The Guardian’s mobile product manager Tom Grinsted, news media designer Mario Garcia, and Yahoo! user experience designer Luke Miller are among first confirmed speakers for WAN-Ifra’s Tablet & App Summit to be held during the World Publishing Expo in Amsterdam.

The event will present mobile news case studies and offer strategies for news organisations for building successful new mobile news products.



“Should we all be designing the way Facebook, Google, or Apple are just because many of our users are also theirs,” Miller asks in an upcoming Shaping the Future of News Publishing report. While the answer is “to some extent, yes” he says publishers should further break down triggers that are uniquely theirs.

“Mobile has changed how, when, where, and why we access content,” he says. “If our development process neglects this paradigm shift, then our customers will make their voice heard in the worst way.”

Other confirmed speakers include:

Freek Staps, head of the pioneering news app NRCQ for NRC Media in the Netherlands,

Marjolein  Stromeier, Head of Mobile for Havas Media Group’s  Mobtext,

Pierre de Grandmaison, Head of Business Development at Teads.TV,

Alex Breuer, Creative Director at The Guardian.

Topics include how user experience (UX) design invites and prepares users to take action in the mobile environment; how some startups and publishers are combatting advertiser underinvestment in mobile news; and how to act “truly mobile-first” in the newsroom

The #TAS14 event is one of several strategic conferences taking place in Amsterdam on October 14-15 during the World Publishing Expo. More than 8000 visitors are expected at the Expo and conferences, which features more than 300 exhibitors and more than 100 speakers.

Full details, including programme, speakers and registration information, can be found at  http://www.wan-ifra.org/tas14