2009 Panel of Judges - South African E-Commerce Awards

Matthew is the head of 20FourLabs.com, a newly-founded innovation unit at 24.com. He is the former GM of Mail & Guardian Online. He has spoken and guest-lectured on online media issues locally and around the world, including New York, London, Berlin, Amsterdam, Ireland and Kenya. He has previously worked in an online capacity for the BBC Online in London, Avusa Media, Carte Blanche and iafrica.com

Eric Edelstein has been involved in Internet Start-up’s for 10 Years, and co-founded incuBeta.com, Clicks2Customers.com, TrafficSynergy.com, and many other well known Internet companies.

Eric spends large amounts of time testing out new Internet Marketing strategies and is passionate about Search Marketing & Social Media. His latest venture revolves around crowd-sourcing: harnessing the global creative talent to involve, create and produce - an example of one of his crowd-sourcing websites is www.Springleap.com

Amanda Forsythe is the founder and Managing Director of Mobiguide (Pty) LTD, a content producing company specialising in multilingual tour guides on the top tourist sites in South Africa. Amanda is a professional interpreter and translator with strong roots in the tourism industry and her foray into the e-tourism sector began when she partnered with mobile phone network, Vodacom, as well as South African WASP, Glocell, and GPS company, Audio Trex to deliver her guides via PC, GPS, mobile phones and other media players. A first for the African continent, Mobiguide will be launching to the public in December, well in time for the World Cup next year, with plans to expand overseas in the very near future.

Vincent Maher is the portfolio manager for social networking at Vodacom, South Africa's largest mobile telecommunications company. His flagship product is The Grid, a fast-growing location-based social network and instant messaging platform. Previously he was the strategist at the Mail & Guardian Online and co-founder of Amatomu.com, the South African blog aggregator and analytics system. Before that he was Director of the New Media Lab at the Rhodes University School of Journalism & Media Studies, the managing director of Digital Commerce and a multimedia director at VWV Interactive.

Justin is an international entrepreneur and investor from Cape Town, South Africa. He is founder, CEO, director, advisor, or investor to numerous companies, mostly in the technology startup space.

As co-founder of the Silicon Cape Initiative, Justin fully believes in South Africa’s potential as a global technology innovation hub.