MySpace Co-Founder and Facebook coming to the Arctic15


    It is less than a week to go until Arctic15, and boy is it picking up speed. We already have a great investor line-up, an impressive list of speakers from the gaming, business, mobile and many other industries. As we are running out of tickets, one thing we were kinda lacking was – social network and technical speakers.

    So we decided we are going big with that and are happy to announce that both Myspace co-founder, Aber Whitcomb and Ali Parr from Facebook will be joining us as speakers.

    Hopefully you remember that Myspace was the most successful social network prior to Facebook, hitting over 100 million global users and a valuation of $12 billion dollars in 2007. In fact Mark Zuckerberg from Facebook actually asked for $75 million dollars from MySpace to buy Facebook back in 2005, but DeWolfe (MySpace founder & starting CEO) declined the offer at the time.

    Aber Whitcomb was then the co-founder and CTO for the company and is credited with using ColdFusion to achieve faster development speeds than many others. For example, Friendster, one of the competitors of MySpace at the time had ten times the amount of developers but could not keep up with MySpace on development speed. It is fair to say that Whitcomb is one of the best CTO’s in the world, he was even listed in TOP25 by Infoworld back in 2009.

    Currently Whitcomb is the CTO of SGN, a casual gaming company. They started the company together with Chris DeWolfe, also a founder at MySpace. The company totaled over 300 million game downloads and their biggest app – MindJolt, was in the Top 20 Facebook apps at one point.

    Whitcomb’s speaker slot at Arctic15 will be at 15:20 on the 27th of May and he will be available for one-on-one’s right after. Do not miss it and if you did not get your ticket yet – do it quickly as we are starting to get worried about the capacity at Telakka.

    MySpace, SGN and Facebook stories are extremely intertwined and we are happy to say that Facebook will also be sending a speaker to Finland, which does not happen all that often.

    Zuckerberg did not quite make it himself this time around but they are sending Ali Parr who is in charge of Parse Partnerships for the whole of EMEA at Facebook.

    Parr is a mix of a hacker, developer, designer and tinkerer. The official title is “Technical Head of Parse Partnerships EMEA”, which means that he is focused on building partnerships between Parse/Facebook and developers and startups across EMEA. With the recent Moves acquisition also shows that Facebook is looking into the region more carefully now, so we suggest you come and listen to Parr and drill him on how to co-operate with the largest social network on the planet.