ANNOUNCEMENT: This event has been rescheduled, moving from 23 June to the autumn (date TBC shortly). All tickets already booked for 23rd June will still be valid for the autumn event. If you have any queries please email deirdre.molloy@nmk.co.uk

With mass broadband uptake now a reality, online search is an everyday part of British consumers' lives, as well as a key driver for business marketing and sales.

But with this increasing centrality comes challenges for businesses and brands: to chose a full-service digital agency or a specialised search agancy for your search marketing, to venture into mobile search, to build results through RSS...

Who Should Attend:
Suitable for marketing, advertising, business development and strategic managers of brands, agencies and businesses, search practicioners themselves, and anyone seeking to grow their understanding of the latest developments in search and what these can do for their company's visibility and growth.

This half-day event will focus on some key issues and developments driving new directions in search:

Local vs International Search:

What is local search, how does it differ from the offerings of international search engines like Google, Yahoo or Ask Jeeves? How do consumers and businesses use it? And where do location-based services and geotargeting figure in the equation?

Convergent & Mobile Search:

Where is search taking us? We can now search our desktop, get local information, and search for music on P2P sites. On and offline are integrating, and RSS aggregation is already impacting search results. Metasearch is gaining ground and momentum is spreading beyond the developer community for ushering in the semantic web.

And what of mobile search? Norway-based Fast Search and Transfer (FAST) launched the world's first mobile search engine mSearch in March. Designed to collect results specifically for wireless users, it focuses on content such as music, games, ring tones and digital images. Meanwhile April saw Google Local off the starting blocks in the US, letting people with browser-enabled cell phones browse Google Local - a Web directory of local businesses and sights - by typing in a name and ZIP code. Will services like this challenge the reign of online search?

Speakers include:

Stefan Karzauninkat - Director of Quality Management (Europe), Seekport Internet Technologies GmbH
Since May 2004 Stefan Karzauninkat has been working exclusively for new European search engine Seekport. Responsible for building quality management teams for each of the European countries in which Seekport has rolled out its country- and language-specific search engines, Stefan's expertise stems from his ten-year involvement in creating websites for customers with particularly content-heavy sites, such as libraries. Stefan is the author of the 'Suchfibel' (Internet Search Primer), the most comprehensive German-language work on Internet searching to date. The corresponding website www.suchfibel.de has been a search engine of choice for many years. Stefan gives seminars and has acted as a consultant for nearly all German search engines.

Edward Cowell - Technical Director, Neutralize
Edward heads up the Neutralize (*\*) team of enterprise search engine optimisers. Introduced to the Internet in 1996 while working for MSN during the launch of Internet Explorer 3 in the UK, he now heads up one of the UK's leading enterprise search engine marketing agencies. An Overture Accredited SEM (Search Marketing Company), UK Premier Affiliate to Atlas OnePoint (GoToast), and member of both Nominet UK and SEMPO, Neutralize (*\*) are also active participants in the working group for the formation of SMA the Search Marketing Association UK and recently launched the Search Engine War blog. They have both highly skilled Pay Per Click and search optimisation teams. The founders of Neutralize (*\*) Teddie and Lucy were two of the earliest members of NMK back in 1999.

Sean Walker - General Manager, Vertical Markets, Overture Europe
Sean joined Overture Services as a founding management member and Head of Sales in September 1999. Three years later was named General Manager, Vertical Markets for Overture Europe. During his tenure at Overture, the company has grown from one European office to a total of 12. His responsibilities include the development and execution of the entertainment vertical sectors of the business across Europe, and more recently, has been appointed to spearhead the company’s mobile strategy for Europe, allowing Overture to be the first global search provider to deliver paid search listings on mobile. Sean is also a Fellow of the Institute of Sales & Marketing.

Dominic Trigg - Vice President, Infospace Europe
Dominic joined Infospace - owners of metasearch sites Dogpile, WebCrawler, MetaCrawler, WebFetch™ and the power behind Excite™ - in May 2005. He has worked in media (including the BBC) since 1991. His most recent role for Yahoo! as the Advertising Operations Director (Europe) saw him delivering advertising implementation across the various European territories and managing the portfolio of adverting sales products. He entered new media in 1996 with BT Internet and Multimedia group. Hired by Microsoft in 1997 as Advertising Director for Expedia.co.uk on launch, he went on to become Adverting Director for MSN UK. In 2001 he joined a joint venture owned by Sky, Warner and Sony called Music Choice as Media Director, moving to Yahoo! in 2003.

Nicholine Hayward - Marketing Director , Weboptimiser
A former copywriter, Nicholine helped to found search engine optimisation and marketing company Weboptimiser in 1996 with CEO David White. Since then, she has helped to pioneer the vision, technology and terminology of ethical, brand friendly search engine marketing. She has collaborated on a book, ‘Dot Com Heroes’, published several White Papers – the latest covering the integration between online and offline marketing – and spoken at industry seminars, including the IDM’s Academy and the CIMTech conference.

More speakers will be announced shortly.