Arnon Kohavi, Partner, Mapplr
Arnon is the co-founder of Mapplr, an online site for people who love eating out and traveling. He is also co-founder and served as CEO of WeFi, a WiFi sharing and social networking company. Prior to WeFi he was a Fellow at the Reuters Digital Vision Program at Stanford University, where he developed WiFi solutions that help developing countries increase penetration of wireless communications and bridge the "digital divide".
Prior to Reuters, Arnon was for 10 years an executive in the wireless industry. He led the initial public offering and follow-on offerings of DSPC, a wireless chip company, and Vyyo, a broadband wireless equipment maker, on Nasdaq (raised over $1 billion) and the sale of DSPC to Intel for $1.6 billion in 1999. Other companies that Arnon worked or advised include DSP Group, Zen Research, Magnolia Broadband and Mobifusion.
Arnon holds a BA degree in Economics and Management from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and a MBA degree from the Anderson School at UCLA. He currently resides in San Francisco.
Sharon Besser, Senior director, Imperva
Sharon Besser has successfully created, developed and launched new security products for some of the industry’s leading technology vendors. He is currently serving as Senior director of Product strategy for Impere were he leads the efforts to identify, conceptualize, and bring to market new products that will extend Imperva’s leadership position in the application data security market.
Besser joins Imperva from Websense, a leading provider of content filtering and web security solutions, where he was director of products. At Websense, Besser was primarily responsible for Content Protection Suite, that was recognized by independent research firm, Gartner as the market leader. Prior to Websense, Besser was director of products at PortAuthority Technologies, a provider of information leak prevention solutions which was acquired by Websense. Besser also served as director of Security Solutions for security vendor Check Point Software Technologies, where he was responsible for the creation and management of SmartDefense a subscription service which actively protects organizations against known and unknown network and application attacks.
Earlier in his career, Besser founded PubliCom a provider of integrated data security and communications solutions, which was acquired by COMSEC. Besser holds a BSC in Mathematics, Computer Science and Geography from Bar Ilan University in Israel.