GamesBeat@GDC: Meet our expert judges for the Who’s Got Game startup contest

It’s time to unveil our expert panel of judges for the second annual Who’s Got Game contest for the best game startup. We’ll hold the finalist competition for the contest on March 10 at our GamesBeat@GDC conference in San Francisco at the Moscone Convention Center.

Moderating the panel and taking part in the judging will be the very judicious Jeremy Liew, managing director at Lightspeed Venture Partners. Liew invests primarily in the Internet and mobile sectors, with a particular interest in social media, commerce, gaming, financial and methods for increasing monetization. He joined Lightspeed in early 2006. He was previously an executive at AOL and before that at Netscape. He also served as an executive at InterActiveCorp and was an early employee at CitySearch. He frequently writes on the Lightspeed blog.

Our other judges are:

Eric Goldberg, managing director, Crossover Technologies. Goldberg is a 30-year veteran of the game industry, serving in capacities ranging from game designer to executive. Since 2002, he has been a board member of, advisor to, or consultant for over 30 consumer-facing technology companies, from seed-stage to public, in the game, virtual world, consumer Internet, wireless data, and monetization sectors; and to three US venture capital firms. Previously, he  was co-founder and president of Unplugged Games and of Crossover Technologies, the consumer online firm; and president of West End Games, an adventure game company. His award-winning games include Paranoia, Tales of the Arabian Nights, The Tom Peters Business School in a Box, and MadMaze, the first online game to draw one million players. Goldberg helped judge our contest last year.

Joe Hyrkin, entrepreneur in residence, Trinity Ventures. Hyrkin has more than 18 years of experience in general management and senior sales and business development management both domestically and internationally. He was the senior vice president of sales and business development at Gaia Interactive. Prior to that, he was the head of the business side of multimedia search at Yahoo and headed business development and sales for Flickr. He was an executive at Virage and ran sales at Sina.com. He serves on the board of Viximo.

Jamil Moledina, outreach director, business development, for Electronic Arts Partners. He helps connect the best independent visionary game creators with the industry-leading production and commercial power of EA. Previously, he was executive director of the Game Developers Conference. Prior to that, he was Editor-in-Chief of Game Developer magazine, the leading B2B publication in the game space. He is also working on getting his first science fiction novel published.

Patrick Mork, vice president of marketing at GetJar. Mork joined GetJar in 2008, and his job is to oversee the company’s marketing, branding, content and communications strategy.  He has been in mobile content since 2004, first at mobile games publisher I-play and subsequently at Glu Mobile. Prior to joining GetJar, he was marketing director in Europe at Glu. He has 15 years of marketing experience at companies including PepsiCo and Diamond Cluster.

Our deadline is fast-approaching for the contest for best game startup. We’ll close off applications for the contest at 5 pm Pacific time on Friday, Feb. 26, so get your entry forms filled out. The top finalists will appear on stage at GamesBeat@GDC before a panel of expert judges. Those judges will select the winner on stage in front of our live audience. Here’s the link for the application page. We’ll be announcing the finalists as soon as the judges can review the applications.

For more conference info, check out our GamesBeat 2010 web site and our Facebook Group for GamesBeat@GDC. Our sponsors include the Georgia Department of Economic Development, PlaySpan, AdMob and hi5.