Beyond Broadcast
Friday 3 July, Bloomberg Auditorium, London, EC2
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Ronen will present Boxee, an open platform that turns a computer and HDTV into an entertainment platform for movies, TV shows, music and photos.
Avner Ronen
Chief Executive Officer and co-founder
Boxee
13:45 FEASIBLE FUTURES
Avner Ronen is the Chief Executive Officer and co-founder ofBoxee. Boxee’s software, on a computer or connected to HDTV, lets users navigate movies, TV shows, music and photos, as well as streaming content from sites such as Netflix, Pandora, Last.fm, and Flickr.
The idea for Boxee sprang up in 2004, when Ronen and six friends started to use Xbox Media Center (XBMC), open source software for the Xbox that allowed people to play digital media on their TVs. Since 2007, they have worked to extend the base code for XBMC with online sources. Boxee is in the final stages of a public Alpha for Mac, Linux, and Windows (as of June 23), and a third party developer has made Boxee available for the AppleTV. Boxee’s eventual goal is to let users integrate Boxee into their existing devices, or to buy a Boxee box if their existing hardware can’t run it. Boxee was named America’s Next Top Gadget by the Consumer Electronics Association.
Prior to Boxee, Ronen was the Head of Corporate Development and M&A for Comverse, a provider of software and service to telecom service providers. Ronen joined Comverse in 2002 when they acquired Odigo, a company he co-founded in 1998. Odigo was one of the early Instant Messaging services on the Web serving more than 8 million users worldwide. Prior to Odigo Ronen served for four and a half years in the Israeli Defense Force in the special computer unit MAMRAM.