Judges

Stephen Beynon

Stephen was appointed to Group Managing Director of Consumer and Small Business in March 2010. Immediately prior to this, he had been working as an advisor to eircom and Meteor since July 2009.

For the four years before joining the eircom Group, Stephen served on the management board of Virgin Media, the UK’s largest cable operator, where he was responsible for their Business and Wholesale operations. During his time at Virgin, he was responsible for the merger of ntl and Telewest’s business operations and played a leading role in the transformation of ntl:Telewest into Virgin Media.

Earlier in his career, Stephen was the CEO of a private equity backed international telecoms provider, Band-X and worked in Australia for Optus where he ran fixed and mobile businesses in both consumer and business markets. His telecoms career began in 1988 with Mercury Communications for whom he worked for 10 years in a variety of roles including pricing, strategy and marketing.

You can follow Stephen on Twitter at www.twitter.com/stephenbeynon

Stephen Beynon

Stephen was appointed to Group Managing Director of Consumer and Small Business in March 2010. Immediately prior to this, he had been working as an advisor to eircom and Meteor since July 2009.

For the four years before joining the eircom Group, Stephen served on the management board of Virgin Media, the UK’s largest cable operator, where he was responsible for their Business and Wholesale operations. During his time at Virgin, he was responsible for the merger of ntl and Telewest’s business operations and played a leading role in the transformation of ntl:Telewest into Virgin Media.

Earlier in his career, Stephen was the CEO of a private equity backed international telecoms provider, Band-X and worked in Australia for Optus where he ran fixed and mobile businesses in both consumer and business markets. His telecoms career began in 1988 with Mercury Communications for whom he worked for 10 years in a variety of roles including pricing, strategy and marketing.

You can follow Stephen on Twitter at www.twitter.com/stephenbeynon

Paddy Cosgrave

Paddy (27) is the founder of Founders, an annual private gathering of the world's leading tech company founders, dubbed "Davos for Geeks" by Bloomberg Television. In 2010, he hosted 150 leading tech company founders in Dublin, including the founders of Youtube, Twitter and Skype. Paddy is also a youth advisor to Neelie Kroes the European Union Commissioner for the Digital Agenda. From 2006 to 2009 he was chairman of International Telecommunications Union Global Youth Forum. In 2008, Paddy was appointed by the United Nations as an eLeader for ICT and Youth. In the same year, he co-founded the Undergraduate Awards of Ireland and Northern Ireland, a program that supports and recognises excellence in undergraduate scholarship across all of Ireland's Universities. In 2010, Paddy launched the Dublin Web Summit to bring leading international investors and entrepreneurs to Ireland to speak to the Irish tech and business community. Dublin Web Summit is now the largest tech event in the UK in Ireland..

John Montayne

John has been lecturing at IADT for the last 10 years and has also been involved in commercial projects with GE Money, ESB, RTE, Women’s Aid and Airtricity. His areas of expertise include web development, interactive design and multimedia programming. John is a graduate of the National College of Art and Design in Industrial Design and studied his Masters at DIT in collaboration with the RCA in London in Digital Media. John was the coordinator of the BSc in Psychology Applied to IT degree programme at the institute from 2001 until 2005 specializing in interactivity design. John is also involved in the Centre for Creative Technologies & Accessibility.

Margaret E Ward

Margaret E. Ward is an award-winning financial journalist, broadcaster and author. She spent most of her writing career demystifying personal finance and business for readers of The Irish Times and The Sunday Times. For the last few years she's been a regular contributor to radio and TV. Margaret is Tubridy on RTE 2FM's "Savvy Shopper" and she presented Newstalk's Breakfast Business. She is a recipient of the Law Society of Ireland's Justice Media Award for social and campaiging journalism and the ICL science & technology journalism award.

In 2005, she founded Clear Ink, a boutique communications company specialising in clear English for corporate clients. Two of her clients have been awarded Golden Spiders for website content. www.clearink.ie

Gary Conroy

Gary Conroy is the Chief Operations Officer for Realex Payments. Gary ensures that the company continues to deliver superior service, managing both the Customer and IT Platform Operations functions. Gary comes from an International Financial Services background, having worked in the industry for 10 years. Gary has managed Commodity Operations with London-based investment banking giants Goldman Sachs International, and has delivered Banking Software Implementation projects around the globe for MISYS / Kindle Banking Systems. Gary is a graduate of Trinity College Dublin.

Barry Rhodes

Having qualified as a Chartered Accountant in London, Barry came to Ireland in 1977 as General Manager with US multinational, Burroughs Machines. His career has since seen him progress through a number of senior sales and marketing management roles within the high-growth ICT sector, including The Matrix Group, Business Automation (later renamed BA Systems), IMS Group, EUnet Ireland, and Esat Group companies.

Since September 2003, he has been CEO of INEX, Ireland’s neutral, not-for-profit, Internet Exchange, and has overseen the rapid growth of this organisation, which is now recognised as a vital element in Ireland’s ICT infrastructure. Outside of his work, Barry is an expert on the Rules of Golf and he writes a regular blog on this subject at www.barryrhodes.com.

Antoin O'Lachtain

Antoin is a psychologist and philosopher by training but now devotes most of his time to Digital Messenger, the strategy and technology-consulting firm that he runs as owner and managing director.
Antoin’s specialist areas of expertise are telecommunications, particularly mobile telecommunications and the Internet, multimedia and social software. The types of projects he most enjoys working on are: mobile and wireless applications; large-scale, low-cost systems; social software and blogging; developing consumer and business-led technology propositions; and technology forecasting.
Antoin is the author of ‘Making an impact online: creating a website that really works without breaking the bank (business on a shoestring)’.

He is also managing director of Swords Express, a coach service that connects Swords village with the city centre, via the port tunnel.

Cathy Grieve

Cathy Grieve is owner of Red Diamond Media and an experienced media professional specialising in digital media consultancy and content creation.

She has worked in front line journalism with the BBC for almost two decades, based in Northern Ireland, Washington D.C and London.

As a senior editor with the very successful BBC news website, she was involved in the development and commissioning of content for emerging digital media platforms over the past decade.

Cathy has won numerous awards throughout her journalistic career including a Royal Television Society award, several Webby awards and Online News Association and European Online Journalism awards for her work in digital media.

She has now established Red Diamond Media, situated on Capel Street in Dublin's city centre, bringing her extensive knowledge of journalism, digital media and technology to a new digital media company specialising in various media activities, including viral marketing, web user ability, TV, radio and online productions.

Dylan Collins

Dylan Collins

Anthony Quigley

Anthony Quigley is co-founder of Digital Marketing Institute. Prior to this was founder and CEO of Online-Markeing.ie, one of Ireland's leading Internet Marketing and Digital Media agencies. Anthony is an experienced entrepreneur having brought several startups to sale in the past 10 years. He developed and delivered Ireland's first Diploma in Online Marketing (in early 2007). Before founding Digital Marketing Institute, Anthony was CEO of iQuate, an Irish based IT Asset Management & Compliance software solutions vendor, where he helped grow the company from start-up, raising US$1 million in funding along the way. In 1998, he was founder and CEO of high technology firm Net Results which was acquired by NASDAQ listed Integrity Software in 1999. Anthony skills are in helping organizations to develop and implement Online Sales & Marketing strategies. Anthony gets involved at the business planning stage through to the closing of sales.

Paul Lynch

Paul Lynch is the Managing Director of Network Recovery Ireland. Lynch is responsible for strategic and business planning, product development and all financial and operational management. Previously Paul was a co-owner and Sales Director of Hosting365. In his time with H365 he grew the company revenue over 300%; introduced the Managed Services concept and brought Irelands first cloud computing offering to market. Lynch successfully brought the company to sale twice.

Prior to Hosting 365, Paul has held senior sales positions within the telecoms industry having worked in among others Esat Telecom, Nevada Telecom and Smart Telecom. Paul is a noted Cloud computing evangelist and speaks both on a national and international level on the subject. Paul has a Marketing degree from Dublin City University and is a fluent Spanish speaker.

Gareth Dunlop

Based on 15 years of direct commercial experience helping businesses use the internet more effectively, Gareth advises companies on how to get the most from the internet and how to get best value from their web and digital marketing agencies.

Previously Gareth was the MD of iON, a leading digital strategy and marketing company, headquartered in Belfast and with major clients in 15 countries. Prior to that he was the MD of Tibus, one of the largest and most successful web development agencies in Ireland, from 2002 to 2009 when it was sold to UTV Media. Since 1996, he has gained massive commercial experience advising blue chip clients in Ireland, UK and Europe (SPAR, DHL, Post Office UK, BBC) on internet strategy and best practice.

A former Board Member of the Irish Internet Association, and Chairman of WeddingsOnline.ie, Gareth writes & lectures extensively on internet related matters. He occupies regular columns in SiliconRepublic.com and the Irish Independent in the Republic of Ireland, and Business Eye magazine in Northern Ireland.

Fireball Media