Speaker 1 - Billa Bhandari of Akoura Biometrics and GoSecure

Billa Bhandari (Founder, Chairman) of GoSecure and Founder/CEO of Akoura Biometrics has fifteen years experience building business oriented, secure, scaleable and mission-critical trading systems in the banking industry, including Chase, Credit Lyonnais, Putnam Investment and State Street Bank. Before Akoura, Billa founded Parallax Corporation to provide technology-consulting services to clients including GTE, Sun and HP. Billa’s background in Finance and Technology exploited the need for user oriented yet highly secure information solutions. Billa has strong recognition in the International Biometrics and Information Security community and serves on the Technology Board of ID World, Single Working Women’s Affiliate Network, and Locuz, Obvue. Billa has appeared on many industry panels focused on deployment of Biometrics in the Enterprise and brings vision and business development skills to Akoura and GoSecure.

For a full profile, please visit LinkedIn-->

Speaker 2 - Doug Stellman - Yorkshire Fund Managers

Doug has worked in venture capital since 1993, working on investments ranging from start-up technology businesses through to general development capital investments. Prior to this he worked for Price Waterhouse on IT and systems.

He is also a Chartered Accountant with a Bioscience background.

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Speaker 4 -

Moderator - Manoj Ranaweera - ebdex and edocr

Manoj is currently in the process of turning around ebdex to become a niche consultancy specialising in EIPP (e-invoicing) and supply chain finance, providing corporate and vendor advisory and vendor analysis services in addition to business advisory for startups and early stage businesses. Manoj has also teamed up with Rhys Jones (previous speaker) and founders of Ixis to bring edocr, which can be best described as "YouTube for documents with a twist". Manoj also runs OpenCoffee Manchester, a relaxed version of NW StartUp 2.0 events on every 4th Tuesday of the month, Mashup* Manchester and blogs at http://www.manojranaweera.com.

Manoj is very much interested in building a portfolio of startups. He is interested in projects where he could add value through leadership, business planning and execution, market entry and channel development.

For a full profile, please visit LinkedIn