Mentors & Board
The following mentors and board members will be attending during the Launch48 Romania to offer assistance to attendees on all aspects of creating and delivering their web app successfully. Important Romanian specialists from the online, marketing, branding and financial areas have accepted the invitation to be part in this innovative event and offer their skills to the groups and projects worked on during the 2 days of activity. Attendees can look forward to meeting these experts, as they will be introduced to each group during the event
Ian Broom
Launch48 Co-Founder 
Ian Broom has had a passion for the internet and been creating web sites since he was in high school in the 1990’s.Ian has a Diploma of Software Development and a Bachelor of Information Systems. In 2007 he relocated to London from Melbourne, Australia with a goal of expanding his own web design company Weboo, http://www.weboo.biz which he started in 2005. Ian conceived an event that offered additional opportunities to aspiring entrepreneurs and working with Adil Mohammed, he co-founded Launch48.
Hugo Pickford-Wardle
Launch48 Organiser
Hugo is currently running The Times iPad Project. A UX evangelist and passionate advocate of Agile development. He thinks it’s obvious you should be able to start a digital business in 48 hours and likes meeting people who don’t think He’s mad. He’s also a wannabe rails developer and entrepreneur.
http://www.hugopickfordwardle.com
Alex Buga
Mentor 
Alex has over 7 years background in webdesign and he has gained experience in great agencies like Kondiment, Firedive Interactive or Baritchi Advertising and now MB Dragan. He specialises in Interface design, usability, print design, art direction. Alex is currently working as Creative Director at MB Dragan, an interactive agency based in Bucharest.
Octav Druta
Mentor 
Octav is the co-founder and CEO of Sunnytrail, an analytics webapp that enables founders/CEOs to track profitability metrics for webapps based on the subscription business model. His personal mantra is “enjoy life outside the box”. He pursues awareness, integrity, simplicity, fun and openness in everything that he does. When all said and done, he’s a new product/business development guy. He work best in uncharted teritories. For him, entrepreneurship is a way to express his thirst for discovery, making a difference in the world and creating along people who see things differently.
George Lemnaru
Mentor 
George Lemnaru is Product Manager and Co-founder of eRepublik Labs. eRepublik is revolutionizing the way strategy games are created, distributed and played by leveraging the power of communities and the Web. The original concept for erepublik.com was born out of George’s passion for economics,politics, and history. The project took shape when George met Alexis Bonte, at which time the two founded eRepublik Labs. George began his first entrepreneurial project at only 21 years of age, launching start-up companies for the online Romanian market. Among these projects, NaturaPlant.ro – an online store selling natural health products, which launched in 2003 – became the largest store in its sector in Romania.
Mircea Pasoi
Mentor 
Mircea Pasoi is an entrepreneur and an engineer. Originally from Romania, I now live in the lovely city of Vancouver, doing his web startup, Summify. He moved there because his company was accepted into the Bootup Labs incubation program. The first startup he co-founded was balaur.ro (launched in March 2009), a job search engine for the Romanian market. In less than an year, it became one of the leading job search engines in Romania. He and his partner quickly realized that we wanted to do something more global, so they started Summify, a product that helps you preview any link on the web. In December 2009 he received an awesome news: Summify (then ReadFu) was accepted into Bootup Labs, a startup incubator.
Mihai Pricope
Mentor 
Miti (Mihai Pricope) has recently joined J2 Innovative Concepts, a young start-up specialized in building automation. Previously he worked at Adobe where he held various position from software engineer working on Flex Builder to Platform Evangelist traveling around the world and talking about Flash, Flex and AIR. Before that he started a company in his dorm room, together with 2 university colleagues. The company managed to be the leading provider of extensions for Dreamweaver and got acquired by Adobe (that’s how he ended working there). When he is not programming computers Miti can be often found in the kitchen where he shares his passion for cooking with his friends.
Dragos Roua
Mentor
Dragos Roua is a self-made entrepreneur. He started his first Internet Business back in 1999, when Internet meant dial-up and search engine was proudly represented by Altavista. He started a network of websites in late 1999 and sold it in 2008. Been market leader in vertical niches like cars (masini.ro) and lifestyle (culinar.ro). After he sold his business he started a (quite popular) personal development blog at www.dragosroua.com. He travels more than he works, or so the word goes. Besides his active online presence he started in late 2009 two offline workshops in Romania: a 2 days mentorship workshops for online entrepreneurs and a 3 days blogging course. His expertise is based on more than 10 years of uninterrupted presence in the online industry and his strong points scale from product monetizing, resource management up to personal branding and personal productivity.
Vlad Stan
Mentor
Entrepreneurship is his way of living. As an investor, all his efforts are directed towards supporting a new generation of socially and globally minded entrepreneurs. I am convinced that the new entrepreneur has the imagination, the passion and the skills to produce outstanding results for humanity. Presently, he is involved in projects such as Trigwee.com as a co-founder, Seedmoney.ro, an angel investment fund created to support entrepreneurs from CEE and Bucharesthubb.com, the first business accelerator for entrepreneurs from CEE, located in Bucharest, Romania.
Filip Chereches Tosa
Mentor 
Filip is a geek with strong entrepreneurial mindset, passionate about user experience and innovation, strives to make things happen. Wrote his first computer program in BASIC, at 9. Has been a developer ever since.In 2006, he co-authored AJAX and PHP: Building Responsive Web Applications, one of the most successful Ajax books. Filip has started GeekMeet in Romania, in 2006, as an informal and decentralized event for people involved in Technology & Internet. GeekMeet, today, counts local communities in 8 major Romanian cities and is expanding every year. Currently, Filip is privileged to make things happen as part of an amazing team, at LATERAL.
http://www.technologywithpassion.com/
Bogdan Sandulescu
Mentor 
Bogdan is passionate about technology, tennis and dance music. He is currently Product Manager for uberVU, one of the Romanian startups that have experienced an international sucess. Bogdan started working at uberVu as a lead developper and previously he was project manager for OkapiStudio. He graduated the Computer Science BSc at the Universuty Politechnica od Bucharest.
Cristian George Strat
Mentor 
Entrepreneur and Software Engineer passionate about technology, Cristian George Strat has co-founded Summify.com, a platform that brings insightful summaries for any link on the web. The startup is currently incubating at BootupLabs, Vancouver, BC. Besides, he was also cofounder at balaur.ro (2009), one of the most famous Romanian job search engines, and infoarena.ro (2004), a portal containing IT educational resources, related news and articles, web programming contests, buit also a dedicated forum. Cristian has also interned at Google in Mountain View and Switzerland.
