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Vince Poscente
 “The Age of Speed”
Vince Poscente is a business consultant, best-selling author of The Ant & the Elephant and an inductee into the Speaker Hall of Fame. He used his unique perspective on business and speed to reach the gold medal round of the Olympic speed-skiing competition only four years after deciding to compete - with no previous racing experience. With every effort concentrated on achieving his own top speed, he began to notice the pervasive and defining influence speed has in all our lives. In his new book, The Age of Speed, Vince unravels the notion that in today’s world we move too fast.
At the core of Poscente’s message about embracing speed is the claim that the continued acceleration of business and life is inevitable. If we cannot stop it, perhaps we should consider putting it to work for us. On a mass scale, we have developed a peculiar love-hate relationship with speed: though we want more, faster, now, we have adopted a mindset that speed is corrosive. In effect, we have decided that though we want speed, we do not like it. Poscente turns that perspective upside down and challenges audiences not to resist acceleration, but instead to turn the momentum of its inevitable rush to their advantage. Speed can be Your Greatest Ally.
Kay Koplovitz
 “The Power of Ideas”
Kay Koplovitz is the founder of USA Networks and the first woman network president in television history. A pioneer in cable television networks and new media ventures, she is a visionary woman who led the cable television industry in challenging the mighty broadcast networks for coveted audiences. Ms. Koplovitz was the first to negotiate cable rights to major league sports; later she developed the station into a leading provider of original programming. Under her leadership, the company also launched the SCI FI Channel, one of the top ranked networks in viewership today. In 2000, she co-founded Springboard Enterprises, a national organization that has fostered the investment of more than $4 Billion in women-led firms to date. Currently, she is Principal at Koplovitz & Company, a media investment and management firm specializing in new media investments, and the Chairman of the Board of Liz Claiborne Inc.
Dr. Michio Kaku
 “Physics of the Impossible”
Dr. Michio Kaku graduated from Harvard in 1968, summa cum laude, and number one in his physics class. He received his Ph.D. from the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory at the University of California in 1972, and in 1973 Dr. Kaku held a lectureship at Princeton University. Today, Dr. Michio Kaku holds the Henry Semat Professorship in Theoretical Physics at the City University of New York (CUNY), where he has taught for over 25 years. He has also been a visiting professor at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, as well as New York University (NYU).
During the last part of his life and work, Albert Einstein was on a quest to find the "theory of everything", an equation perhaps only an inch long that would unify all four fundamental forces of the universe. Dr. Michio Kaku has continued this quest, and is the co-founder of string field theory, one of the main formulations of string theory, a leading candidate in the search for a "theory of everything".
Gary Hoover
 "Eight Keys to Building a Successful Enterprise"
Gary Hoover began his entrepreneurial journey at an early age. Convinced that the best way to change the world (for the better) was to lead or create enterprises, he started subscribing to Fortune magazine at the age of 12. While other kids were playing baseball, he was memorizing the Fortune 500. He visited hundreds of corporate headquarters and offices before he was 18, and studied the stock market in depth. His question was the same, “what separates the losers from the winners?”
At the age of 30, he finally took the plunge and created the pioneering book superstore, Bookstop, which helped change the nature of book shopping in America. Bookstop also won kudos for its preservation and restoration of historic buildings such as old movie theatres. This company was sold to Barnes & Noble for $41.5 million in cash when it was 7 years old, and became a cornerstone for their industry-dominating superstore chain, which today does over $4 billion in annual sales. After he and his partners sold Bookstop, Hoover returned to his first love of understanding businesses, and in 1990, began a small business information publisher, the Reference Press. This became Hoover’s, the world’s largest Internet-based provider of information about enterprises. In 2003, Hoover’s was purchased by Dun & Bradstreet for $117 million.
Today, Gary Hoover travels the world speaking to Fortune 500 executives, trade associations, entrepreneurs, and college students about how enterprises are built and how they stand the test of time. From his own successes and failures, and from the lessons of the thousands of companies studied by Hoover’s, he draws real-life examples of the things that really matter. He talks about the role of history, geography, demography, curiosity, and the other key things that are not discussed every day in the newspaper. Gary speaks from long experience and long study about the big picture and the critical components of the successful business mission.
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