Announcing first speakers at GamesBeat 2011 conference on mobile games

Drum roll please. The first announced speakers at our third annual GamesBeat 2011 conference 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; and Trip Hawkins, chief executive of Digital Chocolate. This trio is the first of numerous speaker announcements we’ll have as we release more details about VentureBeat’s GamesBeat 2011, which will take place July 12-13 at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco.

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.

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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. All three of the speakers announced today will do fireside chats at GamesBeat 2011, which will target an audience of CEOs, executives, entrepreneurs, investors, marketers and other key figures in the game business.

After eight years of research, Perlman’s OnLive debuted as a games-on-demand service for the PC in mid-2010. The company offers fast-action online games where the game is stored and executed on a web-connected data center server. Changes to the game are sent to the client machine in the form of compressed video. Users can thus play fast-action, high-quality games on low-end machines. OnLive debuted its MicroConsole in the fall of 2010 so gamers could player server-based games on their big-screen TVs. And Perlman recently announced that mobile device maker HTC had invested $40 million in OnLive.

Perlman spoke at GamesBeat@GDC last year. He is founder, president and CEO of OnLive. Previously, he launched such technology startups as Mova, Web TV, and others. He was a key developer of Apple’s QuickTime web video technology. And he also runs technology incubation firm Rearden.

Decrem is also a veteran of GamesBeat and is currently head of mobile games at Disney. Last year, Disney bought Decrem’s company, Tapulous, which made the popular Tap Tap Revenge series of music games. Before that, Decrem was chief executive of Flock; head of marketing and business affairs at Mozilla Foundation, co-founder of Eazel, and founder of Plugged In.

Hawkins is well known in Silicon Valley as the founder of Electronic Arts and 3DO. Hawkins has been a fixture in video games since he started EA in 1982, where he stayed until 1991. At that point, he founded 3DO in an attempt to create a new game console. He started Digital Chocolate to focus on mobile games in 2003. He was inducted into the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences’ Hall of Fame in 2005.

Hawkins will do a fireside chat on “Digital Disruption: Insights about how and why it’s happening; the coming revolution in which discovery technologies will triumph over distribution business models; and how the browser will beat the app stores and set content free, transforming games into a $100 billion market.”

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.