FELIX BAUMGARTNER has a passion for expanding boundaries, especially in the air. The record-setting Austrian skydiver and BASE jumper .is best known for breaking the speed of sound when setting the world record for skydiving at an estimated 39 kilometres (24 mi), reaching a speed of 1,342 kilometres per hour, or Mach 1.24, in October 2012.

Born on April 20, 1969, Felix was raised in Salzburg, where he dreamed of skydiving and flying helicopters and was inspired by astronauts on TV. He made his first skydive at age 16. After sharpening his parachute skills as a member of a Special Forces demonstration team for the Austrian military, he supported himself by repairing motorcycles before becoming a skydiving professional.

In the 1990s, Felix extended the range of his canopy skills with BASE jumping. In 1997 he won the overall BASE jumping championship at West Virginia’s Bridge Day, which draws competitors from around the world. His 1999 jump from the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur established a new world record for highest BASE jump from a building; and that same year he completed the lowest BASE jump in history from Christ the Redeemer statue in Rio de Janeiro. A sampling of Felix's additional records includes jumping from the Millau Bridge in France (record for highest span) and Taiwan's Taipei 101 tower (new highest jump from a building). He even BASE-jumped into a Croatian cave equivalent to a 60-story building in depth.

Felix's most renowned achievement to date has been his freefall 'flight' across the English Channel –non-motorized and without a vehicle. Requiring development of a special carbon wing, the project was three years in the making. When, on July 31, 2003, Felix jumped from an aircraft at more than 32,000 feet over Dover, England, his only protection from the extremes of the environment (a temperature of -40° F.) was a custom-built jumpsuit and helmet. Strapped to his back were the carbon wing, an oxygen tank and his parachute. The Austrian reached a speed of 220 miles per hour, and he completed the 22-mile freefall to Calais, France, in six minutes.

Named to Vienna's Street of Champions and nominated for a World Sports Award and two categories in the NEA Extreme Sports Awards, Felix is also an advocate for the nonprofit Wings for Life Spinal Cord Research Foundation. He has earned his gas balloon license, and as the holder of private helicopter licenses for the United States and Austria as well as his commercial European license, he is living many of his childhood dreams. If the Red Bull Stratos quest to break the speed of sound is successful, he may even surpass those youthful imaginings.

In undertaking the training required for the mission, Felix divides his time between the United States and Switzerland; but, he acknowledges, 'The air is where I am at home.'

Stefan Olander is one of the industry’s leading digital marketers. Over the past decade Stefan has held a number of key marketing leadership positions with Nike. Blending his passion for the digital world with traditional communications skills, Stefan has led many of Nike’s most innovative and cutting edge initiatives, from launching EMEA's new digital platform in 2000, to overseeing all communications for one of Nike’s most comprehensive global football initiatives; The Secret Tournament in 2002. In his America’s role he led the creation of Run Americas inspiring 115,000 people in 5 cities throughout the region (Sao Paolo, Buenos Aires, Mexico City, Santiago, Lima) to run a 10k race on the same day.

Stefan has also led communications development for the global world football 06 campaign (both on and offline) advertising, nikefootball.com and joga.com, a global social network for football created with Google.

As Global Director of Digital and Content, Stefan Olander was instrumental in bringing Nike plus to life creating a new consumer connection bridging the digital and physical worlds that has changed running forever. Subsequently in his role as Global Director Brand Connections he oversees the functions of Advertising, Digital Brand, Media, Content and Business Affairs for the Nike Brand.

In his role as Vice President of Digital Sport, Stefan has created and is leading a team dedicated to enhancing the consumer experience through the use of digital tools. His group is responsible for the recent expansion of the Nike+ ecosystem with the creation of the Nike+ FuelBand, Nike+ Basketball, Nike+ Training and the soon to be launched Nike+ Kinect Training which was co-developed with Xbox.

Stefan recently wrote a book called Velocity with AKQA cofounder and chairman Ajaz Ahmed.

He resides in Portland, Oregon with his wife, two sons and daughter.

Phil is responsible for 8 of the 10 BBC online digital products including the BBC Homepage, BBC News, BBC Weather, BBC Sport, Knowledge & Learning, CBBC, CBeebies and Search products on web, mobile, tablet, Red Button and IPTV.

Phil had responsibility for defining and delivering the BBC's award winning online digital services for the London Olympics in 2012.

Phil was Programme Director for the launch of iPlayer, has an MBA from London Business School and is a serial entrepreneur founding and running SmashedAtom (an interactive TV services company), iRights (a digital rights exploitation business) and Huge Entertainment (a digital consultancy).

Phil has been a consultant with Coopers & Lybrand and Ernst & Young and was European Director of Stanford Research Institute.

Ajaz founded AKQA when he was 21 to create an ideas and invention company to help organisations embrace the digital revolution. AKQA's clients today include Nike, Red Bull and Google. AKQA has created some of the world's most recognised and iconic digital products, services and ideas.

AKQA is now the largest and most awarded company in its field with over 1,300 employees and 11 offices worldwide. With an introduction by Sir Richard Branson, and alongside Stefan Olander head of digital sport at Nike, Ajaz co-authored Velocity – the no. 1 bestselling book about the changing business and technology landscape. All proceeds are donated direct to youth homeless and global healthcare charities through Virgin Unite foundation.

Ajaz Ahmed on Twitter:
@ajaz

Philippe Baumlin is working as an IT Program Director within the global IT department of Chanel.

Philippe oversees worldwide Customer & Digital topics for all of the Chanel product divisions. A graduate of the Université de technologie de Compiègne, he joined Chanel in 2000 after a successful career as a consultant in the retail industry. In his current role, Philippe is leading the IT Transformation program to bring Chanel into the digital age. During the past 13 years within Chanel, Philippe has held several positions within in the IT organization and has driven a large number of projects such as Digital Asset Management, Product Information Management, e-Commerce and creating unique experiences across the businesses digital properties and within Chanel's boutiques around the globe.

Based in Chanel's headquarters in Paris, Philippe oversees international teams in Hong Kong, Tokyo and New York City as they work around the clock on Chanel's digital initiatives.

Philippe lives in the heart of Paris with his wife and their 3-year old daughter.

Alessandro began his career at Birra Peroni Industriale, the largest Italian brewer, where he worked for eight years, from 1992 to 2000. In 1996 he was appointed UK Country Manager and put in charge of the London-based subsidiary. In February 2000 he left the field of FMCG market to join Kataweb, the Internet Company of Gruppo Editoriale L'Espresso, where he was in charge of e-Commerce and Advertising. In 2002 he joined Vivacity, the Internet Company of UniCredit Banca, where he was appointed Commercial and Marketing Director. Two years later, in 2004, he was given responsibility, as Head of Online Banking, for the development of e-retail banking and online trading in UniCredit Banca and he was responsible for the public websites and online and mobile banking services of UniCredit Group's Italian Retail Banks - UniCredit Banca, UniCredit Banca di Roma and Banco di Sicilia. Today he is SVP with global responsibility for Online and Mobile Banking within UniCredit Group.

Alessandro was born in Rome (Italy) on October 25, 1966. He holds a degree in Economics and Business Administration from "La Sapienza" University, in Rome, plus a post-graduate specialization as Dottore Commercialista (Certified Chartered Public Accountant). He is married with 3 children.

As Global Vice President of Digital Marketing, Shawn is responsible for all web strategy, design, development, and operations for SAP’s flagship web property: www.sap.com and its 72 country sites in 40 languages. He also leads online demand generation activity, combining global campaigns, search and social media, with email and enewsletters to engage SAP’s customer and prospect base. Shawn’s strength in converting high volume web traffic into sales leads is a key contributor to SAP’s double digit growth.

Burns began his career at SAP in Jan 2007 as Vice President of Worldwide Demand Generation. He was the driving force in the design of a low-cost “Tele-Web” Lead Generation model in support of SME multi-channel targets and led its successful implementation in NA, EMEA, LatAm and APJ. Prior to SAP, Shawn spent 8 years with Wunderman (WPP), one of the largest direct marketing agencies in the world, holding a variety of posts in Latin America and Europe. He is a recognized expert in the B-to-B Digital Community, has served as an official judge for the prestigious IMF Cyber Lions competition in Cannes and personally won two Atticus Awards for thought leadership in Digital Marketing.

Bastien Schupp was appointed Vice President Marketing Nissan Europe effective 1st April 2012. Prior to this appointment he was Managing Director Nissan Austria a position which he held for 2 years. Bastien graduated from ESCP Europe with a European Master in Management in 1996. His career in the automotive industry started as Marketing Consultant Southern Europe for Audi. He held several positions with Audi before moving to Nissan Europe in 2005 as General Manager Marketing Communications. In March 2007 he moved to Infiniti, Nissan’s luxury brand, as Marketing Director. He held this position for 4 years before being promoted to Managing Director, Nissan Austria. He is married with 2 children.

As VP Worldwide Retail and eCommerce for Adobe, Rob is responsible for the company's nearly $1 billion business selling Adobe products to individuals worldwide through two primary routes to market. On the direct sales front, Rob oversees the Adobe.com sales and operations team of regional e-commerce leaders for each of Adobe's major markets as well as three sales call centres based in Salt Lake City, Utah; Maastricht, Netherlands and Tokyo, Japan. On the indirect sales front, Rob has responsibility for all of the retail and e-tail selling relationships for Adobe software applications around the world including regional sales teams calling on all of Adobe's largest retailer and etail partners.

Prior to joining Adobe in 2009, Rob was the Chief Marketing Officer for Art.com where he had responsibility for all revenue-generation activity, growing the company from $120 million to over $200 million annually. In that role, he built a multi-functional team to deliver sales growth, margin improvement, product and geographic expansion, and increased earnings for the multi-channel/multi-brand business.

Prior to that, Rob spent 3 years with Gap, Inc. where he was the Vice President and General Manager for Old Navy Canada where he led a turnaround initiative to restore revenue and profit within the 65-store Old Navy Canada business. While working for Gap Inc, he also held the position of Vice President/General Manager of OldNavy.com where he led a team of 75 to deliver over $300 million in revenue and increase website traffic by 25%. Rob also held senior-level positions in marketing and e-commerce for four years at Williams-Sonoma where he created the brand marketing organisation to drive customer acquisition and loyalty, and built and executed the business plan to launch the $130M PotteryBarn.com business in 2000. Rob also has experience in sales and marketing for consumer packaged goods at Clorox and Procter & Gamble.

Rob holds an MBA from the University of Southern California and a B.A. in Psychology from San Diego State University.

He lives in Moraga with his wife and two boys and is on the board of the Contra Costa Youth Council focusing on at-risk youth. He's also an Ironman triathlete.

As senior vice president and general manager, Brad Rencher is responsible for driving Adobe's Digital Marketing business, one of the world's largest enterprise SaaS businesses and Adobe's fastest-growing business unit. He leads a global engineering and business organization focused on creating the industry's leading end-to-end digital marketing platform — the Adobe Marketing Cloud. Rencher has also driven strategic Adobe acquisitions including the January 2012 acquisition of Efficient Frontier, a leader in optimizing digital advertising across search, display and social media.

A thought leader in the digital marketing space, Rencher regularly presents at numerous industry conferences and trade shows on topics such as digital marketing, advertising and publishing, the power of big data, the business impact of mobile and social, and business optimization. Examples of his speeches and industry insights can be found on Adobe's Executive Perspectives blog and via Twitter.

Rencher joined the company in January 2008 as vice president of corporate development of Omniture and was instrumental in the evolution of the Digital Marketing Suite. Following the acquisition by Adobe, Rencher served as vice president of business operations of the Omniture Business Unit. Before Adobe, Rencher worked at Morgan Stanley as part of the technology investment-banking team, where he executed mergers and acquisitions and capital-market financings for leading technology clients.

Rencher earned his MBA from the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University, and completed his undergraduate work in finance at Brigham Young University. An active participant in the local technology community, Rencher serves on the board of directors of the Utah Technology Council.

As President of Adobe’s Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) field operations, Mark overseas a region that delivers over $1 billion of creative and marketing products to consumers and businesses across 20 major markets. Mark is directly responsible for the Enterprise teams, working closely with the Channel, Partner and eCommerce route-to-market teams to deliver a holistic approach to canvassing EMEA’s market needs. Over the last ten years Mark has led various businesses focused on data, platforms and analytics, with primary application in Marketing Services.

Prior to joining Adobe, Mark was managing director of marketing services at Experian in the UK &I, where he was also global head of their data and analytics product suite. Prior to that, he held North America roles as group president for Marketing Services and president of Business Information Services. At Experian, Mark developed and delivered a Digital Marketing Services strategy which repositioned the business as a leader in multi-channel marketing services, delivering forward looking data, analytics and technology.

Mark holds a Bachelor’s degree in Public Finance from San Diego State University and served on several industry Boards such as the Orange County Business Council and OCTANe, prior to relocating to Europe. He and his family have lived in the UK for the last three years after relocating from Southern California, USA.

Follow Mark on LinkedIn

Follow @mrzablan on Twitter

As vice president of strategy and business development for the Digital Marketing Business at Adobe Systems, John Mellor works closely with strategic partners to extend the value and reach of Adobe's Digital Marketing Suite - the world's leading digital business optimization platform. Mellor's responsibilities include driving the Adobe Genesis partner program to integrate the solutions of more than 200 independent software vendors with Adobe's Digital Marketing Suite. He also builds strategic relationships with Adobe's partners, which represent the world's leaders in digital marketing, advertising and publishing, as well as social media, competitive intelligence and customer relationship management systems.

Mellor joined Omniture in 2003, prior to the company's acquisition by Adobe in 2009. Previously, he served as senior leadership positions for Frontline Educational Products, a leading direct marketing company in the consumer education market, and for RichFX, an online merchandising company for high-end retailers. Mellor also co-founded and led strategy and business development for Viewpoint, a provider of interactive media technology and services for websites and enterprise applications, which was acquired in 1998 by Computer Associates.

An experienced public speaker, Mellor presents at numerous conferences and trade shows on topics such as digital marketing, advertising, media and business optimization.

Mellor holds both a Bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering and an MBA from Brigham Young University.

As VP for Enterprise Technology, David Nuescheler leads product innovation and strategy for Adobe's Enterprise products and brings his vast expertise in Web Experience Management to bear for Adobe's comprehensive enterprise solution set. Nuescheler drives the Adobe enterprise technology vision and architecture and is responsible for the platform’s user experience and technology incubation.

Nuescheler joined Adobe through its acquisition of Day Software. He joined Day in 1994 and was instrumental in growing the company from a small multimedia agency to a leading enterprise content management software company.

He created the basic concept for the original Communiqué, now Adobe CQ5, and has guided product development to create a truly advanced content management and infrastructure platform. Nuescheler has led various international technical standardization initiatives and is a member of the Apache Software Foundation.

Nuescheler has been awarded for his work in standards and open source on various occasions including being nominated twice for the JCP Spec-Lead of the Year Award, Two Star-Spec Lead Awards and the Lifetime Achievement Award of the 'Best of Swiss Web' Association. Adobe revolutionizes how the world engages with ideas and information - anytime, anywhere and through any medium. For more information, visit www.adobe.com.

Royston Seaward is a Partner within the Technology Practice of Deloitte, focusing on Media and its impact with clients, covering Production, Broadcast, Distribution and multi-platform. During his 19 years in consultancy, Royston has undertaken a wide range of projects in the UK and countries abroad, specialising in the custom development of technology solutions to address business issues. He works with CXO’s and acts as a bridge between Technology and the Business, and has focused on delivery, architecture and technology strategy in Telecoms and Media Clients.

Royston leads Deloitte thinking around the impact of new technology and innovation for business, as well as the Deloitte Digital Transformation thinking across business, covering both the consumer facing, back-office and enabling technologies, production and distribution, and business model implications. He leads our global digital transformation proposition for the UK.

As head of Commerce & Content, Dan is responsible for defining SapientNitro’s technology strategy and service offerings to help clients deliver, manage and optimize their marketing, merchandising and commerce-related content to create effective multi-channel customer experiences.

As part of his role, Dan oversees SapientNitro’s team of commerce and content management specialists and cultivates strategic partner alliances and industry relations. Dan is a frequent keynote speaker and panelist at industry, partner and analyst events and sits on a number of partner and client advisory boards.

After a long tenure in Munich, Germany, where he helped establish and grow SapientNitro’s presence in Continental Europe and a six year tenure at the company’s global headquarters in Boston, MA, Barnicle is now back in Munich, Germany, where he co-leads the business in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.

Ariel was appointed CEO in 2004 and is the driving force behind the company’s expansion. Prior to joining hybris, Ariel was senior vice president of European sales at salesforce.com, where he oversaw year-over-year revenue increases in excess of 100 percent. Ariel also established and led European sales at BroadVision, and was the head of sales at Oracle Switzerland. He joined Oracle from IBM, his first position after studying physics at ETH in Zurich.