Latest judges for DEMO’s $1M media prize: Omar Hamoui, Mark Pincus, Larry Augustin and Anu Shukla

Here’s the latest batch of judges who will be at the DEMO conference next month in San Diego. They’ll help award the $1 million media prize (see details) to the best of the 60 companies launching new technology products at the event.
We’ve already announced that a list of all-star alumni will also be on hand for the Sept. 21-23 conference as well as the first bunch of judges here. We’ll be making more announcements shortly.
These folks have awesome track records, are in the thick of things at their current companies, or both:
Omar Hamoui (left) is founder & CEO of Admob, the leading mobile advertising company. He founded Admob in January 2006 while in the MBA program at The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. Previously, Omar started and ran several companies in the mobile, internet, and computer software industries including Vertical Blue, GoPix and fotochatter, a mobile to mobile image sharing network. We’ve covered Admob’s growth since its launch three years ago, when Hamoui managed to get backing from one of Silicon Valley’s top backers, Sequoia Capital. See also our article about Admob’s acquisition of a mobile ad exhange AdWhirl.
Mark Pincus (left) is chief executive of Zynga, the largest social gaming network reportedly making more than $100M a year after launching just two years ago to target Facebook, and more recently the iPhone. It reports 27 million daily users. Pincus was an early social network entrepreneur, having founded Tribe Networks (tribe.net) in 2003, one of the first social networking sites. Cisco purchased Tribe.net’s assets. Prior to Tribe, Pincus co-founded SupportSoft, Inc. (Nasdaq: SPRT), a provider of service and support automation software, serving as CEO until its IPO. His first company was Freeloader, the first web-based consumer push information service — acquired seven months after launch by Individual, Inc. for $38 million.
Larry Augustin is CEO of SugarCRM. He’s a path-breaking entrepreneur in open source: In 1993, as a Stanford graduate student, he founded VA Linux (now SourceForge, NASDAQ: LNUX), the first company to pre-install the Linux operating system on computers. While CEO, he launched SourceForge.net, a popular collaborative software development management system. He led the company through an IPO in December 1999, and served as CEO until 2002. From 2002 to 2004, he was a Venture Partner at Azure Capital Partners. He’s on the board of Fonality, the Free Standards Group, JBoss, Linux International, MedSphere, the OSDL, Pentaho, SugarCRM, Hyperic, Compiere, Zend Technologies and Appcelerator. He blogs here.
Anu Shukla is founder and CEO of Offerpal Media. Founded two years ago, Offerpal has become one of the leading social advertising network companies. It has done so by letting advertisers engage with readers in more engaging ways than traditional advertising — for example by making readers discount offers in exchange for information about themselves, and letting them gain points for virtual currency. Such methods, which provide more promising leads, have become particularly effective for social application developers — those targeting Facebook, for example — to monetize their traffic. Like Zynga, Offerpal is one of the early “break out” social companies, and is also rumored to be making more than $100 million a year. Shukla also was founder and CEO of Mybuys Inc., a provider of personalized product recommendations for online retailers. Prior to Mybuys, she founded and was CEO of internet marketing automation company Rubric. Rubric was acquired in 2000 for $366 million. She was also VP of Marketing and Product Strategy at Versata (VATA).
As mentioned before, the presence of such accomplished judges are just one reason to show up for DEMO. The world’s leading press shows up (everyone from the The Wall Street Journal, to USA Today, CNN, CNET, Forbes, Infoweek, ComputerWorld, PC World and the top blogs), the production values are second to none, and well, check out the list of alumni companies, which speaks for itself — including Netflix, TiVo, Adobe Acrobat, Palm Pilot, Sun’s Java, Salesforce, WebEx, the list goes on and on.
More details here. Tickets here.