Pre-conference networking reception at DZINE: Saké tasting, Taiko drumming dance performance, live exhibition by artist Yoko Kubrick, and "Meme-This! hosted by Venga--an interactive creative engagement you won't want to miss!

Start at the registration desk, enjoy breakfast with fresh morning brew, chat with new friends you met at the pre-conference party the night before, stop by sponsor's booths located both upstairs and downstairs, and settle in before the show starts. 

GlobalSaké founders Talia Baruch and John Hayato Branderhorst will go through the day's agenda and tell you more about the amazing community that has much grown these past two years.

Clear, targeted communication is vital to all areas of the consumer experience. Despite appearing effortless on its surface, the science of human communication reveals that sharing even the simplest of ideas requires an intricate synchronization between speaker and listener. This session will provide a practical introduction to the science of communication, as well as practical insights aimed at increasing the effectiveness of communication with consumers across a wide array of settings.

- Dr. Matt Johnson, Professor at Hult International Business School, TEDx Speaker, Author. Consumer Neuroscience, Behavioral Insights & Neuromarketing (ex Nike, Princeton)

Storytelling through data: Language agnostic AI and multilingual MT (machine translation) & NLP (natural language processing), demystifying neural networks in machine learning and recommendation systems. We'll explore How Words Work: Building language-specific and Language-agnostic relevancy algorithms to automate structured text data.

From localized language analysis for Spanish flavors to a scalable language agnostic approach. We'll review Séntisis' localized linguistic approach to analyze the voice of the customer for marketing and CX teams in Spanish-speaking markets and the nuances of each industry and variation of Spanish. Then we'll see a completely different approach they applied in Lang.ai- a scalable language agnostic approach that could help any industry and vertical structure text data.

How can business users build apps that structure text with their unique business knowledge and criteria without any engineering knowledge? We'll review a couple of different case study examples from different business teams in the customer service and sales space and how they built a base language-agnostic/industry-agnostic approach from the get-go. 

Moderator: Luis Serrano, Artificial Intelligence Evangelist (ex Udacity)

Panelists: 

 - John DeNero, Chief Scientist at Lilt

 - Jorge Peñalva, CEO of Lang.ai, Co-Founder of Séntisis

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Stretch your legs, walk around, refill your coffee cup, and share reflections with your fellow attendees.

Go to Market Strategy: From Discoverability to Adoption in New Markets

International expansion gives businesses the opportunity to add new revenue streams and expand their growth outreach. However, there are a number of aspects to consider before launching into new international markets. Maryna will share some of the data-driven methods you can streamline your new markets' entry with smarter research and solutions. She will cover market analysis and selection, entry strategy, long-haul adoption. 

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- Maryna Hradovich, VP of Strategic Growth and Development at SEMrush

In this panel, we'll discuss how to collect authentic voice of the customer through implicit & explicit user signals and qualitative & quantitative user studies, to inform us on how to best make our products make sense for our international user segments. We'll bring diverse case studies from around the globe and share insights on persona development, regional consumer behavior, and on integrating expected user experience in our product performance.

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Moderator: Aviva Rosenstein, Director of Global User Research at Zendesk

Panelists: 

- Andrea Lee, International UX Research Lead at Linkedin (ex HSBC)

- Paul Chang, Ph.D, Senior Director, Patient Cloud Design at Medidata Solutions

- Abla Hamilton, User Experience Researcher at Google (ex Redbubble, Snapfish)  

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How to turn consumer data into memorable brand & product experiences using storytelling, physical, and digital interactions. John and Masashi will share insights and case studies through cutting-edge projects they have produced around the world, from New York, Tokyo, to Indonesia.

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- John Kudos, Managing Partner at KASA Collective and KUDOS Design Collaboratory

Enjoy a delicious Lunch, bringing you flavors from around the globe, network with fellow industry colleagues and visit sponsor's booths. 

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM) are already challenging enough. When you add International in the mix, for both organic and paid discoverability & high-intent customer acquisition, it’s very easy to see how a global site can quickly become irrelevant and lost in a cross border marketplace.  Michael Bonfils walks through the biggest challenges around International SEO & SEM, covering domain structure, attribution signals, schema signals, content/language adaptations and localized ad campaigns. You will learn the fundamentals and best practices around how to structure your international site to optimize growth in international markets. Michael will also share the psychographic classification method to personalize ads placement and content by categorizing user intent signals.

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- Michael Bonfils, Global Managing Director at SEM International

1. Overview of core gaps and goals in global payments today.
2. Current and future solutions for facilitating cross-border transactions on a global scale and optimizing for specific regions (SE Asia vs LATAM, vs EU vs US).
3. Avoiding fraudulent risk-prevention in new markets--high vs low-risk regions.
4. Mobile-first/mobile-only financial networks & platforms for the un/under-banked, single API and SDK. 
5. Strategic partnerships in the global payments' space. 

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Moderator: Dora Chai, International Business Development at Stripe (ex AliPay, Evernote, SAP)

Panelists: 

- Janette Chung, Head of Payments at Jobox (ex AliPay, PayPal)

- Corey Crellin, Senior Product Manager at PayJoy

- Yan Xiao, Project Lead for the Digital Trade Portfolio at the World Economic Forum-Center for 4th Industrial Revolution

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All too often globalization teams are focused on delivering translations. However, the globalization team should be a critical strategic impact function for the business bottomline. Effectively driving international KPIs is an extremely horizontal cross-functional effort. Companies are typically structured vertically. Therefore, for effective impact, the Globalization team needs to be positioned in an autonomous horizontal cross-functional level with high-visibility to and close alignment with the corporate core objectives. This is how you drive a holistic high-impact strategy for successful long-lasting global growth.

Global-ready in Platform means a modular platform infrastructure architecture that enables to dynamically generate the right experience by user geo and language.

Global-ready in Product means investing in truly understanding our customers within the context of their geo environment, repositioning the value proposition to address the right problem solving and to create the right local experiences.

Global-ready in People means top-down organizational structure that enables the Globalization team to align international OKRs across functions and team.

Takeaways: Attendees will learn what it takes to be a globalization strategy team vs a Localization team; how to drive round-trip alignment between all functional groups; and how to run much more than globalization strategy to lift global revenue.

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- Talia Baruch, Global Product Growth Strategy as a Service (ex Google, Linkedin, SurveyMonkey); Yewser Founder, GlobalSaké Co-Founder- 

- Anna Schlegel, VP Global Portfolio-to-Market Lifecyle at NetApp (ex VMware, VeriSign, Cisco, Xerox)

- Shawna Wolverton, SVP Product at Zendesk (ex CPO at Planet and SVP Product at SalesForce)

- Isabelle Bicaci, Sr Director International Strategy at OpenTable (ex Eventbrite, Square)

- Silvia Oviedo Lopez, Head of Global Growth at Pinterest (ex eBay, Yahoo)

Stretch your legs, walk around, refill your coffee cup, and share reflections with your fellow attendees.

Optimizing product experience and value proposition for Japan new market adoption. Case study examples from Uber, Starbucks and Wix in Japan.

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- Kazu Mori, Product Localization, Japan Content Marketing Specialist at Wix

Repositioning the brand story and adapting marketing assets for geo-fit relevancy to grow adoption in international markets. In this exciting wrap-up session, we'll share case studies from different consumer products, where content adaptation (copy & creative transcreation) were instrumental to lift growth in new markets, tapping to local customer expected behavior and fitting local market needs & wants.

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Moderator: Talia Baruch, Global Product Growth Strategy as a Service (ex Google, Linkedin, SurveyMonkey); Yewser Founder, GlobalSaké Co-Founder- 

Panelists:

- Sonia Oliveira, Senior Director Globalization at Square (ex GoPro, Zynga, Adobe)

- Bea Verdasco, Director of Localization at KAYAK

- Chris Hodgson, Managing Director, Mother Tongue

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Thanks for a great day! Unwind, decompress and reboot with drinks and social.