Amit Khurana heads newspaper sales for TechNova Imaging System Pvt. Ltd. He has been associated with TechNova for 11 years. Khurana is a Printing Technologist who holds an MBA and boasts of rich experience and a deep understanding of the newspaper industry. Khurana started his career on the shop floor handling press operations and worked in the Printing Ink Industry before joining the TechNova family.

Amit Gupta has over 20 years of experience in various kind of printing machinery i.e. screen printing, rotogravure printing and offset printing machines. He has worked on UV lacquer-based screen-printing machine for optical media and has developed soft-logic to control solid state UV ballast. He has also developed a High Voltage Corona Treater for Poly-Treatment process for rotogravure and poly-extrusion machines.

Gupta has hands-on experience on SMD and THT based industrial repair and service of different kinds of industrial equipments i.e. Servo Drives, PLC, VFD etc. He has worked on the complete retrofit of Logic and motion control for manroland offset printing machine. Gupta also tried his hands on 2 X 2500KVA Static UPS installation with 2V–VRLA Type 3000 No. of batteries installation.

Frode Finnes Larsen is the CTO at Distribution Innovation AS, a Schibsted Media Group and Amedia company. He started his career as a rocket scientist at the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment.

Larsen is an experienced speaker and has 20 years of experience in technology management, innovation and transformation. He advises startups and is currently advising a global drone/UAV company. Since its inception in 2001, Distribution Innovation has digitized the distribution value chain of media companies. The brand occupies over 90% of the market in Norway and Sweden, almost half the market in Finland, and is expanding to Europe.

Distribution Innovation is undertaking business development in relationship with customers, enabling their business with new technologies such as machine learning, IoT/smart mailboxes and blockchain. At Distribution Innovation, Larsen and his colleagues have launched Europe's first voice service with payment, built the first blockchain-based logistics platform in the Nordics, started with digital locks, deployed secure delivery boxes and moved into the cloud.

Larsen has studied electrical engineering and holds a Master’s degree in management.

65000+ hours of experience design, 150+ products and 400 master classes. Karthi is a Chief Product Officer in Xperian, an ecosystem for creative problem solvers. A technologist turned into a multidisciplinary product designer and design educator focused on human cognition and behaviors. Her work focuses on designing meaningful systems with an emphasis on experience design. Before starting out into products world, Karthi designed printers for Hewlett Packard, Payment systems for State farm Insurance, Dashboards for World Bank, Pocket PC applications for Microsoft and many more. Karthi had a 7-year stint of entrepreneurship by running a premium design consulting agency called Oghma. Karthi earned a Bachelor of Engineering in Electronics and a Masters in Human-Computer Interaction from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore and also an Executive MBA from Product Leadership.

Mathijs Baron is the Director of International Sales for Africa and the Asia Pacific region. He is responsible for supporting customers in South America, Africa and Asia.

After graduating from the Marnix University in the Netherlands, he kickstarted his career in Beijing where he lived for over five years. During his time there, he launched several companies that helped him pave his way to an international career.

With over nine years of experience in the Asian market, at QIPC, Baron leads a team of engineers and locally based agents that collaborate with clients in the region.

Madan Mohan Mohapatra, Head-Customer Strategy and CEO Future Media, brings with him a cumulative experience of over two decades. The period has seen him working across sectors as diverse as consumer research, television production, media planning and buying, marketing with retail at the core, activation, loyalty & analytics and business revival at market/store level. During these two decades of work, he has been not only responsible for setting up new businesses but also revising business across multiple verticals. His current role is two-fold – drawing up the customer strategy for Future Group in India and also building an asset monetization model (P&L responsibility) for the group.

He has been fortunate to have worked in India during a critical phase when the new economy was just taking its baby steps. Sectors such as television, media and retail had transformed to align with a new, emerging consumer class and eventually to make way for a global Indian consumer. That gave Madan a first hand exposure to often working in large organizations, where the environment was no different from a start-up – enthusiastic, having a clear cost focus and very profit-driven. Cases in point would include stints in media agencies when television was a fledgling medium, witnessing the beginning of the cricket economy in India and later globally and perhaps most importantly, being a part of the retail story in India, where not just the ability but willingness to spend being the big story. At each stage, the evolution of the Indian consumer or shopper was at the core of it and the job on hand was to get key insights and building strategy to help in business by getting the customers inside the stores. This was greatly supplemented by travel across India during a critical phase when Future Group was expanding its retail presence. The experience of being on the shop floor has been one of the most insightful experiences. Of course, in a market as heterogeneous as India with varying consumer tastes coupled with an intensely complex media structure, he has managed to bring in consumers across store formats feeding into the large growth strategy of the group.

For most Indians, the move to working for large multinational networks comes after the mandatory stint with the traditional Indian entrepreneur. In Madan’s case, it has been the other way but with a difference. The entrepreneur here is Mr. Kishore Biyani, a name synonymous with modern Indian retail, whose 2000+ stores on any given month sells products to over 40 million Indian consuming class. Be it fashion, food or home category, Madan’s experience of working closely with the man, who founded the Future Group and laid the foundation for Indian modern retail, has been rich to say the least. A recent move, which in many ways will mark his return to P&L responsibility with media at its core, calls for working with the largest Indian/MNC brands and develop more innovative ways at the last mile to build positive disposition in the fragmented media market with lesser consumer attention span. This is a business about which not very much is known to the world at large. It gives him the chance to draw out a consumer strategy for modern retail and ensure it makes business sense for the brands using the captive audience in the retail environment.

A firm believer that India is all where the most exciting things are taking place, Madan represents a generation that had a little baggage from a closed economy and used that smartly to get the best out of a new age economy. Luckily, that period of transformation is still underway

Ritu Sarin, 59, is currently Executive Editor (News and Investigations) in The Indian Express and has a career in journalism of over 35 years. She has earlier worked in The Delhi Recorder magazine, The Sunday magazine and The Pioneer newspaper. In 1996, she joined The Indian Express as head of its Investigative Bureau. In the Indian Express, Sarin led a team of investigative reporters and individually, wrote some memorable stories.

This included The Tata Tapes (1997); the expose on breech of security in Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee's office ( 2011); the illegal troop movement (2012); the inquiry report of the Army's Technical Support Division ( 2014); the Birla tax case (2015) and the Essar Leaks (2015). In 1999, Sarin was nominated to become a member of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) and over the past few years, she has headed teams in The Indian Express which have probed bank accounts and off shore companies held by Indians in different tax havens. The first investigation was into Indians incorporating companies in the BVI (2013); the complete data on HSBC account holders (2015); the Panama Papers (2016) and the Paradise Papers (2017). In each case, the Government has set up tax probe teams and recovered sizeable amounts of undeclared tax. The Panama Papers internationally won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for explanatory journalism. The latest ICIJ project which she led for the newspaper was the 2018 investigation into faulty implants and medical devices titled 'The Implant Files.' Recently, Sarin was nominated to be a founder member of ICIJ's network committee, responsible for expanding the organisation's membership base and to laise with the top rung of the investigative journalism body.

Sarin herself has been recipient of the 2007 Ramnath Goenka Journalist of the Year award. In 2011, she received the Prem Bhatia award for best investigative journalist and in 2017 she along with members of The Indian Express team received the Ramnath Goenka award for investigative journalism for the Panama Papers. In 2018, she was awarded the prestigeous International Press Institute (IPI-India) award for excellenge in journalism to be followed in 2019 by the Red Ink award of the Mumbai Press Club for the Implant Files investigation. Recently, Sarin has been nominated to be a founder member of Watchdog Asia, a new group of investigative reporters from all over Asia.

She has attended investigative conferences and conducted workshops in several countries and was a plenary session speaker at the 2017 Global Investigative Journalism Conference in Johanesburg. She is the author of a book, an investigative account of the assasination of Indira Gandhi, published by Penguin in 1990.

Saptangshu Chaudhury’s holds a BE in Printing from Jadavpur University, Kolkata. He has been associated with ABP Pvt Ltd’s print production for 18 years. During his tenure, he has gathered extensive experience with Goss Urbanite, Goss Universal, Hiline Cityline and Wifag printing machines and CtP and pre-press workflow.

Chaudhury is also involved in quality and process improvement across different print locations of ABP. He is an avid sports lover, foodie and a travel enthusiast.

Mr Sanjay Gupta is the Editor in Chief and CEO of Jagran Prakashan Ltd, one of India’s leading Media and Communications Group with leadership in Print, Digital, Radio, Out-of-Home (OOH) and Activation. With 10 print titles across 13 states in 5 different languages and a readership in excess of 90 mn, Jagran is the largest print media group in the country.

Under Sanjay’s leadership, the flagship brand Dainik Jagran, has been the largest read newspaper of India since 2003. Dainik Jagran stands for credibility, honesty and nation building. For 75 years, this iconic voice of freedom and free expression has been benchmarking standards of excellence that have inspired readers and industry alike.

Mr Sanjay Gupta is associated with several cultural, social and commercial organizations and a number of trade and industry bodies like Indian Newspaper Society, International News Media Association, World Editors Forum and the World President’s Organization. He was recently appointed as the Chairman of the Board of Governors of IIM Amritsar.

For his exemplary contribution to the industry, Sanjay has been awarded at various platforms, the most notable of them being the Editor of The Year Award conferred on him by the Hon’ble Minister Shri Kiran Rijiju, and AIMA Managing India Award for Outstanding Contribution to Media

Takashi Kanari is the Deputy Manager in the sales administration department of Asahi Shimbun, the headquarters of which are in Tokyo, Osaka, Fukuoka, Nagoya and Sapporo in Japan.

Asahi Shimbun is celebrating its 140th anniversary this year. The brand currently publishes and distributes 5.5 million copies of papers daily. Kanari has been working for Asahi Shimbun for 26 years and his primary role is to support distributors with business operation and management.

Kanari hopes to acquire knowledge about the newspaper industry in India.

Ulbe Jelluma is a seasoned marketing and advertising professional. He is heading Print Power Europe, the pan-European, industry-wide initiative promoting print advertising.

Print Power Europe, the leading voice for print media campaigning, sponsored by the European paper industry, organises Round Tables with leading brands and agencies; providing facts, expert interviews and cases on its website printpower.eu and setting-up face-to-face meetings with agencies and brands discussing the role of print advertising in the media mix.

Ulbe worked for the international advertising agencies Ogilvy, Hakuhodo/TBWA and BBDO for international clients such as Canon Europe, Sappi Europe, Südzucker, Unilever, Philips and American Express.

He's committed to the effectiveness of advertising and was a member of the founding committee and winner of the award that recognise effective advertising campaigns: the Effie awards. He was also part of the team that relaunched the Euro-Effies. He is a past Board member of the Belgian Marketing Association. Ulbe is Dutch but has spent more years in Belgium than in his home country.

He’s a regular speaker at industry events, including WAN-IFRA Annual Conference, INMA Global News Conference, FIPP Global Annual event, Distripress Congress, and various Print Power member events,….

Varghese Chandy is the Vice President of Marketing, Ad sales, at Malayala Manorama. With over 2.4 million copies and more than 15 million readers, Malayala Manorama is the largest circulated regional language daily in India.

Chandy is credited with founding of Junction K, the integrated media solutions platform of the group. He has also served as chairperson for the coordination committee of the National Readership Survey.

He has won awards such as Media Marketer of the Year 2003 at ‘Emvies’, Mumbai Ad Club and Best Research Paper award at Worldwide Readership Research Symposium 2009 in Spain.

Kasturi Balaji is the Former Director of Kasturi & Sons Ltd., the publishers of The Hindu. Mr. Balaji has more than 30 years of experience in technology, production and ink manufacturing.

Oliver Lesly has joined The Printers (Mysore) Private Limited, publishers of Deccan Herald and Prajavani Newspaper in 2014 April as General Manager Circulation. Job profile includes marketing strategies and Innovations. Prior to TPML he worked with Bennett Coleman and Co. Ltd. for 20 years and was instrumental in launching and re-launching various editions, including the Bengaluru edition of The Times of India in 1996. He had a short stint at Diligent Media Corporation, where he was responsible for launching DNA in Mumbai (2005). He successfully launched and sustained The Times of India’s Goa edition for five years (2008-14), while also overseeing parts of southern Maharashtra. Oliver graduated from Mangalore University, Alumni from St Aloysius group of institutions.

Jayant Mammen Mathew is the Executive Editor and Director of Malayala Manorama Company, one of India’s largest media companies with a significant presence in Print, Television, Radio and Onine. He was the President of the Indian Newspaper Society (INS), for the year 2018-19.

Malayala Manorama is India’s largest selling regional newspaper with a daily circulation of 2.3 million. The company also publishes more than 40 titles in various languages and operates Radio Mango, Kerala’s No. 1 FM station and ManoramaOnline, one of the largest portals. Jayant played a major role in the company venturing in to television broadcasting.

He spends considerable time expanding the television business. MM TV, broadcasts Manorama News, a 24-hour news and current affairs television channel and Mazhavil Manorama, an entertainment channel. Both the television channels, have won numerous awards, including the best regional news channel of India. Recently MM TV launched ManoramaMax, the first Malayalam news and entertainment OTT streaming service.

In addition to his role at MM TV, he continues to provide leadership in Malayala Manorama Company, where he oversees several publications and continues to write for the newspaper on business, economics and technology.

Prior to joining Malayala Manorama, he was an Associate Editor at Electronic News, a unit of Cahners Publishing in New York, where he specialized in finance and technology coverage. His articles at Electronic News won the Gold Award for feature series instituted by the American Society of Business Publication Editors. Jayant wrote for Malayala Manorama and The Week from New York for several years. He co-wrote the Man of the Year feature for The Week that won a South Asian Journalists Association Award in 2000.

Jayant also worked for Bridge News, a financial news service in New York. His articles have appeared in several publications, including Business Week Online and The Economic Times. Prior to this, he worked in corporate finance for News Corp. in New York and Fox Television in Los Angeles. He received a BE in electronics and communication engineering from Mangalore University, an MBA from Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh and an MS in journalism from Columbia University, New York.

Sayyied Kabir has been with Prothom Alo, the most influential national daily of Bangladesh, for the last ten years. In his capacity as Chief Business Consultant he works closely with the Editor and heads of departments in formulating organizational strategy as well as overseeing operations related to advertisement, circulation, marketing and business development. Early in his career, Sayyied was a founding team member of ETV, Bangladesh’s first private terrestrial and satellite TV network in 1998-2002 and also set up broadcast operations in the UK in 2001. Later, as CEO he helped establish the country’s leading private FM radio station, Radio Foorti. In between, he had stints in advertising, media consultancy and human resource development. Sayyied had studied Economics at Rice University and later did his post-graduate in Boston University. Before broadcast and media, he worked in the development sector in microcredit, population studies and food policy research. In addition to his long-standing association with Prothom Alo, he owns and runs a financial asset management company in Dhaka.