And our latest and greatest speakers at GamesBeat 2011

Today we’re revealing the fifth set of speakers for our third annual GamesBeat 2011 conference. Our slate of speakers will include Neil Young, founder and CEO of Ngmoco; Andrej Naborgoj, CEO of Outfit 7, the maker of Talking Friends; and Jason Citron, chief executive of OpenFeint, which was recently acquired by Gree.

This GamesBeat 2011 conference takes place July 12-13 at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco.

Neil Young is the founder and CEO of Ngmoco, an iPhone game maker he started in mid-2008, just as Apple’s mobile devices were taking off. Japan’s DeNA recently acquired Ngmoco for up to $403 million. Now Young is helping to pull together a worldwide version of Mobage, a mobile social network platform for smartphones that is aimed at making mobile games a lot more social. Before starting Ngmoco, Young was a longtime executive at Electronic Arts. Young will do a fireside chat at GamesBeat 2011.

Andrej Nabergoj is the founder and chief executive of Outfit7, the maker of the Talking Friends series of apps for the iPhone. The Talking Friends series is one of those rare app families that has generated more than 100 million downloads since it debut about a year ago. He will talk about “entertainment companies born through mobile.”

Jason Citron is the founder and chief executive of OpenFeint, the mobile social network platform for iPhone and Android devices. Gree recently paid $104 million to buy OpenFeint. Not bad for a 26-year-old. Citron has done an interesting dance, staying out of the way of Apple and its Game Center mobile game hub, and at the same time providing social features for game developers. The publishers that use OpenFeint’s social platform now reach tens of millions of users. He will speak on a panel about mobile social networks.

Our previous announced speakers include Steve Perlman, chief executive of games-on-demand firm OnLive; Bart Decrem, head of mobile games at Disney and former chief executive of Tapulous; Trip Hawkins, chief executive of Digital Chocolate; Peter Relan, chairman of YouWeb and chief executive of CrowdStar; Si Shen, chief executive of PapayaMobile; David Ko, senior vice president for mobile at Zynga; our keynote speaker, longtime game entrepreneur and founder of Atari, Nolan Bushnell; Tim Chang, partner at Norwest Venture Partners; Daniel Terry, co-founder of mobile game maker Pocket Gems; and Bing Gordon, partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and former chief creative officer at Electronic Arts; Jennifer Lu, director of business development at TinyCo; Sana Choudary, CEO of game startup accelerator YetiZen; and Tim Merel, managing director of Digi-Capital.

Each year, GamesBeat follows a big trend. In 2009, we focused on how All The World’s a Game, with the explosion of games onto a global stage. Last year, GamesBeat@GDC focused on Disruption 2.0. This year, our theme is Mobile Games Level Up, and it focuses on the busy intersection of games and mobile technology. We’ll focus on everything from smartphone games to tablets and handhelds.

Console games dominated the news in the past, but the center of attention is rapidly shifting toward mobile as more and more users play games on the run. While there are hundreds of millions of gamers on Facebook, analysts believe the number could be much higher for mobile games. Our speakers are right at this intersection. GamesBeat 2011 targets an audience of CEOs, executives, entrepreneurs, investors, marketers and other key figures in the game business. Stay tuned for more speaker announcements.

We’ll be exploring the most disruptive game technologies and business models at our third annual GamesBeat 2011 conference, on July 12-13 at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. It will focus on the disruptive trends in the mobile games market. GamesBeat is co-located with our MobileBeat 2011 conference this year. To register, click on this link. Sponsors can message us at sponsors@venturebeat.com. To pitch a startup at the Who’s Got Game contest at GamesBeat 2011, click here.