumer startups. His last job was in MMO game company. He is a self proclaimed designer and game enthusiast and bullish about the emerging game industry in India.

Currently Studio Head of Griptonite India Games, a Foundation 9 Entertainment game development studio. Griptonite India is a video game development studio based in Hyderabad, India, developing on XBOX 360/Kinect, PS3/PS2/PSP, Nintendo Wii/3DS/DSi as well as mobile gaming platforms like iPhone/iPad and social media games for Facebook.

Previously Vice President of Technology at FXLabs Studios, a video game development company in Hyderabad, India. First video game development studio in India to launch a 3D PC Game built on Unreal Engine released in India, Europe and Russia. First Bollywood 3D PC game built for the hit movie Ghajini.

Before joining FXLabs, he has worked in US in technology companies like Wavexpress, Lucent, Sharp Labs and Sarnoff Inc working on digital multimedia solutions for Broadband Cable Networks, MPEG Standards, Data Compression and Image Processing.

Sunu Engineer is an Architect at Zynga India, the leading social gaming company on the web. In this role, Sunu is responsible for building secure frameworks for enabling the large sale social network games of Zynga. Zynga India’s charter involves building exciting games that define the future of social gaming and also in engineering the Infrastructure used for the game play by millions of Zynga users.

Sunu has a good mix of entrepreneurial and engineering experience. Before joining Zynga, Sunu was the founder of Embedded Computing Machines Pvt. Ltd., an embedded systems product company working primarily in sensor network and smart energy grids. Prior to that, he held dual roles as the Chief Architect of Calsoft Pvt. Ltd specializing in Storage and Systems Engineering and as a scientist at Inter University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA) , working on the design of the distributed operating system for the IUCAA observatory. He has worked extensively in US, Europe, Middle East and Asia designing and building multiple products in storage and enterprise systems including hardware and firmware. Sunu’s strongest skills involve designing and building products, understanding and designing human machine interaction models, managing delivery from large distributed teams, attracting and mentoring talent and inventing new ideas, theories, products and ways of looking at things.

Sunu holds a Ph.D in Astrophysics from Pune University,Pune , India.

Ojha is the President of Version2Games Limited. Rajat has over 16 years of industry experience and has worked on various games on various platforms like PC, Pocket PC, Palm, Symbian, XBOX, PS2, PS3, iPhone and Android. He developed his first game in 1994 which was an instant hit. He also led the first group which developed cross platform wireless gaming in 1999.

He is responsible for the company's overall management and direction and he also ensures that the company maintains its ongoing reputation for producing high quality games for a global market. Rajat is a frequent speaker at various gaming and management conferences.

Ashwani is the Asst. Producer at Version2Games Limited. He’s recently been promoted to this new role after being a technical lead for last three years. He is one of the most sought after game developer with immense skills in Artificial Intelligence. He has worked on various platforms like PC, Mobile and console in a career spanning over 6 years.

John is the Modeling Lead at Version2Games Limited. Before joining V2G, he worked as a game environment artist for SWIGames in Florida. John is in the game industry for over five years now. His core specialty is in vehicle modeling.