Ann Greenberg is a digital media pioneer who has significantly advanced the democratization of media with her work as an entrepreneur, inventor and thought leader. Ann's passion for empowering audiences through new forms of interactive entertainment has shaped her entrepreneurial endeavors and inventions.

At her company, Entertainment AI™ Ann is merging machine and human creativity to engage a new generation. The company’s patented platform automates media creation, enabling smart content that changes based on who you are, and gets all participants paid. The company does what Ann calls “Human-Centered Storytelling” to enable new kinds of meaning.

In 1998, Ann co-founded the leading entertainment data company in the world, Gracenote. Gracenote was the first crowd-sourced company and a precursor to Blockchain. Gracenote connects people to the content they love and handles billions of data requests daily for leading consumer electronics, software, and automotive companies. In 2017, Nielsen purchased Gracenote for $560M and adopted Gracenote IDs as the standard content identifier across its audience measurement solutions.

A longtime proponent of Self-Sovereign Digital Identity, Ann would not launch Gracenote until it had privacy protections in place. Ann recently formed the Media and Entertainment Digital Identity Association (M.E.D.I.A.) to help surface issues and solutions unique for these industries.

Ann is a contributor to the forthcoming book, The Humanized Internet: Dignity, Digital Identity, and Democracy (Jan 2020). Ann's chapter is entitled, Human-Centered Storytelling, which is also the title of her own book to be released in 2020.

Ann is a member of the Extended Reality Committee for the IEEE Global Initiative for Ethical Considerations in Artificial Intelligence and Autonomous Systems. Ann participates in the Innovation 4 Jobs (i4j) think tank; helps organize Women In Blockchain Los Angeles, EOS Los Angeles Meetup, is a member of Women of AI, and mentors Korean accelerator SparkLabs, and SparkLabs Cyber+Blockchain Accelerator; and advises select startups. Ann designed the original immersive story-mapping concepts for a documentary about a tribe of Jews living in Ghana, West Africa. She also produced hip-hop artist Blaqstarr’s SongPano (Ann's concept for immersive album covers) for Interscope.

In 1992, Ann co-founded ION, a pioneering digital studio to do “omnidirectional, interactive, and immersive entertainment, for co-creation” which invented and patented early interactive cinema systems, enhanced CD formats, and groundbreaking intelligent media players. ION partnered with BMG and published cutting edge work for artists including, David Bowie, Brian Eno, The Residents, Todd Rundgren and Primus. Clients included: Apple, Sony, Microsoft, Macromedia, Phillips, Interscope, Disney and House of Blues. Other projects included “Robecca a Digital Frankenstein” built from collective memory, “Digital Dante” and Ray Zone’s 3DWorld. Ann pioneered celebrity-hosted chats and playlists and worked on early Internet broadcasts for major brands, including House of Blues, and the first internet broadcast from Jazz Fest in New Orleans.

Prior to co-founding ION, Ann headed marketing for Academy Award-winning Pressman Films.

Ann is a dynamic speaker. Sample conferences include United Nations' AI for Good Conference 2019, United Nations' Blockchain For Impact Summit 2018 (AI Panel), Consumer Electronics Show, National Association of Broadcasters, South by Southwest, Augmented World Expo, Future of Blockchain, Crypto Invest Summit, VRLA, VR On the Lot, Cognizant Community, Mondo NY, Monage (Computer History Museum), AIShowBiz, Digital Hollywood, Sundance, SMPTE + Stanford Computer Vision Summit, and Stanford’s Future of Entertainment.

Specialties: Entrepreneurship, Digital Media, Participatory Storytelling, Crowdsourcing, Collaborative Models, Immersion, VR, AR, AI, Entertainment Technology, Interactive Cinema, Blockchain Technology, Spatial Computing, Computer Vision, Intellectual Property Development, Marketing, and Business Development, Women in Technology, Innovation, Futurism, Public Speaking.

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