Portfolios / Committee
The following table describes the portfolios of the committee. Clicking on a name will take you to their respective resume.
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Casper de VilliersCompany: Clickatell
Casper de Villiers completed his studies in Retail Business Management at the Cape University of Technology in 1994. He then became involved in various skills development training programmes for a period of 5 years (both corporate and youth development), which formed a platform for leadership and entrepreneurship for the challenges to follow. In 2000 Casper became the co-founder of Clickatell, a global messaging company that services customers in more than 220 countries. Casper was responsible for all financial and operations duties at Clickatell during the start-up phase and soon moved to core operations management and the establishment of a world class support centre. As the company expanded and diversified, Casper became responsible for the launch of a new wholesale offering, including the main business development duties. Casper currently still fulfills the responsibility for the supplier infrastructure, which ensures exposure to the global mobile workplace. He became Clickatell's representative on the GSM Association and managed to obtain extensive exposure to the mobile world through various global mobile conferences and events. Clickatell enabled him to participate in a number of large equity transactions with some of South Africa's and the world's largest equity firms. This provided further global experience and interaction with some of the world's largest corporations and led to Caper's passion for the industry being made visible in his interactions with all industry role-players. Casper has been involved in WASPA's CodeCom working group in the past. His official WASPA duties will focus on clarifying/defining financial processes and procedures and participating in other working groups. His personal focus will be to improve communication channels to ensure that the voice of the WASP is heard. |
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Michael HainebachCompany: Viamedia
Education:
Experience:
Michael has gained broad and practical experience in the mobile space. For the last 9 years Michael has been intimately involved in the development of this industry, gaining both local and international experience with a leading WASP, iTouch. From the first SMS services, through WAPs hype, demise and revival, Michael has experienced many failures and successes, including the pain and celebration of a successful London listing. As a member of a leading international group, Michael had the benefit of learning from many different markets at various stages of development. He has had access to and tapped the minds of the leaders of this industry. Michael has been on both the technical and marketing sides of the industry, understanding the technical opportunities and limitations as well the minds of the customers. Now as the Marketing Director of ViaMedia (one of the most successful South Africa WASPs), Michael's responsibilities span both consumer and corporate services, including all mobile bearers and technologies. His passion, understanding and concerns therefore span the entire industry. |
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Neil HutchinsonCompany: Grapevine Interactive
Neil graduated from the University of Cape Town, B.Bus.Science Honours degree in 1984 and has spent most of his career in Corporate marketing where he launched and branded many new products and services in the SA market. He spent 6 years working in various marketing roles within the Rembrandt Group. In 1990 he left his role as Marketing Manager at Stellenbosch Farmers Winery to join the multi-national Guinness Group as Marketing Director of their spirits company, United Distillers. He was responsible for the marketing strategy of their leading international brands and oversaw the growth of Bell's to the no.1 position in South Africa. Neil was largely responsible for successfully launching and developing Johnnie Walker in the new emerging market segments in South Africa. He also set up and commercialised the first Internet site for trading and delivering liquor in South Africa. In 1996 he became General Manager of United Distillers SA and saw the business grow to generate turnover in excess of R540m by 1998. In 1999 Neil left the Guinness Group and joined Dimension Data as an executive member of the Dimension Data i-Commerce division. He focused on the convergence of technology and business/brands working with the larger Corporate?s helping then to build their Customer Relationship Management (CRM) strategy to ensure their technology adoption was justifiably increasing customer value. In March 2000 Neil co-founded Grapevine Interactive focused on providing automated digital communication systems for the corporate/branded market locally and abroad. Grapevine secured capital from Dimension Data and Brait who are minority shareholders. Neil's experience in consumer segmentation and his links to the media and communications businesses have played a large role in the success of the Grapevine offering to date. Neil is Managing Director of the Grapevine Interactive Marketing (GVIM) business that specifically focuses on delivering digital campaigns across electronic and mobile channels including SMS, Voice, Email, WAP, MMS and Web. In 2007 GVIM was rated by the Naspers Group as the top Mobile Marketing services provider in SA in terms of gateway, campaign software and mobile marketing expertise. Over the last 2 years Neil has introduced new thinking into the mobile marketing environment such as Consumer Digital Intelligence (Di) rating and Virtual Instant Prize (ViP) incentive models that have been used by brands to improve the ROI on their campaigns. |
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Norman ParkinCompany: Integrat (Pty) Ltd. (CEO) Norman Parkin, the CEO of Integrat (Pty) Ltd, an Electronic engineer by profession, has been actively involved in the mobile industry since 1996. He initially became involved with GSM related hardware, after which he was employed by one of the mobile networks as VAS Manager of new products. Norman has been the CEO and Co-Founder of Integrat since 2002, a company which focuses on aggregation services. He has gained extensive experience of the Mobile Networks as well as WASPS and their specific needs. Norman also serves on the Vodacom WASP Council and is deputy Chairman and heads up the technical committee. |
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Gavin PenkinCompany: Exactmobile (Director of Portal and Mobile Entertainment services)
Gavin has worked in the Mobile Services Industry for the past 8 years. Gavin has been a member of the WASPA Mancom for the past 2 years and has been active on the various committees since WASPA?s inception. Gavin has played a prominent role in lobbying for the enforcement of misleading and illegal services as these will contribute to a demise of the industry. Gavin also believes that WASPA as a leading industry body is making great strides in ensuring that Mobile Services can continue into the future. |
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Leon PerlmanCompany: Cellular Online
Leon Perlman is the founder and is the founding and current Chairman of WASPA. A former scientist, he has been in the telecommunications industry since the early 1990's. He holds the degrees BSc, BSc (Hons), MSc, BProc, LLB, and is currently completing a Doctorate of Laws (LLD) at the University of South Africa. A sought-after international speaker, he has chaired and spoken at many international mobile, legal and telecommunications conferences worldwide for over 10 years. He has lectured and taught technology convergence and technology law at Columbia University Business School in New York, the University of Cape Town, and the University of Toronto. He has headed the telecoms law division at Michalson's, a boutique ICT law firm based in Cape Town and Johannesburg. Published widely, he contributes to respected international telecommunications journals on various technology-related matters. He wrote the m-commerce chapter in the book, "The Hitchhikers Guide to Going Wireless" published in October 2005. |
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Russel StrominCompany: Strike Media Russel has more than 20 years experience in the technology industry, mostly as a self-employed entrepreneur. His first business was purchased in 1998 by a large listed IT organisation and incorporated as a whole as the Internet division of the company. Russel was employed by the purchaser in a number of executive roles, finally as Group Technical Strategist.
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