A few weeks ago we announced the first speakers for this year’s Social Ad Summit. Today I wanted to announced a second batch of speakers and also state that we’ve decided to open up registration. The primary reason for opening registration is that managing the invites while blogging and planning the conference was getting a bit overwhelming. We’ve actually had a large volume of invite requests (close to 1,000) but filtering through them was getting to be a task.

Ultimately many people that should be in attendance haven’t received an invite simply because we don’t have their email in our attendee request database or they entered their email incorrectly in the form on our site.

The event remains targeted at social web executives and advertisers (agencies and brands). However rather than managing all of the invites, you can now just visit the registration page and purchase a ticket. Since we’ve already gone through a few iterations of ticket sales and discounts, I’ve extended the current discount period for a few days so that readers of this site have the opportunity to still purchase at a discounted rate.

I’m also excited to announce a new venue to accommodate a larger number of attendees. For this year’s Social Ad Summit, we will be holding the conference at New World Stages. We’ve rented out the entire venue and there is plenty of space for networking, in contrast to last year where speakers could hear people speaking in the sponsor booth area. I’ve also spent some time trying to get a fresh set of speakers.

Last years speakers were great and a few may actually return but for now we are seeking out those that we haven’t provided a platform for speaking before. Below is an updated list of speakers.

• Andrew Trader, VP of Partnerships, Zynga
• Wade Tinney, CEO, Large Animal Games
• Sebastien De Halleux, CEO, Playfish
• Justin Siegel, CEO, MocoSpace
• Nir Eyal, CEO, AdNectar
• Lisa Rutherford, President, TwoFish
• Brian Balfour, Co-Founder, Viximo
• Noah Kagan, Co-Founder, Gambit
• Victoria Ransom, Founder & CEO, WildfireApp
• Kathleen Pitcher, Electronic Arts
• Jeff Freedman, Virtual Greats
• Sean Muzzy, NEO @ Ogilvy
• Anu Shukla, CEO & Founder, Offerpal Media
• Mike Kerns, CEO, Citizen Sports
• Natalie Petouhoff, Forrester Research

If you’d like to attend the event, I highly recommend signing up sooner rather than later as the ticket prices will continue to rise. If you are interested in attending you can purchase a ticket via the Eventbrite page. We will also be announcing at least 20 more speakers for Social Ad Summit 2009 over the next couple weeks. If there’s anybody you’d like to see, please let us know.

I hope to see you there!