First judges for DEMO’s $1M media prize: Satish Dharmaraj, Russ Fradin and Jennifer Zeszut

I’m delighted to announce the first few judges who will be at the DEMO conference next month in San Diego. They’ll help award the $1 million media prize to the best companies launching their products. I’ll be announcing more judges over the coming days.
The media prize (see details here) is a new feature at DEMO. We’ve already announced that a list of all-star alumni will also be on hand for the Sept. 21-23 conference. That, added to the 60 companies we’ve selected from thousands to launch their product, plus the significant press that show up (everyone from the The Wall Street Journal, to USA Today, CNN, CNET, Forbes, Infoweek, ComputerWorld, PC World and the top blogs), is going to make this a fun event you won’t want to miss. Stay tuned for more announcements in coming days.
Satish Dharmaraj (top left) is an Entrepreneur in Residence at Silicon Valley venture capital firm Redpoint Ventures. Dharmaraj previously was CEO of email company Zimbra, a company he co-founded in 2004, and then sold just three years later to Yahoo for $350 million — making it one of the more notable successes of the Web 2.0 movement. Prior to Zimbra, he was VP of messaging product at Openwave Systems, and was part of the founding team at unified messaging company Onebox, which was sold to Phone.com for $850 million. Before that, he was at Sun’s JavaSoft division. At Redpoint, he’s focusing on software-as-a-service, cloud and software infrastructures and open source computing areas. He’s made angel investments in blogging service Posterous and open source web meeting company Dimdim.
Jennifer Zensut (left) is chief executive of Scout Labs, a startup backed by CNET founder Halsey Minor, which recently introduced a subscription service that allows companies to monitor the web (blogs, social networking sites, news articles, forums) for trends in opinions about products or services. The company recently was mentioned in a New York Times story for its help in letting ticket seller StubHub identify a surge of negative blog comments about one its policies. Previously, she was vice president of marketing at Leverage Software, director of marketing and product planning at eBay and director of strategy at Razorfish.
Russ Fradin co-founded vertical ad network Adify in 2006, and sold it just two years later to Cox for $300 million — making it one of the biggest, quickest hits among the new advertising network companies. Before Adify, Fradin was the senior vice president of business development for Wine.com, the online wine retailer, and before that he was EVP of Corporate Development for comScore Networks. Fradin also served as VP of business development at Flycast Communications.
More details here. Tickets here.